Coach Mara

I started coaching in 2015, in a garage gym in Lakewood with three barbells and a rower that only worked if you hit it. Eleven years later I write and run training programs full time, mostly for people with jobs, kids, and about four hours a week to spend. I hold the CSCS through the NSCA, which means I passed a test on exercise science and biomechanics and then spent a decade finding out which parts of it survive contact with a real schedule.

My method is unglamorous. Every session I write is specified the same way — sets, reps, RPE, rest, tempo — so you never have to guess what “go heavy” was supposed to mean. I autoregulate with RPE instead of percentages, because your Tuesday isn’t your March. I build deloads in and I expect you to take them. If a lift isn’t available to your body that week, you get the substitution rather than the lecture.

Most of the people I work with are between thirty and fifty and coming back to lifting after some kind of interruption — a back that went, a second kid, a decade of only running. I like that work; it’s usually a matter of removing the two or three things that hurt and keeping everything else. Outside the gym I play upright bass in a bluegrass trio with a standing Sunday slot at a bar on South Broadway, and I’m comfortably the worst musician in it.