What does it mean to be Oddball Strong?

I know. Oddball Strong is a weird name for a personal training business. 

So why did I choose it?

Well, the short answer is that I’m good at training and bad at marketing.

The long answer, on the other hand, is something I’ve always had a hard time articulating. Turns out it’s hard to clearly explain one’s deeply held beliefs in a way that will make sense to others. 

Who knew?

At its core the name reflects the fact that I have always felt like an oddball, somewhat outside of the fitness industry, despite being a part of it. I’ve always done things a little differently, and viewed things through a different lens.

Some of it comes down to methods, what I do: I’ve always focused more on making my clients strong, capable, and confident as opposed to skinny, sore, and sweaty which is the norm in a lot of places. I could talk at length about how I approach training, and I will, but those are topics for another day.

Some of it is my target audience. Instead of looking for people who want to get “beach ready” I am after people who want to get fit to live their life on their terms, free of pain and illness. But all of that is front and center on my website, and it still doesn’t encompass the guiding tenets that I try to live by and to instill in my clients.

Where I feel I differ the most is in my beliefs. My dogma. The schema I have built over the years that forms the foundation of what I do and who I am as a coach. Today I’m going to try and distill all of that down into a few…core principles.

Today I’m going to explore what it means, to me, to be oddball strong.

Principle #1: Training should make you better

This one seems redundant, I know. It should be a given that training makes you better in some way.

But in my experience, that’s not always the case.

Sometimes this manifests as training in a way that isn’t aligned with your actual goals. i.e training like a bodybuilder when all you really want is to be able to keep up with your kids and not wake up with back pain every morning. 

But it can also be seen in the way that a lot of people sacrifice something, whether it’s their mental health, their social life, or their joints, on the altar of fitness and performance. Their training is making them better in one area, to the detriment of another.

Approaching exercise with the mentality of “My knees are killing me, but it’s OK because I added 50 pounds to my squat” or “I’m starving and depressed, but at least I have abs” is not how I want to think about exercise. And it’s certainly not what I want for my clients.

Being oddball strong means training in a way that makes you better able to live your life, and never at the expense of your life, or any aspect of it.

Principle #2: Exercise is medicine, but it’s also… just exercise.

I’m a firm believer that exercise is the best medicine for most ailments, and I have seen time and again the life changing benefits it can reap.

But it can also become a huge stressor, especially for real people, with real lives, who are trying to eat right, sleep 8 hours a night, keep the house clean, stay in touch with their friends, meet work deadlines, get dinner on the table, and get their kids into bed at a reasonable hour.

It’s too much!

To live your best life you need to exercise regularly, that’s not up for debate. But, going back to my first principle, you need to remember that exercise should support your life, it isn’t meant to become your life.

It’s OK to miss a workout or two, or ten(!!), and you don’t need to justify your reasons. 

Exercise is important, and you should strive to make it a regular part of your life, and pushing yourself to do a workout when you don’t want to has a lot of value. But cut yourself some slack, too. If you get upset every time you miss a workout it won’t be long until you become so discouraged that you quit entirely.

Exercise can cure you, but it can also consume you. Do your best to stay consistent with your training, but don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. Training, for its own sake, isn’t the goal, it’s the road that takes us there. Leave room for a pit stop and a chance to smell the flowers, now and again.

I’m sure I could conjure up a few more cloying metaphors and truisms if I tried really hard, but I think I’ve made my point.

Being oddball strong means finding a balance where you can reap the benefits of exercise, but also cut yourself some slack and recognize that missing a workout, or a week, or month of workouts, isn’t the end of the world. It’s just a bump in the long road ahead.

Principle #3: Your worth, and health, is not measured in pounds.

In the fitness industry we put entirely too much emphasis on weight. In more ways than one.

The way I was educated, and the way most of us think, is that to be healthy you need to be thin. So if you’re thin you must be healthy and if you’re not, then you must not be.

But I know lots of people who are “overweight” who are perfectly healthy. Yet their entire health and wellness is wrapped up in their size, and any and all other factors are discounted.

I had a client a few years ago whose doctor wouldn’t take her ailments seriously and told her “You just need to lose weight.”

So she lost weight, a LOT of it, and, big surprise, her ailments didn’t magically disappear. Turns out she was actually really sick. 

I suppose losing weight did improve her health, but only because it got her doctor to finally take her complaints seriously.

Conversely I know plenty of people who are thin, but NOT healthy.

The longer I’m in this industry the more frustrated I get with the idea that weight is the be all and end all for fitness and health metrics. There’s so much more to the story.

Quantity and quality of exercise and physical activity, or lack thereof, is a far better predictor of health and wellness than weight. But most people, including health practitioners, have an unconscious fat bias and can’t look past it at the bigger picture. 

Now before you accuse me of being anti-weight loss, let me be clear. Being severely overweight has been shown to have a lot of negative effects on health. But there is a lot more to the story, and it’s just as possible to be healthy and heavy as it is to be unhealthy and skinny. They aren’t mutually exclusive and I will never push weight loss on a client if it’s not something they are intrinsically motivated to do, and I will always strive to better their health in whatever way they feel they need.  

Being oddball strong means recognizing that weight is just one factor of our health and that our primary focus should be on how we feel and what our body can do rather than how it looks or what the number on the scale says.

The other weight obsession that gets a lot of people into trouble has to do with the weight they lift in the gym, and arbitrarily chasing performance goals.

I’ve known a lot of people, including myself, who fell in love with lifting and lost sight of why we started in the first place. Instead we fixate only on adding more and more weight to the bar.

Continually getting stronger and pushing yourself is important, but it can go too far and should never be at the expense of your health. I learned this lesson the hard way and hope to keep you from doing the same.

Being oddball strong means seeking continual improvement, but never shortcutting the process or trying to reach the next milestone before we’ve earned it. It means keeping the end goal in context and worrying more about being able to make it to the next workout than to the next plate size.

Principle #4: Set a man on fire…

I’m sure you’re familiar with the old adage about giving a man a fish, but I prefer the more morbid “Build a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a day, but set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.” 

Nice bit of gallows humor there, but jokes aside the same principle should apply to training.

Most training programs give very detailed instructions as to what, when, and how much, but very little in regards to why.

Some of it might be a fear that if we, as trainers, give away all of our “secrets” then we will make ourselves redundant. But more of it, I think, comes down to being so immersed in the process ourselves that we forget that a lot of what we take for granted is not even on the radar of our clients.

There are no secrets. No tricks. I want my clients to know as much as they are interested to learn about the process of their training, the why behind it, and the plan for the road ahead.

Being oddball strong means being involved in the process of your training. It’s about becoming empowered and confident and knowing that if we had to part ways tomorrow you would be confident in your ability to keep the ball rolling and take charge of your own training.

Putting it all together

Nothing I’ve said here is particularly groundbreaking, I don’t think, and some of it is actually already paid a lot of lip service in the industry.

But I think that the message we say, and the message we actually exemplify are often very different, and that the industry, as a whole, takes a lot for granted and has lost sight of what normal people who don’t live in the gym want and need. 

We pay lip service to the health benefits of exercise but still sell quick fix weight loss solutions and fad diets. 

We talk about body positivity while still pushing unrealistic body ideals that further negative body image issues.

We push our own arbitrary goals onto our clients to stroke our own ego or, worse, because we don’t know how to relate to or program for actual humans with actual lives.

I love my industry, don’t get me wrong, and it does a lot of things right. But there’s also a lot of room for improvement.

Being an oddball means recognizing that need and addressing it, and that’s what I have tried to do with Oddball Strong: To create a new set of ideals to strive for, and to do my best to exemplify them.

I want my clients to have a positive relationship with every aspect of their fitness and health. 

I want them to feel strong, confident, and empowered. 

I want them to know why they are doing something, and how it’s helping them achieve their goals. 

I want them to learn to love exercise, or at least not hate it, and to learn to forgive themselves for not being perfect.

I’m not saying that my way is the right way, just that it’s my way. The Oddball Strong way, and if any of this resonates with you… maybe you’re an oddball too.

Thanks for bearing with me through this. I hope you enjoyed it and have a little better sense of why I consider myself an oddball. If this resonates with you and you want to learn more about working with me, please feel free to reach out to me via the link below, or schedule a training assessment!