Movement Coach Charles

“I started working with Charles about a year and a half ago to address a lingering hip injury from years of ice hockey, along with the imbalance that comes from overusing your quads and hip flexors at the expense of your glutes and hamstrings.

He spotted early on that this dysfunction was the real reason I couldn’t quite get back to 100% on the ice, and that observation shaped the way we worked together.
Charles approaches strength holistically, looking at how the body’s systems relate to one another rather than isolating muscles, and over time that translated to real changes in how I move.

Between our sessions and the exercises he sent me home with, I’m in a much better place on the ice. The pain is gone, my stability is significantly better, my posture has shifted, and I notice I’m carrying myself with more confidence in general.

Charles is also just easy to be around: genuinely supportive, quick to celebrate the wins, and willing to push you when you need it. If you’re working through an injury or a stubborn movement pattern and want someone who’ll think about your body as a whole system, he’s worth your time.”

If you look at the position of the ribs, belly, pelvis, and legs in Ryan’s before and after images you can see that he made a lot of changes to the way the bones in these containers stack relative to one another. The muscles, fascia and even the pneumatic pressure systems are holding a very different baseline tension that supports distribution of force throughout his system rather than isolating that force in hyper-mobile pockets of his system.
This has created more freedom and safety in Ryan’s body and given his nervous system the security to enjoy hockey rather than constantly protecting his body from the threat of further injury.

It was a pleasure working with you Ryan, wishing you years and years of play and presence on the ice.

The real medicine of what I offer is the invitation to feel what’s happening in your body and use sensation as a guide.

This sensory map of your body will help you feel whether a movement is distributed and supported through your system or compensated and overburdening an already overused pocket of your system.

Many people work out the way they live.. on autopilot. Defaulting to whatever movements have been most repeated in their body so that their brain has space to stay in the analytical mind.

Daydreaming, listening to a podcast, worrying about how they look. Anything but feeling.

More and more i realize that the biggest challenge and the biggest medicine for many of my clients is the initial suffering of staying in sensation.

For the distracted overthinker, being put into an uncomfortable position feels like standing on the edge of a cliff. “Why am I shaking?” “Is it safe to take a break from being in my head?” “I’m not used to feeling this much.” “I’m bored.” “When is this gonna END”

Re educating your relationship with feeling tension and pressure in your frame and teaching your body that these experiences are safe and helpful, creates the space in your nervous system to begin to correct the dysfunctions that come from years and years of moving on autopilot.

It’s hard at first but, as I’ve seen time and time again, this confusing and unfamiliar experience becomes clarified and starts to FEEL GOOD. You leave each session feeling better than you walked in, your analytical brain gets a break, you learn to trust tour body and your whole nervous system gets upgraded in the process.

This is not just movement health it’s nervous system health and it’s needed now more than ever.

Your neck is always “tight” because it’s weak, disconnected and generally feels unsafe.

You feel constant tension in it because you anchor your stress through your face directly into a neck that isn’t grounded into the rest of the system.

You breathe with your neck, lament with your neck, rage with your neck yet it’s so weak that it bobbles down the front of your chest like a newborn baby every time you look at your phone.

A strong, integrated neck knows when to be used and knows when to relax. The deep and superficial muscles work together and in sequence to do their job in the background of your life. When your neck is strong and integrated you don’t even think about it because it’s not sending concerning signals to the brain.

Most modern day humans have taught their neck how to be used through the context of emotional stress and anxiety, often in a sitting position . Our dominant side grabs and pulls while gravity pushes our head ever forward to the front of our ribs. This leaves the vertebrae of our neck compressed and misaligned.

The journey to a strong, secure neck is 3 steps.

1. Understand that the relative position of bones (posture) changes the prioritization of soft tissue (muscle) activation. Play with balancing your rib cage vertically and upright over the center of your pelvis and stacking your neck over your rib cage so that your ear and the middle of your shoulder are aligned vertically.

2. Rest your tongue on the roof of your mouth and practice relaxing your neck while you breathe through your nose. Add some movement of the upper body and continue to focus on relaxing the jaw and neck. Notice when your neck begins to grab and see if you can redirect that tension into your ribs and diaphragm or let go of the tension all together.

3. Learn how to STRENGTHEN YOUR NECK IN ALL DIRECTIONS and connect that strength throughout your entire system all the way down into our feet. Adding relative strength to your neck will retrain the neck to be used when is needed and take a back seat when it’s not needed.

Chicago basin. 2025


The alpine diesel train that took us on a 30 mile journey into the San Juan forest and dropped us off at the trailhead is as magical as it sounds ✨ . Choo chooing on the edge of a cliff overlooking a river just hits different 🏔️ 🚂

We got robbed at needlepoint by a massive porcupine. It snuck into our campsite at night and chewed up anything it could find. It especially liked things that seem like they could be food but aren’t like cork or rubber. It also scared the absolute s**t out of me when it crept under my rain fly in the middle of the night making alien clicking noises. By the time I turned my headlamp on we were face to face and it was staring directly into the windows of my soul. To be fair, we were the unfamiliar strangers intruding into his territory.

The San Juans will be a place I return to over and over again for years to come. Grateful to have a body that is capable of traversing this remote landscape. Grateful for friends who are down for these tough and rugged adventures. Grateful for this incredibly sacred and beautiful land that brings us home. Home to our hearts, home to our bodies, home to presence.

Still frames of a life being lived. Images that inadequately capture the spectrum of emotions experienced. Hopefully they share some of the awe and presence that is waiting for you outside your front door.

This summer I’ve pushed my edge and sat with some pretty intense physical and emotional discomfort. I have also felt deep lucidity and expansive joy.

Ive been able to set down this 6.07 ounce anvil I’m currently holding for days at a time and taste the elusive freedom of not holding a screen 4 inches from my face.

These mountains are medicine. They are a reminder of source and creation. Your cells echo their familiarity to this source when you feel that peace rising up from the dirt and settling into your heart. We all need this medicine now more than ever and I don’t need to explain why.

My dream is to offer a service that helps people safely reconnect with their bodies. Over 13 years of working in this industry I’ve maintained contact with this vision and focused my work on getting better at this single goal: helping people to connect with and trust their bodies.

What does it mean to reconnect with your body?

It means to recieve clear feedback from your body in the form of sensation and tension informing your brain of your body’s relative position in space.

It means creating deep familiarity with what movements or activities feel healthy and regenerative and what activities don’t.

It means feeling strong and supported through standing, walking, running, dancing and playing.

It means being able to tolerate reasonable amounts of stress trusting that the body can self regulate and recover.

It means being able to use movement frequently as a tool to manage stress, optimize hormones and tap into a meditative ritual.

I’m so grateful to be able to offer a service that I’ve refined over many years, a service that has expanded to not just achieve this goal through movement but also incorporating the powers of mindset, light, recovery and stress management.

I am still learning and refining this service and i know I always will be. But the results and feedback I get from my clients as well as the results I achieve from applying the practice to my own life reminds me every day that I’m heading in the right direction.

Happy 91st birthday to a grandma who has supported me and cheered me on with all her heart for as long as I can remember.

I’m so grateful to have you in my life grandma!
I’m sad I can’t be with you to celebrate your important day but I’m very excited to see you in a few short weeks.

Can’t wait to lounge in your backyard soaking up the Florida sun ☀️ and go for a long walk around the neighborhood with you.

We didn’t get a birthday picture this year but here’s a little scrapbook of the last 10 years of birthday outings 💕.

Blue lakes pass to Mt. Sneffels 🤧.

October 2024.

First backpacking trip in Colorado.

Things that remind me: I am just a small part of something much much greater than me. I don’t need to understand it perfectly to accept it or love it. It doesn’t need a clear name or to be distilled down to a fiction of the simple human mind.

It exists either way and is evident in every moment we experience, every beautiful emotion that rises from our center, every time our body interacts with plants, dirt or sunlight.

I was designed perfectly with all that was designed around me.