There are roughly 200 personal trainers within a fifteen-minute drive of downtown Palo Alto. Most of them are very good at the same thing: helping someone in their first six months of training move from "no exercise" to "an exercise habit." That work matters. If you're brand new, almost any certified trainer can get you there.
This page isn't for that person.
This page is for the adult who's been training for years. The freestyle lifter who hates being handed a program. The Stanford engineer who wants to put 405 on the bar by 45. The post-CrossFit lifter whose elbows finally said enough. The mom who's been doing Peloton for three years and wants to know what strength training actually feels like.
What the coaching actually looks like
Sessions run out of a private space in Palo Alto. No chain gym. No 7am bootcamp music. No televisions playing CNN at the squat rack. We work one-on-one, usually for an hour.
The first month is mostly assessment. Where your hips actually move. What your ankle can do without your knee caving in. How you breathe when you're pushed. Most of the people I work with have been training for years and have never had this conversation — they picked up programs off Reddit or from a coach who saw them six times. The reps got logged but no one was watching for the small failure patterns that show up in year five.
After the assessment, we build the work around what you'll actually do. The best program is the one you'll do for two years. Most programs fail because they're too rigid, not because they're too simple.
The 12-week consult
The way coaching starts here is with a 12-week consult — not a transactional first session. It's a real conversation: where you are now, what you actually want, whether what I do is the right fit. About a third of the consults end with me telling someone that what they need is a $50/month gym membership and a podcast playlist, not a coach. That's not a marketing line. Coaching is expensive. If your problem is "I don't show up," a coach doesn't fix that long-term, and the most useful thing I can do is say so out loud.
If coaching IS the right fit, the 12-week is where the relationship starts. Three months is long enough to actually change something measurable — a deadlift, a chronic pain pattern, a body composition shift — and short enough that you don't feel locked into a multi-year contract.
Who I tend to work with
The roster shifts but the patterns are consistent. About a third are tech operators — founders, engineers, PMs — who want to hold onto the strength they had in college. Another third are post-40 men who finally want a coach for the work that used to be "just hit the gym." The rest is a mix: endurance athletes adding strength, post-rehab clients rebuilding from surgery, occasionally a high school athlete prepping for the next season.
The common thread isn't a sport. It's that they've decided they want to be measurably better at moving heavy things for the next twenty years.
FAQ
How much does coaching cost? Pricing is something I discuss directly during the consult, because the right structure depends on session frequency and how much programming support you want between sessions. The 12-week consult itself is free.
Do you train in-person or online? In-person is the default. I do remote programming for past clients who've moved out of the area, but I don't take new clients remote-only.
What's the difference between you and a trainer at Equinox? The trainer at Equinox is good at what Equinox needs them to be good at — running high session volume across a wide range of fitness levels. I see fewer people, for longer, and the relationship is built around your training over years, not quarters. Different products. Both fine.
Where exactly are you based? Palo Alto. Clients drive in from Menlo Park, Atherton, Mountain View, and San Carlos regularly.
If you've read this far, the next step is the consult. Thirty minutes, in person, and there's no sales pitch on the other side of it.