Exercise Is a Great Metaphor to Life — My Mom Taught Me That

July 16th is a hard day.

It has been for fifteen years now. Some years it's a quiet heaviness that settles in early and lifts by evening. Some years it hits differently — a song, a smell, a moment that pulls me back to that morning without warning.

Every year, without fail, I think about what she said on my way out the door.

That Morning

It was July 16, 2010. My mom had made a list of things I needed to take care of before heading into my final year at NAIT. Errands. Paperwork. The kind of practical, organized thing she did — always thinking ahead, always making sure the people she loved had what they needed.

I checked off the list. I headed out.

On my way, I stopped at the gym to see my best friend. We were mid-laugh when my phone rang. I could tell by my dad's voice... something was wrong.

The drive home was the longest drive I have ever done.

Yet probably the fastest I have ever drove.

My mom passed away a few hours after I walked out that door.

What Came After

Grief is not linear and it is not quiet. It brings heaviness, isolation, numbness — sometimes all at once, sometimes in rotation, sometimes in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday when you least expect it.

I was 21 years old. I had just lost my mom, my closest confidant and the person who had first planted the idea in me that I could build a career around helping people move and feel better.

She believed in that before I did.

For a while I didn't know what to do with any of it.

Then I went back to school.

Back to the gym.

Back to the work.

And something started to shift — not quickly, not dramatically, but steadily.

The way things shift when you keep showing up even when you don't know why.

Near the end of my final year at NAIT, we were told to leave some peer reviews on some classmates final assignments. A classmate left a note on my assignment that I've kept them ever since.

"I have watched you grow from a shy, quiet guy into such a confident and strong person. After your presentation it was clear you were not the same person who walked into the first year classroom."

They were right. I wasn't.

Somewhere in the grief, in the going-back-anyway, in the training and the studying and the showing up — something had been built.

Something that hadn't been there before. I didn't know what to call it then.

Now I'd call it the thing my mom gave me in her death that she couldn't have given me any other way.

Rooted resilience and a self-assurance I never knew before.

What Barbara Knew

My mom's name was Barbara.

She was practical, warm, direct and relentlessly forward-moving. Her philosophy — the one she lived and the one she passed to me without ever formally naming it — was essentially:

"why stop there?

Why stop at good enough when better is possible.

Why stop at comfortable when capable is within reach.

Why stop at what you've already done when there's more still ahead.

She saw that in me before I saw it in myself.

She pushed me toward a career in fitness not because she thought it was safe or practical — a young, shy kid who got picked last in gym class becoming a personal trainer, but because she saw something I couldn't yet see.

I think about that a lot.

About what it means to believe in someone's potential before they've earned it.

About how much that kind of belief can change the trajectory of a person's life.

It changed mine.

She changed mine.

The Metaphor

Here's what fifteen years of training people has shown me and what losing my mom at 21 taught me first:

The hardest sets in the gym are not the ones where you fail.

They're the ones where you don't know if you're going to make it.

Where the weight is real and the outcome is uncertain and the only option is to keep going and find out.

Life works the same way.

There are weights you don't choose.

Losses you don't see coming.

Mornings that start one way and end in a way you couldn't have prepared for.

And in those moments, the question isn't whether it's heavy — it obviously is.

The question is what you build from having carried it.

I am a better coach because of what I lost. I understand, in a way I couldn't have without it, what it feels like to have the ground shift under you.

To not know what comes next.

To have to rebuild something — your identity, your confidence, your relationship with your own body and what it's capable of from a starting point you didn't choose.

When a client walks in after a health scare, a loss, a long stretch away from anything resembling self-care — I know that territory.

Not perfectly, not identically. But I know the weight of it.

And I know that people carry more than they think they can, more often than they realize, and come out the other side with something they couldn't have built any other way.

For Whoever Needs to Hear This

If you're in a heavy set right now — a hard season, a hard year, a hard chapter that doesn't seem to have an end, I'm not going to tell you it's secretly a gift or that everything happens for a reason.

What I will tell you is what I know to be true from the inside of it:

You don't have to have it figured out.

You don't have to feel strong to keep going.

You don't have to be ready.

You just have to keep showing up.

Imperfectly, inconsistently, some days barely — but showing up.

The strength gets built in the doing.

Not before it.

Not after.

In it.

My mom didn't get to see what came next. I think about that every July 16th and honestly on a lot of other days too. I can't undo anything that happened.

What I can do is make sure the work she started in me keeps going.

That the belief she had in a shy, quiet kid who didn't think he belonged in a gym turns into something that helps other people believe the same thing about themselves.

That's why I do this.

Every rep matters.

She knew that before I did.

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