THE FIT LIFESTYLE, BEING MARRIED AND FAMILY
I’ve done personal training and been a fitness person. My dad always worked out. He had a gym in our garage. When I was young I just thought that is what everyone does. By the time I was old enough to realize that not everyone has fitness as a part of their lifestyle, I was already hooked. I’ve always worked out. I started getting serious when I was around 16. I’m an all-in person. If I’m going to workout, I do it as hard as I can. If I’m going to do this God thing, I’m going to come at it with everything.
I started doing personal training while I was in college at the University of Memphis. I enjoy helping people accomplish goals. People divide things into spiritual and physical when in fact God wants it to be one thing. God asks for your body, soul and mind. Sometimes we say, “Ok I’ll give him my mind or my spirit but a lot of times we hold back our body. It can get neglected when we hold back. God asks for all of it. The outside begins on the inside. It’s all one package.
I have brothers and sisters, seven siblings total. Some of them took to it and some didn’t. That lesson is something I learned by seeing the transformation that happens to people. I’m always interested to see what is happening with the mind and not just the body. One of my brothers had low confidence but today is more secure. That happened in part through working out. That helped transform his life and provided the revelation for me that the physical and spiritual are one.
Who I am and the prism through which I see the world affects how I treat my clients and the conversations we have. It’s fascinating; I don’t always realize the seeds that have been planted until later. Like Paul says in the Bible, you never know whether you are the one planting or watering the seeds or part of the reaping season.
Now that I’m in LA, I have clients follow me [on social media and my website] from when I lived in Memphis. I’ve received emails that say, “I don’t know if you remember the conversations we had when working out, but this is what I’m doing now… I’m a deacon at the church or my whole life is different from what it was before.” Often I had no idea if anything was even [taking root]. It’s not about preaching to people. It’s about how you handle yourself, how you talk and being what is normal to you. People see and realize that. The conversations you have in love plant a seed that can take a while to grow.
That is inspiring for me now, when I work with my current [training] clients and others [through acting, writing and all of life] to realize that I may not see all that is happening in his or her life. I may never see the results of the seeds being planted but someone in the future will get to join in the watering and the harvesting. That is phenomenal.
My personal fitness philosophy is ‘consistency’. I’m not that talented of an actor, writer or workout person, but I’ll show up every time. That’s what I preach to all my clients – consistency. It’s true spiritually as well as physically. You can’t expect to grow physically unless you workout regularly. You can’t expect to grow spiritually unless you keep trying to know God more each day. Show up both when you feel like it and when you don’t feel like it.
A couple of weeks ago I had a shoot where we had been going all week including night shoots until one in the morning with an 8 a.m. call time the next morning. I didn’t necessarily want to get up and go to the gym before I had to be on the set for a full day but I did. It’s the same way with reading the Bible, God will give you wisdom even when you don’t realize it. If you’re consistent with it, you’ll be growing. It starts with just showing up.
Specifically, I like to go heavy and go fast. It’s a hybrid of the two. That’s different each day depending on the day and exercises. I like to keep the pace going. I rest maybe thirty seconds between sets. I get in and get out five days a week. I have consistently for more than seventeen years.
I do a little of everything. I like free weights the most but I mix in machines too. I always change something. Sometimes it will be low reps with heavy weights and other times I’ll go really light with sets of fifty to one-hundred reps. I do both functional exercising along with traditional bodybuilding exercises. I love the squats, dead lifts and bench press of power lifting and then I’ll also do the battle ropes.
Go to John’s website to see more of his fitness and modeling photography.
Most of the time I workout solo but I also lift with a few close friends. One friend that I’ve known since we were three now lives in LA. We started working out in my dad’s garage when we were in high school.
My wife and I used to workout together. Today, with young children, we take turns.
John and Mindi enjoy making fitness a part of life in various ways. This audition video, Married To Muscle, was a fun seven minute conversation they shot together.
Mindi and I went to the same church here in LA for four years but at different service times. So it wasn’t until we both went on the same mission trip to Brazil that we met and ultimately got married. One way that we both connected was our desire to build our family through adoption and not just biological children. So, we’ve been through the foster care certification process because we want to adopt a child out of the system that probably wouldn’t have a great chance at life. It’s a difficult process.
With the birth of our twins along with an adoption in the summer of 2018 we will have gone from zero to three children very quickly.
Read John’s goodguyswag article Waiting For Sex where he shares more about Mindi and marriage.
