Back Home to Edmonton: What Nine Years Abroad Taught Me About Training

Nine years is a long time to be away from home. Long enough that street names start to blur. Long enough that the coffee shop you used to love has been replaced twice. Long enough that when you finally roll back into town, you catch yourself looking at your own city like a tourist — reading signs you've walked past a thousand times as if they were new.

That's exactly how I felt pulling back into Edmonton this year. Nine years abroad. Three very different countries. Countless gyms, coaches, athletes, clients, conversations, and lessons. And now, standing on a familiar street corner in a city that somehow feels both exactly the same and completely different, I'm home.

The road that got me here

When I left Edmonton, I thought I was chasing warmer weather. What I actually ended up chasing was knowledge. And the further I went, the more I realized how much I didn't know.

My first stop was Spain. If you've never trained in a Spanish gym, let me tell you — those coaches do not play. There's a culture of patience over there that North America desperately needs. They train movement before they train muscle. They spend weeks teaching a client how to breathe, how to brace, how to hinge, before they ever load a barbell. I watched sixty-year-old men move like gymnasts because someone had the discipline to teach them the basics twenty years earlier. I watched teenagers get taught how to squat with a broomstick for a full month before touching a weight. And nobody complained, because everyone understood why.

I brought a lot of that home with me. The obsession with form. The refusal to rush. The idea that mobility isn't a warm-up — it's the whole foundation. In Spain I stopped being a trainer who counted reps and started becoming a coach who watched movement.

Then came Colombia. If Spain taught me patience, Colombia taught me joy. Training in Tuluá and Cartagena is loud, sweaty, communal, and unapologetically fun. Group classes that felt like block parties. Trainers who could get a room of thirty people laughing while they were dying in a squat hold. Music, salsa steps between sets, coaches yelling encouragement in Spanglish. I learned there that intensity doesn't have to be miserable. Suffering with a smile builds a very different kind of athlete — one who keeps coming back, one who tells their friends, one who actually enjoys the process instead of enduring it.

I also worked with some incredible strength coaches down there who were doing more with a set of kettlebells and a sandbag than most fancy North American gyms do with a full rack of machines. Resourcefulness became a skill I actively trained. If your program only works when you have every toy in the catalog, it isn't really a program — it's a shopping list. Colombia taught me to design workouts that work in a garage, a park, or a hotel room, and still get real results.

And then Florida. Which is its own animal. Florida is where I met some of the sharpest sports-performance coaches on the planet — people working with high school athletes, tactical operators, and post-rehab clients side by side. The systems down there are dialed in. Data-driven. Recovery-obsessed. Heart rate variability, sleep tracking, tempo prescriptions, deload weeks planned months in advance. I learned how to read a body the way a mechanic reads an engine, and how to build programs that actually respect the person's real life instead of some imaginary version of it. I also learned when to leave the data alone. Numbers are a tool. They are not the client.

Nine years. Three cultures. One takeaway: great training exists everywhere, but you only see it if you're willing to stay long enough to learn. A weekend certification will teach you a template. A year of showing up next to a master will teach you how to actually coach.

Coming home to a different Edmonton

I'll be honest — I wasn't sure what I was going to find here.

The Edmonton I left in 2017 was a good city, but not exactly a fitness capital. Sure, we had gyms. We had our die-hards. But there was a general shrug about health. Winter was long. Excuses were easy. The default was sedentary. Getting people to train in January felt like recruiting for a war nobody wanted to fight.

I've been back a few days now, and I'm genuinely blown away.

The trails are packed. People are out running in weather that would've made 2017 Edmonton stay inside with a beer. There are new gyms — real gyms, not just chrome-and-mirrors chains — everywhere. Yoga studios, functional fitness spaces, powerlifting basements, boxing gyms, climbing walls, small-group training studios tucked into strip malls. I walked into a coffee shop the other day and half the people in line were dressed to train. That would not have happened a decade ago. Kids on bikes. Parents pushing strollers up river-valley hills at a real pace. Older folks doing laps at the mall before it opens.

Something shifted while I was gone. I don't know if it was the pandemic, the wellness movement, better information online, or just a slow cultural wake-up — probably all of it — but Edmonton got serious about moving. And it didn't just get serious in one demographic. I see it in twenty-year-olds and I see it in seventy-year-olds. That's the mark of a real shift, not a trend.

And that makes me really, really excited to be back.

Why this matters for what I do next

Here's the thing about carrying nine years of international coaching in your head: it doesn't do anybody any good if it just stays there.

Every one of those coaches I worked with — the patient Spanish master, the joyful Colombian group leader, the analytical Florida performance specialist — gave me something. A cue. A protocol. A way of thinking about a client. A conversation I've replayed a hundred times since. Those tools don't belong to me. They belong to whoever needs them next.

That's why I came home.

Not because Edmonton needs another trainer. It doesn't. There are already excellent coaches in this city. But I do think there's room for someone who can bring three continents worth of learning under one roof and make it available to people who might never have flown to Barcelona or Tuluá or Tampa to find it themselves. Most people don't have nine years to spend chasing knowledge. That's fine. I did it, so you don't have to.

What I'm bringing back

If you're wondering what that actually looks like in practice, here's the short version:

From Spain: an obsession with movement quality. No matter your age, your goal, or your history, we're going to spend real time making sure your body actually knows how to do the thing before we load it. This is where injuries stop happening and progress starts. Boring, unsexy, absolutely essential.

From Colombia: a training environment that doesn't feel like punishment. You can work hard and laugh at the same time. In fact, the clients who last are the ones who look forward to their sessions. That's not an accident. That's a design choice. Effort should be heavy. The atmosphere around it should not be.

From Florida: systems. Real programming. Recovery built into the plan instead of hoped for later. Data that actually tells us something. The kind of professionalism that treats your body like the high-performance machine it is, whether you're 22 or 62. Nothing random. Nothing improvised. Every week has a purpose, every block has a target, every deload is intentional.

And underneath all of it, the Edmonton grit that's always been mine. The city that helped shape me is a place where people work hard, keep their word, and don't waste your time. That's how I coach. No hype. No fluff. No selling you a supplement stack you don't need just because there's a commission attached to it.

An open invitation

If you're reading this and you're in Edmonton — whether we've never met, whether you were a client before I left, whether you've been curious about training but never quite pulled the trigger, whether you tried three trainers already and none of them fit — I want to hear from you.

I'm not doing a big flashy relaunch. No grand-opening banners. No countdown timers. No "founding member" pricing tricks. Just a coach who's back where he started, with a lot more in the toolkit than he had when he left, and a genuine excitement to see what this city can do.

If you want to know more about how I work with clients, take a look at my training options or my pricing. If you'd rather just have a conversation and see if we're a fit, reach out directly. First conversation is always free. Always will be. No pitch, no pressure. Just two people talking about what you actually want out of your body and your life, and whether I'm the right person to help you get there.

The last word

Nine years ago I left Edmonton to figure something out. I didn't fully know what. I just knew there was more to learn than what I could find in one city.

Turns out I was right. And I was also wrong — because the whole time I was collecting lessons overseas, Edmonton was quietly becoming a place that was ready to receive them. The city grew up while I was away. So did I. We're meeting again as different versions of ourselves, and honestly, I think we're going to get along even better this time around.

Perfect timing, really.

It's good to be home.