Transcription of Rebecca Woll for the show Bodily Alignment #228
Dr. Lisa: It’s always a pleasure to spend time with individuals who really understand the way that the body works and the joy of using the body in fun ways, like exercise. Today, we’re speaking with two individuals who are relatively new to Maine and doing something that I think is quite great. This is Tom Kropf and Rebecca Woll who run Shift Portland, which is a personal fitness facility on Market Street.
Tom received his bachelor’s degree in exercise science from Loras College in Iowa, and a master’s degree from Rockford College outside Chicago. Originally from Nebraska, Tom played college football before coaching in the college ranks for many years following graduation.
Practice starting Shift Portland, Tom is responsible for the business and education of more than 65 trainers as personal training manager for the flagship location of Equinox Fitness Clubs in New York City. Tom is also a certified strength and conditioning specialist through the National Strength and Conditioning Association. While not at the gym, Tom enjoys being outdoors running, biking, hiking, golfing or exploring.
Thanks for coming in Tom.
Tom: Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: You also have with you your lively wife, Rebecca Woll. Rebecca holds a master’s degree from Columbia University in motor learning and control with a concentration on balance in adults 55 and older. She is a certified balance and mobility instructor for Fall Proof through the Center For Successful Aging at Cal State Fullerton.
Rebecca is also a certified strength and conditioning specialist through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, with additional certifications in functional movement, nutrition and kettle bells. Previously, Rebecca managed the personal training department for Equinox Fitness Clubs, including flagship locations in New York City.
Rebecca holds a BA in dance and English from Connecticut College. Prior to her current focus, Rebecca was a professional modern dancer who continues to choreograph and teach throughout the New York and Portland Maine.
Thank you for coming in.
Rebecca: Thanks for having us.
Dr. Lisa: You guys have a lot of background in this area.
Tom: Yup.
Rebecca: We do.
Dr. Lisa: You’re clearly very passionate about the work that you do.
Rebecca: Yes, we absolutely are.
Dr. Lisa: I’m interested. Why Maine? One of you is from New York, one is from Nebraska. You lived in Brooklyn for 9 years, 10 years, but you’re here. You came here last summer. You got married, you settled down in our fair city.
Tom: Yeah, and thank goodness. The journey has been a longtime coming. It’s been quick and time since we’ve made the journey, I guess in August, when we moved up. From our standpoint, just being able to have a better lifestyle is really what the impetus was for us.
New York was great, we love a lot of things about it, but we wanted to go to a place where we could have an opportunity to build our business, an opportunity to have a lifestyle that was going to be more conducive to eventually raising a family and doing things along those lines.
Rebecca: We loved what we could find in Maine. We loved the integration of health in every day life. The fact that we can walk out our door and find a trail to go running or biking or walking on, and then go to work. We love the opportunities that Maine presents in terms of health. Everyone here is really focused on how can we improve our everyday lifestyle. How can we make wellness a part of that?
There’s a calm here that doesn’t exist in a lot of other places in the world, particularly in New York. Although, you can find places there as well. That’s really important to your mental health and a state of mind that will find a nice combination between physical and psychological integration. We really liked that wellness, that opportunity that we found here.
Dr. Lisa: Each of you came to exercise science from a slightly different direction. Rebecca, you have been and are a dancer and a dance teacher. Tom, you have a broad background in coaching and football in particular. What was it about each of those individual pursuits that drew you to them?
Tom: For me, in particular, when I came out in college, I went directly into a training conditioning type of setting where I was dealing with all athletes all the time. That could be a lot of fun. It could be very exciting because you’re going to see the products of your labor directly on the field.
That was great for a long time, but then the transition started to go to more, “How can I challenge myself to help people who don’t have the abilities of these athletes?” When I got out of coaching and into more of the personal fitness realm, it was so much more rewarding for me to say, “Listen. You were somebody who is suffering from chronic back pain, or migraines, or shoulder pain, and now you’re able to live a more active lifestyle than most other people.” That’s more rewarding than watching an athlete go from bench pressing 325 to bench pressing 375. I’ve got a lot more out of that.
The background has really been spurred on by trying to learn new things too. I feel that … Especially in Rebecca in her field, if you ever stop learning, you should be out of the business. There’s a lot of right ways to do things more than there are wrong ways. To be able to find out what all those right ways are or release most of the right ways, allows you to help a lot more people than the narrow scope of knowledge that you might have.
Rebecca: I came to personal training by accident through dance. I was dancing in New York, and dancing in New York is a bit of a difficult thing to also make a living at. I was in a company with a bunch of girls who were Pilates instructors and managers and personal trainers and they happen to … I really loved what they were talking about and they happen to have connections to interviews and that thing. That’s how I got into personal training. I wanted to make money doing something that I loved, helping other people move and come to fitness from maybe places where they didn’t know how to get there.
From there, I really fell in love with personal training, but more how people moved watching the technique of different movement patterns when people were doing different exercises. I became really intrigued with how does this happen. Why is the brain connecting with the muscles and putting a knee cap in a certain place? Why is that happening and how is that happening?
I found the answers to those questions through motor learning and control. As I was doing that, I fell in love with the topic of aging and became extremely intrigued by the changes that happen as we age. The fact that you can really slow those changes and slow those regressions, and even to some extent, put a stop to some of them and reverse them.
I am so impressed by working with people who have goals that are as simple as getting down to the floor who can’t do that anymore. That to me is what this field is all about, is finding those things that make people’s quality of life that much better. People doing things that they just thought they couldn’t do anymore.
Dr. Lisa: What types of lessons that you takeaway from the work that you did with Equinox in New York City? It seems like what you’re describing, each of you is describing, probably pulls some elements from what you did there, but also seems fairly unique to this new business hat you started.
Rebecca: It is. We have to cut at Equinox with a huge amount of what we do and what we’re able to do here. We couldn’t have started a business without that background. Equinox is hugely aware of the importance of education, and they put a great deal of emphasis on education as they hire new trainers. For me, I had a background in dance. I have a degree in dance, so I have the anatomy training and all of that, but I didn’t necessarily have the exercise physiology training and the scientific background of how everything works together.
For me, as a new trainer, Equinox, they gave me my entire base of education. When you go through classes for years and years and years there, and it’s all paid for. You have the opportunity to really delve into the material without the issue of, “Oh! I have to go to work and do this.” It’s all combined. That’s really amazing.
They give you the opportunity to grow. I think we’re both able to take that base and then find the neesh that we really entrusted in and expand from there.
Tom: I also feel that Equinox gave Rebecca and I a very good footprint of what fitness could be, more from how we should feel. When you walk into a place, you should know that it’s clean, that is going to be inviting, is going to be friendly, is going to be focused on you. The customer service aspect that we learned from that company has really driven us to build what we want to build here.
Principles of being able to have an unbelievably clean workspace when you walk in I think can’t be discounted at all. That’s what we learned at Equinox. Just the basic business of how to do this and make sure that people, for a lack of a better phrase, get what they pay for and make sure that they leave the building feeling, “Okay. I feel good. I feel like I’m making progress. I feel like this house I spent with this person was completely focused. It was programmed.” That’s something that we took away from that position.
Dr. Lisa: Having been in your store and having bought a couple of items which I had to limit myself because there’s a lot of really great things that I would have bought many of, many more of. I was impressed with the conversations that I had with you about where the clothes came from. These are clothes that you wear to … In my case, I was buying a shirt to run in, and I bought a shirt for my daughter to workout in. You’re both very conscious of buying things from organizations that have a commitment to bringing quality products into the world without, I don’t know, using abusive processes to manufacture these products.
I think that’s pretty great, and I’m not sure that everybody pays attention to that. Why was this important to you?
Rebecca: We felt there is a lot of athletic clothing out there, a lot of very good athletic clothing out there, and that there are certain brands that dominate the market. Living in athletic clothing, we’re very aware of what those brands are and how they feel on your body.
Being small business owners, we really felt it was our duty and that it was very important to draw in other small business owners. Particularly those that were focusing on the quality of their product. We have made an effort to reach out to those business owners that we feel the quality is extremely good. That they’re taking the time to know where their product is being made. That they’re taking the time to then look over every single piece of the item that’s being made.
Those people are so dedicated to their businesses that we felt it was our duty to promote that as well, as long as those clothing provided the same, if not, better quality than some of the larger brands. That’s where the impetus came from. We’ve reached out to a lot of the small business owners. They’ve been really wonderful to work with.
Like you said, we really try to make an effort to find things that are really nice to workout in. We’ve tried all of the clothing ourselves and we live in it. We feel it does a great job with the athletic part of it, but also the leisure wear part of it. We really want to make this a lifestyle. We don’t want people just to come in and buy clothes that they’re going to workout in, but buy clothes that they’re going to workout and then feel comfortable going to lunch afterwards, or going to pick up their kids, or just hanging out in.
We want fitness to be an entire brand for yourself. We want people to wake up in the morning and live a healthy lifestyle, and the clothes reflect that. That’s where we got the idea from.
Tom: Yeah, I don’t have much more I could add to that. I really like the idea of providing environmentally responsible clothing. We have a couple of brands that for every item that they’re sold, they take a pound of trash out of the oceans, or for every item sold, they donate a meal to a homeless shelter or they’re all made in … If they’re not American made, they’re made in only women owned factories. It’s really important to us that things are done responsibility and ethically. It’s not some sweat shop. People are getting paid fair wages for their work.
Dr. Lisa: What are some of your favorite brands?
Rebecca: I love my new found obsession, is a new company called Katie Brown LA. She’s a business owner out of California and Oregon. She just takes such pride in her clothes. I have spent hours on the phone with her and she’s told me how things are made and why she’s made them that way. Her material is just the softest thing you’ve ever put on your body, and I can’t stop wearing it everyday. I go to my closet and say, “Oh! Which Katie Brown can I put on today?”
I love her clothing, but I also love her business model. The customer service is better than I have ever, ever seen. If I need to talk to her, she will call me immediately. That’s the customer service that we want to provide our clients and our customers. I really appreciate that coming back and having such a quality product.
Tom: I really enjoy the spiritual gangster brand that we have. It’s been popular so far in Portland. I just love the fact … I think their motto was something on the lines of clothing for a high vibration lifestyle. I just think that sums up people like Rebecca and I, because we’re always moving. We’re always doing something. We can never really sit still. It’s clothing that help you think, “Okay. Yeah, I’m spiritual, I’m centered, but I’m also … I’m tough. I can go out and I can get things done.”
I just really love the aspect of creating … What they’ve done is that they create a brand that takes the aspects of putting yourself out there and then also being able to center it back to you again. I just love that. A couple of other brands that I think is worth noting about, is we have a brand out of Arizona called R&R Surplus. This is started by a husband and wife team similar to Rebecca and I. He was a boxer and was always working out and wanted to have something that he could wear around the house that was going to be comfortable, very, very well made, but also fashionable. They developed this line.
It’s all hand stitched. It’s all made to order directly for us. Really, it’s an amazing product. Tripled layer sweatshirts that are just incredibly comfortable. I just love the aspect that they say, “Listen. This isn’t something that we don’t know if we’re going to like, be Nike or Reebok, but we’re going to make stuff that we want, that we want to wear and hopefully you want to wear to.” I love that. I love that aspect.
Dr. Lisa: Having lived in Maine for most of my life and having been a runner for most of my life, and an athlete in college and in high school. I think I agree with you that it’s important to have … Because I do something almost everyday, it becomes something that I actually look for. I look for clothes that wear well. I look for clothes that feel good if I’m going to run 13 miles in the winter. I’m going to look for something that’s warm and that wicks moisture.
It actually becomes … It’s such a big part of what I do and a lot of people do that I think what you’re describing is really important. I think … I remember back in, I guess, it must be the 80s, just putting on an enormous sweatshirt and going out with rag clothes and going out on a January morning to run.
I so appreciate having the nice clothing, because it’s also motivating. It’s motivating to be able to be, “I love this outfit. I’m going to put it on and I’m going to go do my interval training.” I think what you’re doing is recognizing that sometimes working out is not easy. Whatever we can do to feel really good about it in ourselves. It’s helpful.
Rebecca: Exactly.
Tom: I think you bring up a really interesting point too. Suddenly, I believe in … Is not always focusing so hard on an end result. They talk about the pursuit of happiness. I’d like to think more about the happiness of the pursuit going through that journey. I think that what you wear, why you do that has an impact on that. If you enjoy your journey, the idea of you getting to that endpoint comes much more realistic.
Dr. Lisa: I like that you call yourselves Shift. It’s a little bit softer and it suggests that transformation is possible in incremental ways. Tell me why. Why was that term … Why did that become your store title?
Tom: You definitely touched on it. We think that, to say, “Let’s change.” or “I’m going to go on a diet.” let’s say, is not the right way of thinking about things. If you can say, “Let’s change gently.” or “Let’s shift the way that you eat.” Let’s shift your thinking about something, makes a lot more sense than doing a dead stop full change.
When we’re thinking about names for the store and our company, we wanted to have something that could go a lot of different ways too. We wanted people to be able to look at our name and strike some thoughts. What are they trying to get at? What were they trying to accomplish? Shifting is a verb, it’s a noun, there’s a lot of different things that you can play it with. We just really liked it. We thought it was a nice way to … We want to say, make some shift happen. Let’s get out there and let’s try to inspire some people.
Dr. Lisa: Rebecca, if people come to your store on Market Street, obviously they can buy some of these wonderful pieces of clothing that you’re describing. You also offer personal training sessions. You also offer classes. Tell me about some of the things that people will be able to sign up for.
Rebecca: We have a few different ways of making appointments with us. The first is classes. We offer three classes a week. They’re small group classes. Meaning they’re limited to four people. They’re extremely individualized. They are Tuesday and Thursdays at 5:30 PM for an hour, and Saturday mornings at 9:00 AM. There are small group circuit training classes. We change the workout everyday, every class. It’s for all levels.
If you have never worked out before and you’re entrusted in trying these classes, that’s fine. We will take the time to teach you or to regress or progress the exercise based on your ability and your level of experience and knowledge. In terms of personal training, our personal training sessions are an hour. They are by appointment. We are able to accommodate whatever schedule you have. Whether that is at 6 AM or 6 PM or 7 PM, 8 PM. Our goal is to have people workout whenever they can. We want to fit those sessions into crazy schedules.
If you come to the store or call us, we’ll talk to you about where your fitness levels are now. What your goals are. We’ll talk to you about making those goals maintainable and achievable. We will do fitness assessment. We’ll make an appointment to take an hour with you to go over every concern that you have. We want to learn about your lifestyle. What do you eat in the morning? What do you eat at night? What happens when you go out on a Saturday night? That thing. Everything is so important and vital to the success of reaching your goal.
We want to see how you move. What joints are locked. What joints are moving properly. We’ll do an assessment called the functional movement screen, which assesses every joint in your body and sees how you really move and what is going on. Are there problems with your hip joint? Is that maybe affecting pain in your back. Are you having pain in your knee? If so, is your ankle joint locked? That thing.
We really do a very thorough assessment. Again, this is all about moving well and maintaining and achieving the optimum, or the optimal quality of life however old you are. Whether you’re 18 and you’re a football player and you want to go to college for football. We can help you with that. Whether you’re 85 and you have had a lot of balance issues. We can help you with that.
Whether you’re 45 and you’re concerned about moving into the 50s, the 60s and you want to make sure that you do that without injuries. We can help you with that too. It’s all about looking at the individual and seeing where they are and how they’re moving, and then creating individualized program for that person and taking you through that.
Dr. Lisa: Tom, what is the website for Shift Portland?
Tom: We’re at www.shift-portland.com. All of our information is on there, for our class schedules, information regarding the brands that we sell, information about our rates and biographical information about Rebecca and I as well.
Dr. Lisa: Excellent. I am hoping that many people, as a result of this conversation, will be calling you up and coming into your store and seeing all the wonderful things that you have to offer. I give you a lot of credit for starting this new business and being entrepreneurs in this field, because I think it’s an important one.
We’ve been speaking with Tom Kropf and Rebecca Woll who runs Shift Portland, a personal fitness facility on Market Street. Thanks so much for the work that you’re doing, and thanks for coming in today.
Tom: Thank you.
Rebecca: Thanks for having us.