TTP Personal Training is owned and operated by Turk Fickling, who has over 23+ years in the health / To me, that’s what an about us page is about. Truth. H-U-G-E.
Give me a minute and I’ll share with you how I got here, where I came from, and what TTP Fitness is all about today. I really hope this will help you determine if what we’re about is right for you, makes you comfortable, and gets you excited to get the fitness you want. I originally started TTP Personal Training and I opted to use “Efficient – Effective – Sustainable” as my motto, my theme, my tag
line. My thinking at the time was trying to find the fewest words to express what all clients that I train to get out of it. That’s the end result. That’s what I want them to achieve. So, I just ran with that. Now years later I realize that’s not us. Initially, personal training started off as a means for me to stay in the gym for free. I wanted a job where I can work out and when I was really young I thought, “okay, being a professional athlete, I know I’ll be able to, and part of my job will be to work out”
Yup, I said. It was because all I wanted to do is to have a job where I workout for a living. Personal training was just in its infancy when I started my bodybuilding career. Now you gotta understand, I was like a hardcore competitor back then. I started off training, regular people like most trainers do, and I didn’t like that too much because I was too intense for regular people. Or We were after different results. I wanted one thing for them and they wanted something else. This is the beginning of my evolution. At the time, I’m like firing on all cylinders, I’m at the peak of my physical performance, and I’m just doing this on auto-pilot. I just won the junior nationals and I getting ready for the nationals. Like, I’m on this straight-up trajectory. So started training athletes and competitors. I essentially was still in this hardcore mentality because I was still competing. I basically turned every client I had into a competitor. I knew that they wanted to train hard. I knew that they wanted to grow muscle and I knew that they had some kind of curiosity and drive towards competing. And I knew me. I could take what you’re bringing me to the table, I’ll turn you into a competitor. I made them successful and that was my brand. TTP Personal Training. So that was the thing. And it was cool. It was really cool and damn, I was GOOD at it. But when I got hurt, and all that changed. Because now I’m not who I was before. For the first time dealing with adversity from a physical standpoint, which I’ve never had to deal with before. So what happened to me, how’d I get hurt, you ask? It was after the nationals bodybuilding show. First show that I lost so I was on a mission to get BIG. I got just totally destroyed in terms of size. I was 285lbs at the time and I could dunk a basketball, no sweat. I was doing a six-foot jump shot and BAM. And what happened as the doctor explained it to me, is that my tib-fib and femur, this literally went like this ???????????????? and separated apart from each other. It just ripped everything apart. I tore my meniscus, my medial-lateral, lateral collateral ligament, ruptured my patellar tendon, and I cracked my femur. So yeah, that took a really long time to heal and I had multiple, multiple surgeries.
2 total knee replacements. I seriously can’t count how many surgeries I’ve had; probably more than 30 at least. 2 total knee replacements ????….. Crazy stuff. Going through all of that and then just, it just gave me a ton of empathy. There is nothing like being majorly broken to give a serious awareness and paradigm shift. It taught me that people may want something and need help in navigating how to do it. Prior to that, I only wanted to work with people who didn’t need help navigating that adversity. Athletes with their heads down, 100% focused, & on high gear only. After my injury I learned and could feel what it was like going through challenges, struggles, and could really relate to what others were going through. The kind of limitations that they were working with and how it impacted fitness. It gave me patience. A ton a patience and combine that with the empathy and now I can relate to people better because I’ve been where they’re at. While maybe not the same exact way, but my story is their story in a different light. So it gave me something that I never had, which was empathy for people who are not just physically coming out of the box, ready to go. I had to rethink a whole bunch of things. After I had my issues with my injuries and stuff, I got really got into a funk because I just walked away from the sport completely. I stopped training. I stopped competing. That was for about five year period. I didn’t do any kind of personal training. And it kind of pulled me back like, you know, like a…. like a strong addiction. It just pulled me back into the mix. I had a lot of confidence issues that I didn’t have, but persevering through all of that and then making my way back to the national scene, after what I went through, I had to re-build my confidence. I think that’s where I started really understanding the law of attraction before I even knew what it was, because I had my thoughts in terms of the outcome and I would be like, “okay, now that… then I’m doing this….and I want to still try to turn pro again.”
Like I did back in the beginning I asked myself;
“what’s my goal?”
“What’s my motivation?”
My motivation was just simple; I know I had a few good years left in me and I wanted to continue the quest that I started when I was 20. So I tried to compete again and stoped when I realized not only that I wasn’t competitive …I didn’t enjoy it. It was not bringing me any joy. At this point I own a nutrition store and a smoothie shop and I was not really happy with that because I just kind of felt like I was spinning my wheels. The fitness addiction is pulling me back. But where and how? So I started personal training again. This is where I took all the tools I acquired coming through my injuries and saw it rocket the path for the average person looking to get fit. Not the competitor
Not the body builder
Not the physique person
The average person who has had life get in the way of getting or staying fit. Every time that I trained with somebody; like Christina for example, who’s lost 90 pounds in our time together there is a huge change in the core person. We changed her life. She doesn’t think the same way. She’s not the same person. Anybody who has a huge amount of success through fitness, the amount of confidence they add to their tool chest, self-esteem; it changes them on a very fundamental level. And so that’s what I’m speaking to because that I see every day, all the time, and that’s what we do. But in reality, we changed people’s lives. That’s what we do. Yes, that’s it; We Will Change Your Life. These are the skills and systems that the Trainers at TTP Fitness bring to the table. We Believe we have the perfect system and process for those who just had life get in the way. Me, Turk Fickling, The Founder of TTP Fitness has seen the top of fitness success at the professional level, gone through a major injury, been out of shape, and had to work to get back in shape. I have been where you are. I know your struggle. TTP Fitness was created for those who had life just get in the way and we will change your life.
