EquiVita - Week 1

Client Stories
As EquiVita reached a major milestone in celebrating their 10th anniversary, they gathered some important moments from its ten year history that highlights what makes the clients so special. So sit back and enjoy reading through some of these cool stories.

One of the founding tenets of EquiVita is education. I have always believed that if you teach people about their bodies, you provide them with choices. The challenge, of course, is sifting through the vast information resources and focusing it so that the information is applicable specifically for an individual.

10 Weeks to 10 Years: Week 9

Week 8

We started our business with transitional fitness, and over the years we added massage therapy, yoga, and group exercise classes. We were pretty confident with our ability to help our clients with the biomechanics of the body, but there is a lot more to health especially if you define health as more than just the absence of disease. We needed someone specifically trained to look at the individual and put together all the components into a whole. Enter, Natural Medicine.

Unfortunately, the state of Ohio is simply not a leader in the field of Naturopathic Medicine, and that has enabled many to work in the field with greatly varied qualifications. Not very EquiVita-like.

Thankfully, we were able to connect with a Naturopath that graduated from Bastyr University, Kimberly Kalfas, ND - you have already met her in week 6. Through her medical education and training she is able to provide people the focused information that they can actually use. From insight in ways to use natural remedies to finding solutions that will work with traditional approaches, Dr. Kalfas provides a much needed resource to our ever growing health and fitness practice.

Meet one of our clients: Gloria
Of the many facets that set EquiVita apart from standard gyms and rehabilitation clinics, perhaps the concept of interpersonal communication is the most remarkable. Schedule a session with an EquiVita Transitional Fitness Trainer or EquiVita founder Adam Milligan and count on a follow-up text message or phone call.

Gloria Rubin, a writer who splits time between New Jersey and Columbus where her children live, subscribes wholeheartedly to the practice of keeping in touch between visits.

"It is fabulous," she said. "The idea that there are people out there who care about me and about my body and how I'm feeling is fabulous."

Gloria, who came to EquiVita a year-and-a-half ago simply to improve her physical condition, makes her way to Columbus to be with her children and to work out with Adam. Between sessions she bicycles and swims.

"Adam has a very different approach to training," she said. "He said to me initially after he evaluated me was that I was not to do any regular exercise-swimming, biking, etc., until we worked out some muscle issues. Apparently my muscles were not working with each other. After a year I began swimming again and now I can go 54 lengths (3/4 of a mile) in 30 minutes and I'm also cycling."

Prior to EquiVita, Gloria had worked with a trainer as well as a physical therapist, but to say the least, found the experience less than rewarding: "Every time I began an exercise routine I ended up with an orthopedic injury and I ended up in physical therapy, whether it was cycling on my own, whether it was swimming on my own, whether it was working with a personal trainer - and it was always very, very frustrating."

She sees Adam as her schedule allows, but even when she is not in town she is keeping to the plan.

"You need to be accountable to somebody other than yourself," Gloria said. "If I do not text message by 3 o'clock in the afternoon Adam will text message me 'What's going on?' "

Sometimes, Gloria said, she'll text message Adam to tell him she's exhausted and stretching may be all she is up for on a particularly trying day.

"And that's okay," she said. "I can say, 'I am doing nothing, but I have to make the decision and I have to tell him that's what I'm doing.' He doesn't expect perfection. He expects the best that I can do in the situation I am in. He individualizes what's going on in terms of the exercises, and what my fitness goals are."

Her goals "are constantly changing." Her initial idea when she came to EquiVita was to be able to swim a half mile three to four times a week. "My goal is now to swim for 60 minutes four to five times a week. I changed the goal because I realized that after a half mile I wanted to swim more. There's a new excitement about being more active."

Over these past 10 weeks I have been giving a lot of thought to EquiVita. Now I realize that is something that I do everyday, (and yes, Janine, working on the business not just in it), but this thinking has really more been about the 'why?'. (I mention Janine Moon because she helped tremendously in the coaching of me and the business.) If you have kept up with these weekly articles you know it hasn't been easy and that I walked away from much easier, or at least more secure, positions with established organizations. And of course I could say that it is just my nature to be entrepreneurial, but that doesn't really address why I would choose to go into a field where there weren't already established models of success. I suppose, as in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success, the reason is actually a culmination of many factors.

At college I started weight lifting. Well, I had started lifting years earlier but just did whatever was typically done in the school's weight room and didn't really connect with it until my freshman year at the University of Cincinnati. On campus there was a weight room for the serious lifters. Officially a Club, it was referred to as the "dungeon" and even some of the university football players lifted there instead of in the upstairs much nicer facilities. In this dungeon I learned that there is a very different focus and community among those that are regulars. It is an acceptance that regardless of how strong you are or even whatever goals you have, you get "it". The "it" is basically that you are not there for show. You are there to work. And that work's focus is you.

There is a camaraderie created amongst individuals suffering the same and how unique to have that same suffering the effort of bettering oneself.

An injury can provide an individual with the same focus of working on self or it can distract away from it. Working in healthcare I saw too much focus on the ailment and not the person. It seemed to me that there was this golden opportunity that through this (potentially very negative) event, people could be inspired to make a change.

Think of it. You have an injury that is going to force you to make the time to take care of it. Whether you apply ice, exercise, massage the injury, etc., you have to adjust your schedule to allow your body to heal. You have a reason to put yourself first! Under normal, uninjured circumstances others could call you selfish (and use it as a negative), but not when you have a, preferably visible, physical ailment.

But our healthcare system is designed to focus just on the affected area now and later to see about the rest of you...Seriously? I cannot imagine a better time to focus on the whole person. The body is demanding attention. Once the pain is lessened the opportunity is lost. People always think that once they get through whatever they are in the middle of that there will be time to focus on the non-urgent. But we all know how rare it is to find someone who actually does that. There is never enough time, money, energy or whatever is the current limitation.

Create a community where the focus is on each individual taking care of his/her self. That is a novel idea...and certainly not my original concept, but it is what I (with the help of so many others) have done. Over these past 10 weeks we have highlighted our exceptional staff and some of our amazing clients-all of whom are at various stages of fitness, but all with the commonality of taking the time to put the most important thing first: self.

It doesn't really matter what your goals are because they will change over time. It doesn't matter how fit you are because that too changes over time. The only thing that truly matters is taking care of you, and the ways to best do that also change over time.

EquiVita is a very hard place to describe because there aren't facilities like it to compare to. The best way I like is to say that EquiVita is just a location until you experience it. Once you get that everyone here wants you to achieve whatever you want, you naturally want the same for others.

Thank you for allowing me to share some of EquiVita with you over the past 10 weeks and for your support of our unique personal service business over the past 10 years.

As always, please let me know how I can help.
Adam