Health at Every Size® Healthcare Provider Listing
Ryan Moore, NASM – CPT, SFC | FRC – FRCms | StickMobility – CSMms | StretchLab – FTP
(he/him, they/them)
Personal Trainer
Turtle Power Fitness
Chicago,
Illinois,
United States
Contact Me:
Make an Appointment:
Specialties & Areas of Focus:
- functional training
- post operative recovery
- senior fitness
- geriatric fitness
Modalities & Theoretical Lenses:
- holistic wellness
- functional fitness
- bio-psycho-social model of health
Age Groups Served:
- Adults (18 years old and up)
- Older Adults (65+ years old)
- Adults (18 years old and up)
- Older Adults (65+ years old)
Additional Populations Served & Allied Groups:
- LGBTQIA+
- transgender
- nonbinary
- BIPOC
- fitness trauma
- gym trauma
Languages Services Offered In:
- English
- English
My Philosophy of Care
I see health as the aggregate of many incremental changes that accumulate over time and result in deeper and more meaningful connection to oneself, others, and the wider world. As a personal trainer I am only with any given client 3 hours/week, (at most) and those sessions are one small piece of that much larger puzzle. Supporting clients in connecting to themselves more deeply entails:
1. educating them about the biomechanics of movement so that they are able to train and move safely and enjoyably,
2. collaborating with them to define clear, achievable training goals,
3. guiding them through a program written to accomplish those goals,
4. creating an interpersonal environment that reinforces innate agency, worthiness, and dignity.
I apply the HAES® principles in my work with clients by:
1. framing the conversation about training in the way I’ve described above, (health as connection)
2. inviting clients to become aware of what their body is communicating to them and to respect those communications, (when to push forward, when to back off, etc)
3. writing sustainable training programs that avoid (and ultimately prevent) injury while incrementally progressing clients towards their goals,
4. incorporating a broad, creative movement vocabulary (not just ‘fitness’ movements) in a way that invites playfulness, creativity, self-expression, and light-heartedness.
About Me & My Practice
I fell in love with dance and movement at a young age, but lost access to that part of myself early in life due to trauma. Throughout my childhood and early teens I struggled with eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and self harming behaviors. I eventually rediscovered my love of dance at Joel Hall Dance Center in Chicago. This is black and queer owned and staffed dance studio in Chicago, and I was blessed to be welcomed as a young (and not racially conscious) straight white man. In that space, and with incredible mentorship, I reconnected to the parts of myself that knew the joy of movement for creativity, self-expression, and aliveness. Not that my trauma recovery was a quick fix, but that experience laid the foundation for me to slowly and steadily heal my relationship to my body - a journey I’m still very much on. It also set me off on a path of dance and martial arts, and I only returned to strength training and ‘fitness’ movements when I began to accumulate a lot of injuries in my early thirties and wanted to learn how to heal from (and prevent future) injury. Because of this non-traditional background, I am passionate about and well-equipped to support others in discovering their love of movement outside of ‘fitness.’ I believe our bodies want to move when we give them the right environment - not that they ‘should’ move because of some conformist fitness imperative.
Accessibility Considerations
As an independent trainer, working with me in-person entails coming to one of the many gyms where I rent space. There will likely not be any interactions with other staff, nor any medical equipment to interact with. We will likely spend some time during each session seated on a gym bench, which has a weight limit of 500lbs. (The seat portion of a gym bench is not designed for superfat+ folks, but it’s simple to sit perpendicularly instead.)
The workout equipment itself is accessible to folks of all sizes, the limiting factor being strength not size. None of the gyms I operate out of have wheelchair ramps or can accommodate wheelchairs within the gyms themselves, unfortunately. I do not speak ASL, nor any languages other than English. All of the gyms I operate out of our queer-friendly and welcoming, although I cannot guarantee that all of our fellow gym-goers will necessarily be gender-affirming.
If a client chooses to train with me virtually, then they will not be interacting with anyone other than myself, and they will be in their own private space for the duration of each session, working with self-provided equipment.