Core Training - Interview with Paul Chek
By Yuri Elkaim, BPHE, CK, RHN
Yuri Elkaim: Hello everyone, this is Yuri Elkaim here from Fitter U Fitness . Today I am very very excited because on the phone with me I have Paul Chek, and if you don't know who Paul Chek is you should be very ashamed of yourself. Just kidding! Paul Chek is someone that I have followed since the beginning of my venture into fitness over 12 years ago. He has been a forerunner in the field and he's been in the field for over 20 years now. He has worked with thousands of people around the world including professional sports teams, and he has really made an impact not just in fitness but in nutrition as well. He looks at the body from a holistic perspective. How are you doing Paul?
Paul Chek: I'm well. Thank you for having me Yuri.
Yuri Elkaim: Today we are talking about core training which is the focus of one of our core modules, but before we get to that why don't you give our listeners a little bit about your background. How did you get into what you are doing, what is your educational background, your experience, and what lead you to where you are today?
Paul Chek: Well that is a long answer but I will give you the Universe in a nutshell approach. When I was young, I was a competitive boxer, kick boxer, and motocross racer and I was raised on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and in my little town as a little collection of very elite athletes. Several of my friends were nationally ranked or province ranked motocross racers. One of my best friends was the world champion of full contact karate in 1986. Another one of my best buddies was Mr. Canada in bodybuilding in 1986. And many of my friends were black belts in various forms of martial arts. In this community of athletes and friends, we were all intensely competitive and we were all very interested in weight lifting and nutrition and anything that would give us an edge over the other guy.
So from my very early years I was grounded in a healthy competitiveness. My mother is a Yogi and my parents owned a 140 acre sheep farm which my father still is on. My mother was very holistic and always used food as nutrition and believed in whole food vitamins. We pretty much raised everything we ate on the farm so I wasn't exposed to a lot of processed foods and my mother believed in natural medicines first before trying allopathic approaches so I came from a pretty healthy grounding in athletics, diet, nutrition, lifestyle, and when I joined the army I had plan A and plan B. Plan A was to get the best training I could.
I went to school to become aircraft weapons systems control system repairman where I worked on cobra helicopters and had to go to electronics school for a year. My plan was that if I didn't enjoy that life that I would fight my way onto the army boxing team and use that as my escape from the military silliness.
Well sure enough I learned that these guys hardly ever exercised in aviation and I gained lots of weight and got miserable and addicted to coffee from working long, long shifts on helicopters and things like that. When I got on the army boxing team I was very successful and they realized right away that I had the ability to fight hard for all three rounds when they had other athletes that were bombing out in the third round. They noticed that I kept bringing things like chopped up vegetables and yogurt as my lunch and eating whole foods.
They all thought that was strange. They were all eating garbage like fast foods. One thing led to another and I competed in triathlons and represented the United States Army at the 1986 national championships in Hilton Head. My company commander offered me to leave the boxing team to train for triathlons. He was betting a lot of money that I would win the army triathlon.
When I told the army boxing coaches that I was going to leave, they asked me please stay and they would give me the job as trainer because they wanted me to apply my exercise and diet methods to the team and I also did massage therapy with the team. I spent 2 years training the army boxing team working with an osteopathic physician where I learned how to care for sports injuries from the team doctor and I applied massage therapy and studied nutrition.
Basically I had 30 of the best athletes in the world to learn from and experiment with. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to practice a combination of resistance training, postural correction, and deep tissue therapy so I went to the Sports Training Institute here in San Diego which is where I wanted to be. At that time I wanted to work primarily with triathletes. I build a huge business of elite runners, triathletes, swimmers, and pretty much every sport that you can think of here in San Diego.
I pretty much educated myself from that point by travelling around the world, taking courses from the best people it the world on the topics that I felt I needed more knowledge on and got certified as a neuromuscular therapist back in 1989. I have a 9 th grade education. I never finished high school so I am self educated from that regard. I don't have any University degrees. I am licensed in the state of California as a holistic health practitioner which is a license that requires a thousand hours of training from a state approved school and that allows me in my practice to pretty much do anything that falls in the realm of holistic and natural health, and anybody off the street is allowed to come see me. Really the only guideline is that I use natural methods.
When I left the army I finished school and worked for almost 2 years with a chiropractor specializing in sports injuries. Then I was hired by the largest physical therapy clinic in San Diego where I spent 4 years sharing ideas with some of the best physical therapists around. Then I went into partnership with a physical therapist and owned my own physical therapy clinic for 3 ½ years. I started lecturing professionally in 1988 at the request of the physical therapists that basically made it very clear to me that the methods that I used were very contradictory to what there were taught.
For example, I would have people with disc injuries doing squats and lunges and what I call primal patterns. It would scare the hell out of the therapists and the physicians because they were all taught that you should never do that. However, they had one problem; I kept rehabilitating the people that they couldn't figure out doing all of the things that they said were wrong.
After working with them for about a year, they asked me to start doing in-services and teaching the methods that I used. They encouraged me to start teaching these things to physical therapists so I began consulting physical therapy clinics all over the United States, teaching them the methods that I was using and they were very happy with it.
That sort of got me going in the seminar business and then in 1995, Charles Polikin, who I had done some consulting work with to help him with some challenging cases that he needed some help with suggested that I start an internship program because he wanted to send 2 of his top trainers that worked for him to see me. They were so blown away by what I taught them that I figured there may be a real need for this so I developed my certification program.
That Chek program is a 4-year program and I have a 1 ½ year program in nutrition and lifestyle coaching and I have an 18-month program in personal, professional, and spiritual development. So now it is a 7-year process to complete the training which you do while you are working. You don't have to go to University and borrow a bunch of money and have huge loans. I wanted to teach people more practically so that they get a dose of training. Then they go off and practice it.
When they have mastery of that level then they can build upon that and that way they can really develop the practical skills that go with the intellectual training. That has really occupied my life. I started as a trainer of the army boxing team in January of 1984 so I have been at this for 25 years.
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