Filed Under (Interviews) by Rick Kaselj on 02-11-2011
Today I have an interview with an old friend, Kevin Yates.
Kevin has been on EFI before and was one of the contributors to Muscle Imbalances Revealed – Lower Body Edition.
Of late, Kevin has been looking into how nutrition affects injuries. Below he shares some insight with you on the topic.
Rick: Kevin, I will get you to introduce yourself as some people at EFI might not know you.
Kevin: My name is Kevin Yates and I am a holistic health coach focused on helping people overcome chronic pain and weight gain.
I started in the fitness industry about 11 1/2 years ago as a personal trainer and at the time most of the clients coming in wanted to lose weight but were also active in recreational sports and had nagging injuries they were dealing with that their doctors couldn’t seem to solve.
They didn’t want to take pain medications for the rest of their lives, give up their active lifestyles or undergo surgeries. The problem was that most trainers only were taught the basic gym exercises but not much of anything for helping people with injuries.
I went through a bit of this myself during my college years before I became a personal trainer. I had gained 36 lbs, I felt horrible, my health was deteriorating quickly, I had high blood pressure and began developing a growing list of nagging injuries I couldn’t explain.
After a few failed attempts at strict dieting, taking pills, powders and supplements that didn’t work and exercising myself to death 6 days a week for 90 minutes a day I was a wreck both physically and mentally. The crazy thing was that I was only 28 years old at the time.
But, I refused to give up and figured there had to be an easier way than this to lose weight and get healthy. I couldn’t bear the thought of living the rest of my life like this. So, over the years I researched, studied and tested out everything I could get my hands on regarding weight loss and chronic pain rehabilitation.
I ultimately lost the weight, lowered my blood pressure, regained my health and completely eliminated my chronic aches and pains.
I worked for 3 years as a physical therapy aide for a number of different clinics and learned a lot. This experience plus working in the fitness industry really helped me combine physical rehabilitation with fitness.
Then I started getting clients who had the same types of problems I had and I just used what I was learning to help them. Before I knew it this became my niche focus.
Most recently I had the opportunity to travel to Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey, where I was a featured presenter for 51 fitness professionals on functional training for injury prevention and rehabilitation.
I also worked with 40 employees of a local company in my area on a weight loss and wellness program and had some pretty inspiring results.
Rick: How did you go from focusing on the physical aspects of injuries to now focusing on diet?
Kevin: I still focus on physical aspects but the interesting thing is that I began looking at those people I worked with who wanted to lose weight but had nagging injuries vs. those who wanted to eliminate chronic pain.
I started wondering why my weight loss clients were making faster progress not only in losing weight but in getting relief from their injuries than my chronic pain clients. I was using exercise for both but the one significant difference was that for my weight loss clients we emphasized diet whereas for my chronic pain clients we emphasized exercise.
Then I just really started researching everything I could about the relationship between diet and chronic pain and I discovered a HUGE link between the two.
Rick: The link you found was in order to help people recover from their injury, diet is something they need to focus in on. Can you give us an example?
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