From Garage Gym to Fitness Guru: The Evolution of a Renowned Fitness Director

Navigating Challenges and Innovations: Insights from Dynamis’ Fitness Director on Transforming Fitness and Personal Growth

Q&A with Brad Davidson, Trainer to Pro Athletes and Dynamis Fitness Director at Murrieta Hot Springs Resort

Can you share the journey from starting your fitness path in a garage to becoming a renowned fitness director at Dynamis?

I started my career in my garage. I trained clients there, and I also traveled to their homes. I originally started off as a spinal rehab expert, and over time focused more and more on performance enhancement. In 2004, I opened my first gym called Synergy Training Centers and slowly built the clientele up over time. In 2009, I made a big jump and opened up a larger facility – changing the name of the gym from Synergy Training Centers to Stark.

From 2009 to 2016, I had a great run with that facility but ended up selling Stark after I wrote my first book with Harper Collins entitled The Stark-Naked 21-Day Metabolic Reset. That led me into a lucrative speaking career, and I eventually sold Stark in 2016, to focus on my speaking tour. I’ve spoken in all 50 states and all over Canada – focusing on enhancing high performers. These included speaking to CEO groups for Vistage and YPO.

In 2020, COVID put my speaking career on pause, and I went back to training clients. While training clients again over the last three years I became fascinated with the class-based fitness world, but noticed some major loopholes in the programs. They appeared to lack a great programming strategy, and they didn’t capitalize on weightlifting. I began to design my ideas around a weightlifting-based class program that combined great programming using weightlifting in a high-energy class environment. In 2022, I received a call from one of my CEO clients David Dronet, and he offered me the Dynamis Fitness opportunity to unveil my weightlifting class-based program.

What motivated you to shift from focusing solely on physical fitness to incorporating mental and emotional well-being into your coaching?

That came over time. Early on in my career, I was solely focused on the physical fitness realm. I believed if you were physically fit, and the harder you trained, the more you could handle in life. I built my beliefs around the more you suffer in the gym the easier life would be. That idea worked well for much of my life until my life came crashing down in my early 40s. I lost an important relationship, my father passed away, and my business took a major hit due to COVID – all in the same year. I felt lost, and I didn’t know how to cope. I could not outwork the pain I was in, and I had no training in mental and emotional health. I realized I had avoided it my whole life because, honestly, I was scared of it.

That journey taught me that true health and true well-being are about so much more than just being physically fit. If you don’t have a strong mindset and train the emotional side of things, you are setting yourself up for a rough ride at some point in life. Now, I believe that mental and emotional well-being are, at their core, the most important factors to live a healthy, high-performance life.

You’ve worked with a diverse group of clients from CEOs to professional athletes. How do you tailor your coaching to meet such varied needs?

Tailoring coaching to diverse clients boils down to understanding individual stress levels. Regardless of their background, stress impacts everyone similarly. By grasping their stressors and recovery methods, I can address their specific needs and goals – whether it be metabolic, physical fitness, or mental and emotional.

I’ve become good at listening to them, hearing them, believing them, and then delivering to them exactly what they ask for because only they know what they really need.

I’ve met so many coaches who think they have all the answers, and they will ignore what the client is telling them. I see this a lot – for example – with trainers who work with NFL athletes. Most strength coaches want to focus on strength and speed work, but oftentimes you talk to these guys, and they will say, ‘I am strong enough and I am fast enough, but I don’t feel great, my joints hurt, my energy is lousy, and I am in a lot of pain.’ In those situations, I listen, and I deliver exactly what they ask for. We focus the offseason on getting them out of pain, getting their energy back, and enhancing their durability. This allows them the freedom to go out and be great at their jobs and perform at their best. 

Another great example of this is from my own experience working with the U.S. Bobsled team. After my first run in a bobsled, it completely changed my focus on training for that sport. Before that, I had no idea of the force and impact it had on the body. Now, if any strength coach writes a program for a bobsledder, I can usually tell if that coach has ever been in a bobsled. My job is just to listen and give them what they need. 

In your story, you’ve mentioned a significant turning point due to health issues. How has this experience influenced your approach to fitness and life coaching?

In 2008, our economy came crashing down, and I needed a way to stand out in my industry, so I didn’t lose my gym. I decided to pursue making an Olympic Team in my mid-30s to show how valuable my ideas about fitness and nutrition were. I secured a tryout with the U.S. Bobsled team, and the journey began. At that time in my life, I was 165 lbs and had retired from sports nine years prior. I had a tough journey ahead of me. My minimum weight was 185 lbs, and the athletes I was going up against were much younger than me. 

My strategy was simple: I was going to outwork and out-discipline these younger guys. I trained two times a day, six days a week, and ate perfectly. Back then, I thought the Paleo Diet was the answer, so I was very diligent with avoiding carbs. Over 10 months of training with the U.S. team, I put on 42 lbs, got my 40-yard dash down to a 4.47 sec, and increased my vertical jump by 10 inches to 42 inches. Everything was going great. I was big, I was strong, I was fast, and I was very lean. I recall a journalist back then describing my physique as resembling that of a teenage mutant ninja turtle. I – like most people at that point – believed I was super healthy, because of how I looked. This industry has constantly told us if you are lean you are healthy. 

Many have been conditioned to do whatever it takes to get fit and lose body fat, then they will be healthy and their life will be amazing. Everything was going great performance-wise. Then, when my first child was born, my perspective on life completely changed. Bobsledding went from being one of the most exhilarating experiences to pure terror. I couldn’t rationalize engaging in a high-risk sport and potentially jeopardizing myself – her father – so, I chose to retire. I remember that day so clearly, I thought to myself, ‘What a great dad I am. No dad bod here, I am super fit and super healthy.’ 

My first week after being done was great, but halfway through week two, my body crashed on me. My energy tanked, and my body started to hurt. I could barely function. Then one morning, I woke to patches of hair falling out of my beard. I had no idea why that was happening, so I went to the doctor. The last time my doctor saw me, I was 165 lbs. This time around, I weighed 207 lbs and still had a six-pack. He was in awe of how great I looked and kept commenting that I was the epitome of what most men want to look like at my age. Even he seemed to buy into the idea that the better you look, the healthier you are. He conducted tests and was able to determine the cause of my facial hair loss. The results completely altered my life and perspective.

My results:

• Type 2 Diabetic
• Extreme Hypothyroidism
• Andropause – My hormones had completely crashed, and my testosterone was at the level of an unhealthy 80-year-old man

I asked myself, ‘How could this be? Type 2 diabetic, I hadn’t eaten carbohydrates in 10 months. How could my body be struggling so much internally yet look so good externally?’ 

I walked into my doctor’s office believing I was the epitome of health and then walked out feeling the opposite. The sole hint provided was the explanation for my facial hair loss: an autoimmune disease triggered by prolonged chronic stress. After six years of effort to correct the damage I had done to myself, I discovered stress was the cause of my demise. I had done it to myself. I created so much stress on my body, and my lifestyle and training only made the stress worse versus helping me be resilient to the stress. 

This experience has completely changed how I work with clients. I now believe stress is the most dangerous enemy to the metabolism, so I now work with people to help them become resilient to stress versus beating them down with stress. Exercise is stress. The wrong nutrition protocols drive stress, and how you fight stress is drastically different from what my industry teaches. By changing my approach to respect and battle stress, the outcomes for my clients have become amazing. Results are drastically better with less effort around fitness and more focus on a stress-resilient lifestyle. The forms of exercise we now choose are very effective with much less stress as a result. For example, most people think lots of HITT workouts each week are the answer for fat loss, but when you look at the research you see a different story. 

A small amount of it weekly is good, but too much is devastating to the metabolism. Just ask anyone who has done something like OrangeTheory four to six days a week for a long period of time. Initially, you may get some good results, then it might backfire and you may start putting weight on. We have found – with supportive research – that lifting weights following a Peripheral Heart Action theory is much more beneficial for fat loss with a lot less stress hormones being generated. So, we recommend lots of lifting with smaller doses of HITT each week for optimal outcomes. 

There is still a battle around carbs being bad, but I learned through experience that if you lead a high-stress lifestyle and add exercise stress, it becomes your biggest adversary. The nutritional answer to creating resilience to this stress is to strategically use carbohydrates to bring stress hormones down. I had become a type 2 diabetic from too much stress, and I beat it by including complex carbs into my diet every day. I recommend all my clients eat complex carbs every day, and the outcomes have been nothing short of amazing.

Throughout your career, you’ve had the privilege of being featured in notable works and collaborating with esteemed professionals. How have these experiences shaped your perspective on health and fitness?

I learned early on the best education was found through the ones who have proven results. I’ve spent my career doing whatever it took to learn from those people. I wanted to learn what was proven to work, versus scientific theory. The late Charles Poliquin – one of my early mentors – taught us years ago that there is the Science of Fitness/Nutrition and the Art of Fitness/Nutrition. The science is clearly well behind the art, so I am always looking for those who are getting results versus those who are preaching science. 

I’ve spent a large portion of my career learning from those working with professional athletes. These coaches, doctors, and practitioners are always looking for an edge with their athletes, so they are always on the cutting edge of what is working and what is not working. I then take these strategies and bring them to my clients and programs. In my opinion, high performance is high performance, if it is working in the world of sports, it will work with my high performers looking for more out of life. 

You emphasize the importance of daily decisions in life’s success or demise. Can you share a personal habit or routine that you believe significantly contributes to your well-being?

When it comes to optimal health, well-being, and success – your daily habits matter most. For example, most people think exercise is the most important factor for losing weight when in actuality it often comes down to movement. Walking every day is one of the most impactful things you can do to lose weight. Exercising a few times a week burns more calories at the moment, but it might come with consequences like increased hunger, for example. Walking can bring stress hormones down and improve insulin sensitivity. Knowing this, I recommend everyone walk – outside whenever possible – for optimal well-being. It not only is a great tool for weight management, but it’s also great for our mental and emotional health. If walking is not your thing, I suggest you find what you enjoy doing to bring down stress. Remember, stress is one of the biggest enemies of metabolism, and we are surrounded by stress. Anything you can do daily to reduce your level of stress will be huge for your well-being. I personally prefer walking and/or meditation daily.

Finally, what advice would you give someone looking to make a meaningful change in their health and fitness journey?

Find a big reason why you need to make a change in your health and fitness journey. If you are only doing it to look better, it might not last. So many people are unhappy with how they look and their strategy is to punish the body to change how it looks. Our bodies are the greatest gift we are given, but it takes effort and patience to get the most out of it. I always ask people to find a big reason why they want to look better, feel better, and have more energy.

Start to think bigger and ask yourself, ‘How will my life change if I prioritize my well-being in the next year, 10 years, or 20 years?’

My big reason is my children. I want to be a model of self-love for them, and I want to be a highly engaged father. It takes an insane amount of energy at my current age of 48 years old to do that. They see me eating well, working out, meditating, and avoiding alcohol, and it’s never because I want to look better. They know I do it for energy to engage with them, to be good at my job, and because I love myself. It is never about how I look. I want to always be that dad who puts his cleats on for practice and is out there running around with the kids showing them what to do and suffering with them. I love the respect and trust that builds with my kids and their friends by engaging with them in this way.