I am writing to help you get to know me better, with full transparency, the impact of social media, and more!!
As for my background and why I am a coach, I will start off with my journey.
I started playing sports and high-speed racing sports at a young age. I got my first dirt bike at the age of 5 and started playing soccer in kindergarten. I was always competitive and wanted to go fast. I raced my dirt bike for years, against bikes that could double my speed, and played soccer coming out in 1st place year after year. I grew noticeably confident in my soccer and racing abilities early on. I still race now. I race my Camaro at tracks on high-speed open track days, where I push my car to its limit and navigate past other cars as I learn more with the BENEFT of a GREAT COACH. As time went by, I played soccer continuously and raced my dirt bike around until I was about 13 years old. I am now 24 years old. My quickness from a young age allowed me to score the most in soccer, and outrun my peers, and this helped me from a young age start to grow confident that I could be first and therefore become great at some things. Soccer leagues progressively seemed to get too easy when I was young, and for some reason after a while I stopped playing. I guess I just grew out of it, which was around the same time I stopped racing my dirt bike too.
I played every sport in high school and middle school that there was, including baseball, basketball, football, and track and field. I did not find an attachment to any of these really, and they became boring to me, but once again, I was still the fastest runner, just like I was in soccer and that showed in track. In the shorter races that challenged speed, I ended up only losing one race. I then thought I might try more foot and leg dominant sports as I realized I had an advantage in them! That is when skateboarding sort of clicked with me. I was able to do some awesome tricks and got decently good at it, and this started to sort of become my escape. In middle school and up through early-mid high school, there were some personal underlying family issues that really impacted me. I found myself really struggling with these issues at home and sought out mainly negative attention from some of my peers in the skateboarding community. This was because I wanted to feel accepted and, on the inside, as I was sad and just needed support, I was not getting any at home.
Eventually, with time, I got the support I needed, and started my high school journey off at a therapeutic boarding school with the resources to help me start opening up. I learned to appreciate hard work and how to put how you are feeling as a top priority. I also fell in love with snow and snowboarding, as I went to school in Montana. I shoveled snow frequently, graveled pathways, and took on many personal responsibilities that set me light years ahead, work ethic wise, of others my age.
Our generation often wants things through the easy route but never learns character or true hard work. This also translates to fitness, as we seek instant gratification, driven by a constant barrage of Social Media. But EASY DOES NOT CREATE LASTING natural RESULTS!
Eventually, all the snowboarding and doing jumps, skateboarding over stair sets and off ledges, running during soccer, jumping on the dirt bike and landing hard over steep jumps, put tons of stress on my knees. I encountered pain and instability. Towards the later years of high school, my knees would even buckle and almost give out. At such a young age, that is not normal.
Mid high school up to the end of high school, I went to Wasatch Academy, a college campus styled boarding school in Utah, where I completed high school. While I was there, I played soccer again for the first time in years and my ego took over. I thought I was going to be the next big thing, as when I was young soccer skills and being 1st came so easily! And, come to find out I was pretty much average and had all sorts of knee, ankle, and shin issues throughout the season. I started recognizing that maybe my body just wanted something different.
I then started working out in an exceedingly small gym on campus, that had a leg press, dumbbells and few other accessories. All the soccer players I liked always stressed the importance of strength training. On the side, I did yoga to understand and appreciate how different movements worked. I found a mind to muscle connection early on in my fitness training career through yoga. And I found the impact that a great yoga workout had on my entire day. My grades were generally high but increased incrementally with better focus after attending yoga classes. I found a correlation to the days of the week I did yoga and my best performing days in the classroom. I also found that issues with my knees slowly started to get better. Little did I know that the workouts I was doing in the gym was slowly building a tiny muscle brace around my knees from consistency on the leg press machine (as it was all I had for leg workouts). I now know that strength training, if done correctly and with the proper diet, can build a natural muscle brace that helps keeps us free from injury.
The Summer before I went away to college, I was living in Southern California. I got a membership at the gym chain, Crunch. While there, I was constantly studying and watching old footage of 7-time Mr. Olympia Arnold Schwarzenegger lifting weights. I hardly ever paid attention to what others around me were doing. I realized that none of the people looked like he did proportions wise, and they all seemed super consumed with everyone else in the gym rather than themselves. This drove me to focus on my goals and I personally think this helped me have at least a target body look in terms of proportions.
I find that we often succumb to groupthink with current technology and programs like Instagram, and for many, these programs can make your life incredibly more challenging. We often lose track of visualizing what WE want to look like, physique wise. Many times, that you go online, and I am totally guilt of this in my past, you tend to see another fit person, with something unique about their physique or body, that changes your mind on how you want to look. Maybe they have a seemingly perfect set of abs, or you are a guy who sees another guy has huge shoulders, or you are a girl who sees another girl has a big booty, etc. Then you check out their workouts and their form is bad or something similar. Genetics DO play a role, and many of these people are just not you and you have no idea what they put into their bodies. You must figure out how you want to look and stick to it. Period. You may even see them eating something or post about the cheat meals they eat only, and so on and so forth. Thinking that what they do is what you should do, usually, is not good idea. We are often left with so many guesses and different quick and easy answers, that we are left struggling with what to eat in a full day, struggling with our own self confidence as we see that these influencers are already at an ideal physique, or photoshopped, and we can be left playing the guessing game in all categories. True help comes from the ones that can give their full attention. Think of this, I am sure you have seen 3-4 people on Instagram eating different diet foods, and you just think you will pick a few meals of theirs and add them in, then look similar to them soon. Or do that movement you saw them do and you will have a bigger booty. Let us be honest, you likely will not see much progress, but mentally that was easy to change so you try this over and over for months and months… This is the easiest way to not ever have to confront TRUE LASTING change!
The progress you want can happen, but YOU NEED A PROFESSIONAL COACH who can provide you with some individuality and one-on-one support for how to fit these meals into YOUR life based on a number of factors such as your job, activity level, and so on.
After graduating high school, I moved to San Francisco to start my business management degree at San Francisco State University. During my freshman year of college, I worked out on campus, and I, without realizing it at the time, was doing circuit style workouts. I would workout full body or 3/4 of my full body multiple days a week, little to no rest, and ate pretty much whatever I wanted. I wanted to get bigger muscles. When I met my fiancé, Natalie, she talked me into working out with her at 24 Hour Fitness. I got a gym membership, and a few weeks into posting on The Gram about working out, my good friend who was a bodybuilding coach offered to help me out with my journey. To this day, my fiancé makes fun of me for how I would work out for 2-3 hours at a time and drink copious amounts of caffeine to get through the workouts. My friend who trained me picked up that I made a tiny amount of progress on my own but also made me feel good when he told me I had great potential. It was an awesome thing to happen to me to be picked up early, as it expedited my workouts and, over time, I built more confidence in myself. I worked with him for 3 years but, unfortunately, still did not know how to structure anything on my own. While he taught me the basics, which I am forever grateful, I did not know the how’s and why’s of anything, I just did exactly what he said for workouts and meal plans. He eventually changed to a different type of fitness coaching, and since we worked together for free, I respectfully decided to do my own thing and not pester him, as I wanted to learn how to become self-sustainable and started there. I also stopped growing, my muscles hit a threshold, and I looked the same for over a year and a half and was finding my previous workouts to be pointless if I was not progressing anymore. I went down the rabbit hole of guessing, big time.
Senior year of college, after having no more mentor and being truly fortunate to travel all over to places like Hawaii, New Orleans, Texas, New York, and more, I put on 35+ lbs. of fat (I now have it in my HANDBOOK how to travel and still succeed with diet, easy peezy). I went from around 195-200lbs and lean and muscular, to a high of about 245lbs (you can see my photo). I still remember justifying this as muscle. Yes, I had muscle, don’t get me wrong, and you need some fat to gain muscle, but I truly went off the rails without having nutrition knowledge and not knowing what to do on my own. Not to mention, if I wanted to refer to a previous program I had on file, the programs were just the exact same meal plans 5-6x a day, and since I traveled frequently and had an on-the-go lifestyle, exact meal plans for me were not (and are not) sustainable without knowing the education behind them on exactly what protein, fats, and carbs I needed and how to substitute and adjust, how to accommodate for traveling, and lifestyle, and so on.
After I gained the weight in my senior year, I got a relatively cheap bodybuilder coach, who put me on yet another meal plan, but this time with infrequent check ins, set workouts and responses that constantly gave zero feedback or helped me with accountability. It was often 2-3 pages of my response and questions, and then “keep it up, you got this”, ARGH!! Also, this time, the coach insisted I used fat burners and waist trainers and fat burning gels. It was a 3-month program, and I was only consistent for a month before my body got tired of the food types, he was having me eat, I was nauseated all day, bloated, couldn’t get through workouts because of the pre workout meal types, and even expressing this to him didn’t make a difference. I kept trying to eat the foods and my body seriously rejected them, although I lost a few lbs., this was because I pushed hard to get through this. I was miserable and had trouble sleeping. After losing some weight, I immediately gained weight back after and went up a bit as my body felt deprived and I was miserable. I took matters into my own hands after this, again, by following an old diet sheet for quite some time.
Then, a while later, I bought a popular Instagram influencers quarantine rebound e book, a few months into Covid-19, with no personalized support, and did it for about 2 months, which helped me keep my weight at about 234lbs or so, which was basically 2 months of very hard work to lose practically nothing. The e-book was very generic and gave poor explanations of everything and no “whys”.
This is when I started to smarten up mid-quarantine, I invested in a higher tier COACH, and since then, I have learned a lot of the science behind nutrition and am steadily losing my weight. I am putting on more muscle than I would have ever imagined. At the same time, I am in with an incredible community of coaches, with top tier support and guidance, and I have spent the last few months fact checking all the knowledge over the years I learned and identifying the errors that were embedded in the previous programs I paid for. Also recognizing that the true errors were in connection between myself and my coaches, their care and personalization, and lack of community and support.
Thank you for reading and I look forward to serving you!
Eddie Kincaid