
When I landed in Belgium, it was supposed to be a one-year stop and the final chapter of my professional basketball career. I had spent 12 years playing all over Europe, chasing the next contract, the next team, the next season. Belgium was never the long-term plan, but like every athlete, I hit the end of the road, and there I was, in the capital of Europe.
It’s a strange thing when you spend your whole life doing one thing – eating, breathing, and sleeping the game. Your whole identity is built around that structure, purpose, and routine, and then one day, it’s over. No game plan, no teammates, no clear direction. From team player to solo act, everything changes in an instant.
For me, that transition was a little more complicated because I was alone in a foreign country and had decided to not yet return home to Canada. I spoke fluent French, but it wasn’t my native language. I had no family, no support system, and no idea how to move forward. I was starting from scratch, and truth be told, I was terrified.
What I knew for sure was that I wasn’t cut out for a desk job, and even if I was, I hadn’t written a resume in over a decade. “Basketball player,” after all, doesn’t really garner much attention when it’s the only occupation you’ve ever had. What I did know was that I loved working with people and wanted to be on my feet, so coaching seemed like a natural next step. On top of that, I was a gym rat and always had been. From rec centers to college facilities to 20,000-seat stadiums, I had spent most of my life in gyms, but coaching was going to be different. I had no idea how to start, how to be a freelancer, how to price sessions, retain clients, or navigate commercial gym politics. I thought I could just show up, magically get clients, and coach them and that would be enough – but I was wrong. I was wearing every hat in a new business without actually knowing how to wear any of them.
So, I started from zero and began freelance personal training at an upscale health club in Brussels. No clients and no connections, just a basketball background and a willingness to figure everything out. So naturally at the start, I leaned on what I knew. I had folks doing bodybuilding splits, circuits, and bodyweight stuff and anything else I had done while playing. Some of it kind of worked, but most of it didn’t. Clients left tired and sweaty, but I was winging it. Literally every single time, I was making things up.
Worse, the gym culture on the floor was unpleasant. I went from the camaraderie of the locker room – the only thing I had known up to that point – to a cutthroat gym floor where I joined a “team” of about 20 freelance trainers. We wore the same shirt, but that was the only thing we shared. Trainers were territorial, ignored new faces and no one introduced themselves or showed me around. I wasn’t greeted; I was “sized-up.”
Paying My Dues
For three years, I hustled on that floor, one hour at a time, one client at a time, working up to 55 PT sessions a week. I constantly made up routines to keep clients engaged or copied whatever trend I saw on YouTube. Most of what I saw on the floor from the other trainers was far worse than me and bordered on parody, but I was making it up too. The only difference was that I mostly used barbells and free weights and was at least attempting to get people stronger.
Then I stumbled across Starting Strength, and more specifically, the video of Rip teaching the squat to Brett McKay on the Art of Manliness YouTube channel. Instantly, it clicked. The stance, the toe angle, the hips, everything. It made perfect sense, and I taught myself a decent version of the thing in about 5 minutes. The bottom of the squat, after all, damn near mirrored the defensive stance I had been doing since I was 12 years old. Quite literally, I had been in that stance hundreds of thousands of times for many thousands of hours. I could do it in my sleep, and for the first time, someone was explaining the squat with a precision, a clarity, and a logic that I hadn’t seen anywhere.
I then watched the Press, Bench Press, Deadlift, and Power Clean videos and ordered the Blue Book immediately afterward. When it arrived I dove right in, but unfortunately I didn’t get very far that first night. Ten pages in, I closed it and thought, “God, I’m so full of shit. I don’t know a damn thing about my job.” I mean, I knew I had a knowledge gap, but I didn’t realize the gap was a goddamn canyon.
Worse, I realized that no one else had the slightest clue about what they were doing either. None of those other trainers had a system, and none of us had any standards. We were all winging it, though we were all promising results. Some were “teaching” movements they didn’t understand and should have stayed far away from, and all of us tracked nothing. Some had clients doing “Animal Flow,” whatever the fuck that is, while others played Xbox in a plank position. One of them, and I shit you not, had people dodging broomsticks while standing on a Bosu ball like they were in the fucking Matrix. It was madness.
Logic
That realization was tough, but it was freeing. For the first time, I had a direction, a method, and a real system that was grounded in physics, anatomy, and refined through decades of coaching experience. Starting Strength was simple in design, complex in application, and effective when followed correctly. It wasn’t just a program, like a lot of folks think – it was a blueprint for how to teach yourself to lift correctly, and to start coaching others to do the same.
I started applying the
method with anyone who would let me. At first, I was straight trash, but I suspect we all were at the beginning. Even in those rough early
sessions, however, people moved better. Squats looked halfway normal,
deadlifts cleaned up, and I finally had people training, not just
exercising. It wasn’t because I was any good that it worked; it was
because the method worked. No plates under the heels, and no Smith
machines. Just normal human movement patterns that anyone could
learn. The damn thing worked so well not because of me, but in
spite of me.
Still, I knew I
couldn’t coach what I hadn’t lived. So I started training. I
hired experienced coaches to help me improve both as a lifter and a
coach. I was 6’7″ and 220 pounds, not weak, but definitely not
strong either. I put myself through the full LP in earnest, fucking
things up, missing reps, resetting, and successfully progressing into
more intermediate programming. The gym became my lab, and I was
learning something new every day.
I started to understand
the system in my bones because I was doing it. I felt what it meant
to grind, to push, to adapt. I wasn’t just reading about leverages
and moment arms; I was living them. That experience sharpened my
coaching instincts, and you could see the difference in my own
clients’ results. The guesswork faded and was replaced by clarity.
From there, I was off and running.
In many ways, the
structure and principles behind Starting Strength echoed everything I
had relied on during my basketball career, and this is probably what
drew me to it in the first place. As an athlete, every day had a
purpose. Every training session, every practice, and every drill was
there to build toward something bigger and better. That structure was
a huge part of what had made me successful, and here was a method
that brought that same sense of order to strength training. It had
clear principles, logical progression, consistent standards, and no
extra bullshit. It brought back the feeling of being in a
professional environment where discipline, consistency, and progress
mattered. It wasn’t about guessing. It was about doing the work.
And for someone like me, a creature of habit through and through,
that predictability meant everything. I thrive on it.
The
Final Test
Finally, in February
2020, I earned my Starting Strength Coach credential and then, three
weeks later, COVID shut the world down. With gyms closed and clients
at home, I trained in an abandoned house in Brussels for 16 months.
No heat, water leaking everywhere, and flickering electricity. But
that little cave became the seed of something real. It’s where my
business partner and I first envisioned our own gym.
At that point, there
was no going back to the commercial gym, even when things reopened.
Not after what I had learned, finding the method and getting
certified. I couldn’t stomach another hour surrounded by gimmicks
and the literal circus of the gym floor. Yelling “Chest down!” or
“Hips!” while a guy 2 meters away is doing cable trunk rotations
in short shorts beside his trainer isn’t exactly the dream training
environment.
The name “Brussels
Barbell: A Starting Strength Affiliate Gym” had been in my mind for
years, and now it was time. I wanted to create a space where Starting
Strength could live in Europe; a gym with structure, purpose, logic,
and zero white noise. I wanted to build a gym that actually does what
it says it’s going to do. So we built it small, clean, and
deliberate. Five racks and five platforms and absolutely no bullshit.
Just the tools that mattered. It embodied the same principles that
drew me to Starting Strength in the first place: Simple. Hard.
Effective. And we removed everything that didn’t contribute to that
mission.
Bringing Starting
Strength to Brussels through Brussels Barbell in August of 2021
finally gave the city a legitimate strength training facility for the
general population. Not a gym with a “strength class” squeezed
into the schedule once a day, or a commercial space where douchebags
are curling in the squat rack, but a place fully dedicated to getting
people stronger. A place built around the barbell, where strength
wasn’t an afterthought but rather the entire point.
Narrowcasting
I didn’t want to
appeal to everyone because that doesn’t work. I wanted people who
were serious, people who were ready to train, eager to learn, and who
understood the importance of getting stronger. As time went on, the
right people found us: moms and dads, consultants, diplomats,
lawyers, military officials, retirees, you name it. Many had never
touched a barbell, and more than a few were terrified. But once they
learned that this was exactly for them, realized they were already
stronger than they thought, and started looking and feeling better,
they were in. You could see and feel the progress – the NLP, if you
will – of Brussels Barbell, day in and day out.
In Brussels, fitness
tends to be vague at best. “Functional Training” is everywhere,
though no one can really explain what the hell it’s supposed to do.
It does look complicated and creative, so I guess it has that going
for it. Bootcamps, Les Mills, kettlebell- and TRX-based “strength”
classes – it’s all very ambiguous, trendy, and largely
ineffective. Most of it feels designed to hit SEO keywords, not
produce any real long-term results.
Brussels Barbell and
Starting Strength reframe that. Strength isn’t about tank top
selfies after curls or six days of soreness from a brutal leg day.
It’s about capability, aging well, and staying independent. It’s
carrying your groceries, fixing your back, and staying out of the
nursing home. It’s about making the choice, voluntarily, to do hard
physical tasks and routinely doing things most people won’t do. It’s
about understanding and thriving on the idea that it’s supposed to be
hard because it wouldn’t change anything if it wasn’t.
That message resonates.
Many clients were told lifting was dangerous. That squats ruin knees
and deadlifts break backs. It can be an uphill battle when someone’s
chiropractor or physiotherapist tells them that squats and deadlifts
will destroy them, but at the same time can’t teach either one of
the exercises and certainly have never trained themselves. So we
start from scratch, and we teach. We explain. We show them how it
works, why it works, and what to expect. Once they understand it and
they feel it, they’re in.
Our
NLP
Brussels Barbell has
grown because we stayed focused. What started as five racks in an
80-square-meter space has become a full facility with 11 racks, an
accessory room, a lounge, private changing rooms and showers, a staff
kitchen, and our office in the back, which is now spread across more
than 300 square meters. We coached hard, we educated, and we stuck to
the model because it works. And it continues to grow, not because of
flashy marketing or the latest fitness trend, but because people keep
getting stronger. Month after month, year after year, they make
progress. It hasn’t fizzled out because some fad lost momentum or a
new gimmick came along. It’s grown because the method works. Right
in the heart of the European Union, there is a gym dedicated solely
to strength. A gym that uses a method that has not yet been refuted,
and that works just as well for a 15-year-old as it does for someone
in their 90s. That kind of place is rare and it’s something most
gyms can’t claim.
And we must be doing
something right. The World’s Strongest Man, Mitchell Hooper, stopped
by to train and featured us in a six-minute video on his YouTube
channel. Mike Tuchscherer, one of the most respected figures in
powerlifting, hosted a seminar here. Even France’s strongest woman,
Angeline Berva, came through to train while passing through Brussels.
These visits weren’t just cool moments – they were confirmation
that we’ve built something worth noticing.
All three of them knew
exactly who Rip is and what Starting Strength was all about. They
sought out our gym and that says a lot. Additionally, not a week goes
by that someone from a neighboring European country doesn’t reach
out to ask about traveling to Brussels for a form check because they
are already doing Starting Strength on their own. The reach of the
method is broad, and it now has a place in Europe where it is firmly
planted.
I didn’t come to
Belgium to open a gym. I came to close a chapter and find my next
one. I had no plan, no clients, and no idea where it would lead, but
I found a method I believed in, that worked every time, and that made
everyone better, every time. Starting Strength and its coaches gave
me the tools. Brussels Barbell gave it a home.
Now we’ve built
something real: a place where people train with purpose, where they
get strong on purpose, and where they’re never on their own. All
they need is a barbell, a coach, a community, and the right place to
do the work.
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