As a kid, I admired my father's successful amateur bodybuilding career. Each night before bed, I sat by the back door and waited for him to get home from the gym. He always arrived in a zone, a zone that I so desired experiencing. Huffing and puffing, swole, and beyond vascular, my father was a presence. His presence is what inspired me to pursue fitness. It was my childhood dream to follow in his footsteps. I long to become the motivational figure to all that he was to me. Fitness became my passion. I signed up for a gym membership at age twelve and began lifting. At age eighteen, I decided to pursue a career in fitness. I registered and passed the NASM CPT exam and applied for a personal training position at 24 Hour Fitness in Chino Hills, CA. I got the job and trained at that location for three and a half years. I graduated from CSUF in the fall of 2013 with a bachelors and high honors in kinesiology. Over the course of my undergrad, I earned several more distinctive fitness certifications, including the CSCS, NSCA’s high acclaimed strength and conditioning specialist certification. My love for fitness and helping others demanded change. I left the corporate gym setting and started my own personal training business. In March, 2014, I launched Grizzly Baird Fitness, and have not looked back since. My fitness journey does not end there. I plan on attending graduate school in the spring of 2015 and competing in my first men’s physique show soon thereafter.

We do what we do by nature. We slave through strenuous weight training programs, grind through early morning “cardio” sessions, and overcome arduous conditioning work outs because we are programmed to do so. Essentially, fitness defines who we are. We plan and schedule entire days around 90 minute training sessions. We embrace delayed onset muscle soreness and live to accept failure, muscular failure that is. We commit wholeheartedly to the struggle and understand that it never gets easier; we just get better at it. We prefer protein shakes to alcohol, beta-alanine tingles to drunkenness, and heavy barbells to fat burgers. We exercise for incomprehensible reasons. Six pack abs, 200KG back squats, and five minute miles are all motivating in their own right, but they do not dictate our passion for the game. Goals fall secondary to our unconditional love for the gym junky genes that permeate through us. We do not exercise for credibility. Nor do we exercise for attention or egotistically driven recognition. We exercise because it is who we are. We exercise because without it, life wouldn’t feel quite right.