Joshua Wasserman

I grew up active and athletic, and movement was central to how I lived. I first came to personal training as a client myself. I went from not being able to do a single pull-up to a full set of fifteen, and the stronger I got, the more excited I became. Before long that energy spilled over into coaching my sister. Somewhere in those early sessions with her, it clicked: at heart, I am a coach and a teacher, and that has run through everything since.

In 2012, I left a corporate job that never really suited me and moved into training. It brought together the two things I loved most: being active and teaching. I got my start at Equinox, and it turned out to be my first real taste of movement science. A lot of what I learned there came from coaches with a physical therapy background, people who understood the body like clinicians but coached like trainers, and I could not get enough of it.

I wanted to go deeper, and I wanted more stability, so I went back to school to become a physical therapist. Medicine had always fascinated me, and physical therapy was where it met movement. It taught me the idea I still build everything around: movement itself can be the medicine.

School opened up the world of evidence and research, and it changed the way I saw everything. I found a handful of clinicians and educators, people like Greg Lehman, Sam Spinelli, and the team at E3 Rehab, whose thinking became my guideposts for how to coach and treat honestly. It was a real turning point. Back in my early Equinox days I believed certain exercises were simply bad for you, repeating the popular fitness myths without ever questioning the data behind them. The clinician I am now is a completely different one. These days I am a movement optimist, because our bodies are far more capable and resilient than most of us believe.

What drives me is helping people get stronger and move better, no matter their age. Whether someone is thirty or seventy, the joy is the same: watching them get genuinely strong, fall for the process, and come to understand their own training along the way. A big part of my job is teaching, I want the people I work with to know why we do what we do, because that is what makes the progress last. It is also why I built MyGymSidekick: so I can track each client's progress, show them how far they have come, and carry my plan for the days between our sessions.

In my free time, I just like to move. Running, sprinting, lifting, hiking, all of it. It is how I feel alive and make sense of the world. More than anything, I want the people I work with to feel confident, challenged, and a little freer in their own bodies than when they started.