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.

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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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