About me
Cliff notes:
- Personal Trainer from Dresden, Germany
- Into Knee pain research since late 2009
- Addicted to learning
More about me in detail
Knee pain: a disease many of us have to deal with at one point or another. After years of playing pickup basketball, it was my turn to do just that. The doctor’s advice was simple. There was one small problem though: I have never been satisfied with incomplete explanations. Advice like “just don’t do any sports for a couple of weeks” didn’t sound right to me. Do nothing and wait for things to magically improve by themselves? To simply “do nothing” was unacceptable to me. So I took matters into my own hands and started educating myself. Slowly one thing led to another …
Getting into strength training
At some point in 2008, I forayed into strength training to get better at basketball because, at 6’6’’ (1,98 m) and 163 lbs (74 kg), I was a little underpowered for the positions I was expected to play. Many failed attempts at sticking to a training regimen in my youth had made me weary of the idea, but that was about to change. The notion of actually doing research on a topic and attacking goals with a plan made the major difference. Of course, the free information and motivation on the internet also helped. And you know what? The whole thing started to be fun too.
My professional background
In 2011, I graduated from the University of Technology Dresden with a degree in linguistics. My focus was expert-laymen-communication, and, for my subjects of my final exam I picked several pieces of literature on sports. Accordingly, Pavel Tsatsouline’s “Naked Warrior”, Dr. Stuart McGill’s “Low Back Disorders”, and Mike Robertson’s “Bulletproof Knees” were under discussion for most of the time. If there’s one thing that can make a linguistics exam more interesting, it’s an evil Russian with a kettlebell. You could say that reading about training was what got me through the final exam in linguistics.
Later that year, I travelled to Austria to learn from Steve Maxwell, and that’s where the ball really started rolling. He gave a seminar on training in nature, alongside two great Austrians by the names of Dominik Feischl and Karl Humer. In those two exciting days, coach Maxwell provided the participants with very elaborate introductions to joint mobility, bodyweight training, and breathing techniques. The seminar was top-notch, but what really blew my mind was how extremely motivating it was to train in a group like-minded people. I realized that seminars like this one provided the perfect opportunity to learn a lot in a short period of time. The next seminar was soon to follow.
A few months later, I travelled to Oslo to take part in Maxwell’s kettlebell trainer certification. It was there that I realized how much enjoyment teaching can give. At the end of the trainer certification, we were given the opportunity to instruct a novice on how to train with kettlebells, and that’s when it hit me: teaching can be exciting and fun. In a way, helping others achieve their goals was like achieving these goals myself. How could that not be great?
Continued education
If you love doing something, you also love learning more about it. Each book gives valuable insights and will make you more proficient at figuring out problems. The more you know, the smarter your training can be and the more efficient you get at teaching others. In a way, as soon as you’re responsible for the education of others, you’re also obligated to constantly improve your own education. Fortunately, there are many motivated teachers out there who make learning easy and fun. People like Perry Nickelston, Scott Sonnon, and Erwan Le Corre (to name just a few) deliver knowledge with an energy that will make you enjoy learning, no matter what.
Putting it all together
Last year I realized that I had all the pieces in place to create a resource about knee pain online. Suddenly, that degree in linguistics could be put to real use! So now here we are …
… even for a “small” niche like knee pain, there are so many topics to write about that it’s actually hard to decide what to cover first. That being said, creating this website is an ongoing process and will take some time.
- “Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.” – Søren Kirkegaard
