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http://www.presenttensefitness.com/

Present Tense Fitness, 222 East 6th Street, Dayton, OH (2026)

01/08/2026

I had the privilege (I really mean that), of talking to a group of the ballet students I work with recently. One of the points I made, and it’s one I’ve been talking about for probably ten years now, is that we need to learn to be analysts, and not judges, of our own behaviors around fitness.

Analysis is curiosity.

Judgment is shame.

Analysis can be tender, even around where we fall short.

Judgment leaves no room for our inherent human messiness.

I’ve been a coach for twenty years now, which is wild to even say or think about. And, over that time, I really came to the conclusion that we overvalue discipline and undervalue consistency born out of a realistic view of our lives.

Cruelty is cruelty, whether we direct it toward others or ourselves.

We deserve better than cruelty. You deserve better than cruelty.

01/03/2026

This morning I finished up my first Nutcracker season supporting New York City Ballet artists. Two things I want to say about this group:

1.) I learned a lot from them.
2.) I’m astonished at their resolve.

One of the reasons principles matter in strength and conditioning is that they’ll be there for you when you need them the most. What that means in the context of Nutcracker is that we have to appreciate:

💪🏽 Dancing volume and intensity ought to be inversely proportional to strength training volume and intensity—but strength training shouldn’t stop in-season.

💪🏽 Individualized programming remains critical for ensuring that every single dancer is having their unique needs met.

💪🏽 Buy-in and relationship-building are key factors in nudging incredibly driven artists to take a day off when they need to, or back off in the gym when they need to. I wanna be super clear about this: buy-in is the job of the strength coach. If you’re trying to do this work and you’re not getting buy-in? That’s on you, the coach, not the dancers.

These artists danced their way through a historically bad flu season in New York City (there were roughly 4500 flu hospitalizations during the week ending December 27th alone).

They stepped in for one another. They encouraged one another. And they kept showing up. Morning after morning. Week after week.

Thank you all for your trust, your hard work, your humor, and your kindness in answering my repetitive questions every session (how are you feeling?/do you have any aches or pains I should know about?/should you be doing that next set?).

Looking forward to Winter Season and warmer months ahead. I appreciate you all so much.

12/31/2025

Most of this is self-explanatory, but I wanted to talk a little bit about consent, because this is the single thing I receive the most consistent pushback about from the dance world.

First, I want to say that whenever I put things on my page, it’s because it’s the way I like to do things. It’s not because I think it’s the only way.

Second, it’s not that I never put my hands on a client. But I only ever do this as a last resort. I would like to think that this practice has made me a better coach because I’ve had to build an infinite number of coaching cues to get people to do what I want.

Third, I don’t think you’re a bad person if you touch the people you work with. I understand that strength and conditioning is a different beast. But, if you follow me, I would like to invite you to at least think about ideas around consent and agency. Just because someone has hired you as their coach/teacher/tutor in movement doesn’t mean they’ve agreed ad infinitum to you putting your hands on them.

Having a client’s trust is the ultimate honor. I hope I never delude myself into thinking that trust is something that isn’t earned—every single day through actions big and small, seen and unseen.

12/30/2025

From grandparents in their late-70s to professional ballerinas in their early 20s, my messaging is essentially the same: you don’t have to love this. But man, you’ll feel so much better when you’re stronger and when you’ve built a big motor.

Loving the gym certainly helps, but, I’ve found an even more important ingredient to long-term sustainability and success in fitness is efficacy. That is, is the work that you’re doing paying off in the way that you want it to? Do you feel stronger? Are your jumps higher? Do the stairs feel easier? Do you get less winded?

Even if you don’t love it, you’ll never want to give up strength. You’ll never want to give up conditioning. It feels too good.

12/22/2025

Catch me right here at this desk writing programs. Between and me, we’re responsible for around 200 of them at any given time. We take the time to think about every individual in front of us, and try to craft movement that works for them.

Sometimes the people we work with will say “I like this one,” and sometimes they’ll say “ugh, not this exercise…” but the hope is that everyone, program by program, week by week, and month by month, feels stronger and better and more resilient.

When I’m writing a program, I think:

1.) What does this individual need?

2.) What will work for this individual anatomically/experience-wise/injury-wise/enjoyment-wise?

3,) What will work for the physical space? (This, and not injuries, as many clients assume, is the hardest thing to plan around).

4.) How can I challenge the individual in a way that makes them strive while also making success a realistic option over the course of a month?

I don’t enjoy writing programs if I’m being honest. It’s just a necessary part of my work. I enjoy coaching and connecting—but the program writing facilitates all of that.

12/14/2025

The “love yourself” message is a fragile veneer of branding, perfect for the social media age where everything is a brand. Whether you call it New Coke, Old Coke, or Coke One—it’s all Coca-Cola. Meaning, body positivity is just fat phobia for a new racial logic that wants to consume Black women’s bodies without feeling racist. It elevates a Black woman’s corporeal reality to a political road map for non-Black others to work out their relationships with whiteness. It is positive as long as the Black woman conforms to the desires projected onto her. It is about “bodies” only insofar as it is about deciding that certain bodies exist to make other bodies feel good about their own existence.

—Tressie McMillan Cottom

I’m a Black man who coaches a lot of white women and girls in the dance world. And, I know for some of you reading this, you might be thinking “well what does all of this racial analysis have to do with me?”

And THAT is precisely what I would invite you to interrogate. Because, as Toni Morrison wrote about “great American novels,” whiteness is in conversation with Black people, culture, and bodies whether we’re present or mentioned by name or not. The absence, actually, often says a lot about that conversation.

In other words, fear of “bulk” doesn’t just come out of nowhere. And, just as importantly, it’s not enough for us to answer those fears with body positivity platitudes. Because ultimately my job is to help people survive the world we’re actually in while agitating for the world we’ve never seen but know in our hearts can exist. (That’s the influence of abolitionist texts).

Branding won’t get us there.

Also: It goes without saying that, for the Black women I’m privileged to train in the dance world, coaching without this intersectional analysis would be doing every one of you a disservice. I think about this responsibility every single day I wake up and go to work. I hope I always live up to that responsibility.

12/10/2025

I’ve had several conversations with clients over the years, dancers and non-dancers alike, about both of these.

In the first instance, generally people vastly underestimate how much food matters to the efficacy of a workout. I attribute this in large part to a diet culture that preaches that the only reason to train is to lose weight or get lean. So people do all sorts of things that undermine performance, including not consuming the adequate carbohydrates needed to really get after it in the gym.

In the second instance, I want to be both clear and careful. Not everyone who menstruates is going to have the same experience with regard to training. I’ve worked with people who barely notice their cycles (in a training context) and I’ve worked with people who really struggle a lot during a few days of the month.

If you’re feeling that your training is unusually difficult, don’t freak out. There’s usually a reason that’s not “you’re a terrible person.” It can be food. It can be cumulative stress (emotional or physical). It can be hormones. It can be a lack of sleep.

I focused on carbs and menstruation in my slides because, in my coaching experience, those tend to be the things that people don’t tie together to their performance as easily as, say, only getting four hours of sleep.

As always, when you’re thinking about the gym: be an analyst, not a judge. Then adjust according to your individual needs.

12/08/2025

I’ve been delinquent in posting about some of the plyometric work we did at SAB to help some of the youngest students prepare for their roles. But, more than that, it was an opportunity to begin laying the groundwork for some long-term athletic development and basic principles around strength and conditioning.

In the video where I’m talking about jump height, one of the things I was trying to teach the youngsters was that intent in strength and conditioning matters. When we’re working on jumps, it’s important to truly jump as forcefully as possible, not only to train our bodies to be explosive, but also and just as importantly, so that we get the opportunity to decelerate from those bigger heights.

One of the things that’s been on my mind quite a bit as I stand in front of these rooms is that I hope I’m modeling even for the youngest students a gentle way of being in front of a room.

And, especially for these little girls, I’m hoping to always set an example for how they should expect every boy or man to treat them. Tenderness isn’t mutually exclusive with rigor. Attention to detail isn’t mutually exclusive with softness. Leadership on the one hand doesn’t have to mean subservience on the other.

Shouting out also the Head of Artistic Wellness, Aesha Ash, for her dogged determination to ensure that dancers can both train hard and be well; Juliana Nikolich for modeling the physical therapy and S&C relationship, which needn’t be adversarial; and for Kerry Shea for her willingness to always go the extra mile to make sure these young people understand the connection between their Pilates practice and their chosen artform.

This work was a team effort, with Kerry leading a warmup, Juliana teaching and refining the plyometric programming, and Aesha teaching and leading the entire operation.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention , whose contributions are always as significant as they are unsung. She’s my PTF partner and the mastermind behind so much of our dance S&C approach at SAB and beyond.

nikolich

12/07/2025

36 hours in Dayton. Got to see our new signage in person, and got to try out a new (to me) lift: the “dead” squat. One of the things I love about strength training is how, even with basic movements, there are always new things to try. I’m sure someone is seeing this and saying “I love those! How have you never tried them?!”

The purpose of the dead squat is to challenge force production while removing the benefit of any stretch reflex that we get in the bottom of a squat. It’s essentially telling your body “nah, son. You wanna get out of the bottom of this squat you’re gonna have to do it on your own—no bounce.”

This space that we created endures, thanks to and (with a gigantic assist from .of.spades, our favorite tattoo artist).

Forever grateful for Dayton. Forever grateful for New York. In both cases, our community fuels us and drives us and inspires us and lifts us up when we’re down, providing some solid ground on which we can regain our footing, or, sometimes, find new footing in surprising ways.

It’s nice to have a real home to come back to. This gym is that. And more.

11/28/2025

Been contemplating this for a minute for all sorts of reasons inside the gym and out. So, I just wanted to gently share this observation about how a lot of us think about ourselves.

I have the privilege of meeting a lot of people, and so many of them share with me the things they’re afraid of. The things that they view as obstacles. The things they wish they were better at doing, inside of the gym and out.

And, what I see a lot is that when people struggle—with a lift, with their conditioning, with their work, with their relationships—they assume it’s because they’re not doing a good job. They assume it’s because of some flaw within them.

But so often we struggle with things for a very simple reason: because they’re hard.

So, if you’re currently struggling with something inside the gym or outside of it, I hope you’re able to remind yourself that hard things are hard. And when we struggle with them, it doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with us.

Be tender with yourselves, the way you would with a friend going through it.

11/26/2025

I’m a strength and conditioning coach, and I’m a personal trainer. My S&C work is mostly with pre-professional and professional dancers. Moving to New York has meant a greater density of dance work, but in recent years, I’ve worked with or programmed for:

Pregnant and postpartum people.
People in their late 70s.
People recovering from prostate cancer.
People with a variety of physical limitations.

All of this work mutually reinforces one another. I think when people see the work that I do with dancers, the assumption is that somehow it’s more sophisticated than the work I might do with a retiree who has a bad hip and sore knees.

But the truth is, I rely on the learning I do in all of my work to serve all of the people I train. The postpartum work we do deeply informs the dance work, and helped us figure out how to best serve a client recovering from prostate cancer surgery. The work that I’ve done with people who have various levels of disability has deeply informed the work that I do with injured dancers.

I always talk about individualization as a cornerstone value in our work. The reason for this is that it means that every body, and everybody, gets treated and coached and viewed based on their individual characteristics and needs and history.

That means training someone in a wheelchair is basically indistinguishable from training someone who’s a principal dancer. We ALL have things to work around. We ALL have insecurities. We ALL are at various stages of physical ability, much of which is essentially temporary.

I don’t mean to flatten people’s experiences here. Obviously someone who is an elite dancer at a prestigious institution is going to be treated differently and viewed differently in our culture than someone in a disabled body and I would be irresponsible not to acknowledge that and account for that in my coaching.

BUT. As far as the physiology goes?

Internal rotation remains internal rotation. Connective tissue remains connective tissue. Programming principles remain programming principles.

Coach the person in front of you. Ask a million questions like a four-year-old. And listen like the client’s quality of life depends on it. Dassit.

Present Tense Fitness

01/08/2026

01/03/2026

12/31/2025

12/30/2025

12/22/2025

12/14/2025

12/10/2025

12/08/2025

12/07/2025

11/28/2025

11/26/2025

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Monday	7am - 7pm
Tuesday	7am - 7pm
Wednesday	7am - 7pm
Thursday	7am - 7pm
Friday	7am - 7pm