Erika Canales has worked in the fitness industry for more than twenty years. She is a USA Track & Field certified coach, a USA Weightlifting certified coach, and a NASM certified personal trainer.
The people Erika most likes working with are adults who are starting. Beginners who want to lose weight, get stronger, or change how they live, and who want a coach who does not assume they already know their way around a weight room. That is the work she finds most rewarding and it is the work she is best at. Nobody gets talked down to and nobody gets handed a program built for somebody else.
She also trains the way she asks her clients to. At 45, Erika competes at a high level in Master’s track and field in the 400m, which is one of the hardest events in the sport to train for and race well. Beginners tend to find that reassuring. The person writing your program is still doing the work herself.
The 400m is also where her coaching goes deepest. It is an event most coaches get wrong, because it looks like a sprint and is not one, and Erika knows it from the inside. If you run the 400 or you are raising someone who does, she is the coach to talk to.
Erika also works with clients training around physical limitations, including spastic paraplegia. That work asks a different question of a coach. Not how hard to push, but what to build around, and what is genuinely possible for this person rather than what a textbook says should be.
Alongside coaching, Erika has built a career in mental health care non-profits, in roles ranging from case manager to diversity practitioner. That work was about access: getting services to people the usual routes were not reaching, through outreach programs built with community partners in places and formats nobody had tried before. It is a useful background for a coach. Meeting people where they actually are, rather than where a program assumes they should be, is most of the job.
Erika is available for in-person training and remote coaching.
Experience
- CPT, National Academy of Sports Medicine
- USA Track & Field certified
- USA Weightlifting certified
- Over twenty years in the fitness industry
- Competing Master’s track athlete, 400m
- BS Sport Management, The University of Texas at Austin
- MBA, Texas State University
Who Erika Works With
Adults new to training, weight loss and body composition, general strength, lifestyle change, sprint and 400m athletes, and clients training around a physical limitation.