About Francisco Villalobos

In my strength coaching practice, I bring a distinctively philosophical approach to exercise, nutrition and motivation.

Teaching is my passion.

My name is Francisco Villalobos and this is my origin story for how I became a strength coach who focuses on seniors. It is a story grounded in frustration and loss.

All I ever aspired to be from the age of 13 was a teacher. When my beloved high school English teacher, Mr. Scavullo, noticed I was reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, he mentioned that there was a profession where people were paid to write and talk about philosophy. I could not believe my ears! I would have happily spent my life reading, writing and discussing philosophy for free. I could hardly believe I would someday get paid to do so. From that day I was guided like a missile towards becoming a professor.

I made that dream come true and I taught for several years, specializing in moral, political and legal philosophy. I soon discovered that although I still loved teaching philosophy, I came to hate the political pettiness I experienced in academia. I decided to re-direct my love of teaching towards the goal of making the golden years of seniors truly golden.

Initially, this career pivot was also fraught with frustration. My maternal grandmother, who along with my mother had raised me, fell around this time and broke her hip. The operation went well but she was so fearful of falling again that she became totally sedentary. Within a year, this serial entrepreneur who had brought her family here from the Dominican Republic, this light in my life, was extinguished. When my grandmother stopped moving, she started the process of dying.

I swore that this fate would not befall my mother and so my mother became my first client (pro bono, of course). My greatest triumph with my Mom was when she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2018. The chemo and radiation helped put her in remission by early 2019 and throughout it all she only missed two weeks of strength training because of how painful it was to squat due to the radiation burns on her backside. I credit the strength she acquired with consistent training over the years (at her strongest she deadlifted 200 lbs. for one rep) with helping her keep from wasting away during the cancer treatment. Training also helped maintain her appetite which I believe was crucial in her making it through that medical crucible.

Because of the circumstances involved with my transition to strength coaching and because I had plenty of experience rehabbing myself through several injuries as an aging martial artist, I decided to focus on a more mature clientele. I’ve worked with younger clients over the years and that can be fun because they are made of gummy bears and are as resilient as weeds. But I’m especially attracted to working with more seasoned individuals who have approached that stage in life where their bodies may no longer be able to cash the checks their wills wants to write. The great thing about seniors is that you don’t have to make them a powerlifting champion in order to make the quality of their life markedly better.

That’s my story in a nutshell. I started off with the dream of making our youth strong, independent reasoners and informed citizens capable of directing their lives expertly and flourishing as full fledged human beings. Now my focus is on compressing morbidity. Ideally, I want my clients to be strong enough so that all their dying is left to the final moments of their final day, rather than the prolonged senescence that has become all to common in first world countries such as ours. I’m confident I can do that for anyone who is coachable and willing to put in the work

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What are your fitness challenges? What’s holding you back today from achieving your goals?

Book a free phone consultation with me today. Together we’ll discuss what’s possible.

You can get on the path this week to real results.