GuerrillaZen FitnessReviews of guerrillazen.com

I hired Blake back in September after seeing a lot of his online content on correcting posture and muscular imbalances. I had never worked with an online coach before and was a little hesitant about hiring someone who could only assess me over video, but after our initial 3-hour assessment, I was pretty confident that Blake knew what was going on with my body and what imbalances I was presenting with. Blake is extremely knowledgable and voracious to learn more. He takes into account your diet, lifestyle, stress, and other habits that influence your posture apart from muscular imbalances. He spends half of his initial assessment talking to you about things that you may not even think relate to your posture, like your sleep habits, diet, your household situation, relationships and other lifestyle habits. This puts him, in my opinion, in a higher category than just a typical fitness trainer because he looks at the whole picture. I already had tremendous success with impleneting a more holistic lifestyle, so this was also one of the reasons I felt comfortable hiring him. We agreed to 4 months of coaching, all of which is done over a version of his app that is similar to the Trainerize Fitness app. I found messaging Blake over the app to be great. He would respond either the same day within a few hours of me messaging or the following day. He cares about his clients, and it shows. We scheduled follow-up Zoom calls each month. These were sometimes hard to work into my calendar because of how busy he was and the calls needing to occur after my work day. We usually spoke on Saturdays, so it was nice that he was willing to work on that day and would make the time to follow up then. These calls were mostly us chatting about the progress that he could see in the monthly photos that you submit to him of your posture along with some lifestyle tips. He did not have me do exercises over the call, which is something that I do wish he had the time for. This is something I really felt like he was missing out on - having you do the exercises with him watching to make sure your form is correct rather than just sending them all to you and assuming you are doing them properly. Again, this is the disadvantage of working with a coach over the Internet versus in person. Months into the program, I unfortunately found that I was not improving in the ways that I expected to. There were certain exercises that exacerbated my pain and to his credit, he would remove them from my program quickly when I shared my concerns, but a lot of the corrective exercises felt like they provided temporary relief and were not getting to the root cause of my pain. There were minor improvements in my pain, but not enough to justify the investment that I made into his coaching. I ended up working with him even longer than 4 months (he did not charge me extra for this because he wanted me to see improvement. Again, he very much cares for his clients, and that is palpable). There was also an entire month towards the end of our coaching that I had a combo of Covid/Flu and lost a ton of progress which was disheartening. After working with him for nearly 6 months, I have found that my specific pain and postural issues have not improved much at all. This could be due to how comprehensive my issues are, and I think that some of my issues have to do with structural abnormalities in my jaw (specifically malocclusion). I also had a severe fracture in my knee a few years prior to working with him that flared up easily with certain exercises that he provided. Those exercises might work great for someone who did not have a knee fracture to help with other areas of pain, but I felt like he never really found good exercises or modifictions to substitute those exercises with because, in his own words, "This is the best exercise for that area." This left me feeling defeated and again, like I wasn't getting the full benefit of the program he created for me. These are all issues that pop up with online coaches. If you have complex injuries or something structual (in my case, jaw/tmj maloclussion) that is contributing to what is going on with the rest of your body, these things may not be taken into account when your program is being created. This is initially why I was hesitant to hire someone who cannot assess you in person. This is why I can only give Blake 4 stars. My case is incredibly complex, so he can't take all the fault for that. But for the investment I made, I did not see a return that I expected. The good news is that Blake does now allow you to maintain access to the exercises he created for you provided you sign a liablity document waiver, so hopefully I can continue making small progress. Bottom line, Blake may be a good fit for you if you are someone who responds well to an online coach. He is nice and cares about his clients, but your results may vary.