About Michael.

I've spent fifteen years building gyms and training clients. The first was in Sunnyvale, where I covered shifts in my early twenties for thirty dollars an hour as side work while I competed in bodybuilding. When I got hurt, I realized I'd need a career that didn't depend on my body. I found my way to Palo Alto and met a few investors who took me under their wing and taught me about entrepreneurship.

Training Space came out of that. We opened in Palo Alto in 2018 and grew to twenty employees and hit record revenue early 2020 — and then the pandemic hit. We shut the doors, laid the team off, and opened free online classes for anyone who needed them. We survived, moved to Redwood City during the recovery and settled in San Carlos, where our program is now built around the 12-week transformation, because that's the journey I'd been on myself and I enjoy sharing my system with those who need it.

I learned the hard way — so you don't have to.

13 years of football ended with injury on a D1AA scholarship. Then I spent my time and energy chasing aesthetics, wanting to look good, wanting to feel respected. It was a narrow way to think about goals and training, but it's where I started. Then I began powerlifting which was much more internal: learning to feel strong rather than just look strong. Then calisthenics and neuromuscular reeducation, partly through injury, and that's where the whole system finally clicked for me.

Each phase taught me something different about the body. Most trainers pick one phase and tell their clients it's the answer. I think you need all three — bodybuilding, powerlifting, calisthenics — at different times and in different amounts. That integration is what clients hire me for, even when they don't know to ask for it.

Five hundred clients have come through the 12-week with me — a USPA team, young men and women whose parents have known me for years, executives, postpartum mothers, athletes peaking for meets. Many different people, all walks of life. The work doesn't change, the approach does.

What I've learned across all of those clients is this: most people don't fail at this work because they don't know how. They fail because their reward system is wired wrong, and we rewire it together. Strength training, properly coached, is teaching you how to feel powerful in your body — and that feeling doesn't stay in the gym.