Hi, I’m Esther.

The story

I’ve been a mover and a shaker all my life. I didn’t start out this way — I was a very sickly baby. So sick that I didn’t have a name until I turned one, when they thought I had a chance of survival. My mom’s first born, my sister, had the same heart defect I had. She didn’t survive. No one thought I would be able to run, let alone be a trainer.

That first year shaped everything that came after. I’ve spent the rest of my life moving — and helping other people move.

Where my training comes from

My fitness education is solidly grounded in the Gray Institute. Applied Functional Science is based on scientific truth, not theory, of how the human body actually moves — in all three planes. This is where Gooder Fitness programming is unique. You’re not just performing traditional exercises like squats, lunges, pushes and pulls. By tweaking the angles and moving in the two planes most programs neglect, you build a balanced body that moves well and is far less likely to get hurt.

The best education, though, is from experience. I was lucky to have worked at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, where I got hands-on experience training cancer patients. I learned to listen, to modify, and to move with my clients. When you work with people who are showing up for reasons that have nothing to do with aesthetics, your own definition of fitness changes. I’m forever grateful for that experience.

A turning point

If you’d asked me what my outlook on fitness was five years ago, my answer would have been very different than it is today. So much of my focus was on body image. I was in that camp for many years.

Maybe it’s because I’m older now, or because I’ve had many injuries — the most recent one was a few years ago, when I worked out so hard I gave myself rhabdomyolysis. It put me in the hospital for five days, and I had to take seven weeks off from training. That changed how I think about all of this.

Today, what a fit person looks like to me is someone who is happy and enjoying life. They don’t have a restrictive lifestyle around food, and they aren’t spending hours in the gym. There’s a balance, and they know they can rein it back in if they need to in either department. They train smart. They may not have a six-pack, but boy, are they strong — and they can move like an athlete. That takes real strength.

How I coach

Mind-to-muscle. You’ve heard the phrase. It’s the ability to tell your body when and how to contract, and have it do it. It’s also coordination. Clients come to me and say, “I’m not very coordinated.” After we’ve worked together for a while, they find that they pick moves up faster, and that they have control over their bodies. What you don’t use, you lose — and the opposite is just as true.

I’ve gone out of my way to get certifications from the modalities that genuinely serve me and my clients. I love TRX — bodyweight in a plank position to activate the core in almost every position is just efficient training. Animal Flow is, by far, the most effective and most fun way I’ve found to build coordination, mobility, flexibility, and agility together.

What’s inside Gooder Fitness

You’ll find all of this in the Gooder Fitness platform. I bring in everything I’ve learned from a lifetime of movement — figure skating, Hapkido, cheerleading, functional training, working with cancer patients, working with athletes, working with people in their 70s coming back from surgery. It’s all in there, waiting for you.

The goal of Gooder Fitness is to get you stronger and leaner, and to help you change your lifestyle to one where movement becomes part of you. You’ll work hard. You may get frustrated. You’re going to work through it. You’ll move so well that your age becomes irrelevant.

“You will move so well that your age becomes irrelevant.”

— Esther Williams