A life-changing injury gave Alec Zirkenbach a new perspective and inspired his mission to bring fitness to people with disabilities.
Alec Zirkenbach knows firsthand the importance of providing access to fitness for people of all abilities.
In 2009, when Alec was in the Navy, he suffered an injury that almost cost him the use of his right leg, damaging the peroneal nerve that runs down the leg, and causing a loss of feeling in his foot.
A lifelong athlete and college lacrosse player, Alec was unable to walk for eight months.
“I didn't really know what to do with myself,” Alec said about his life after the injury. ”I had just started doing CrossFit before I got injured, but I struggled afterwards to know how to train.”
At that point Alec was living in San Diego, and he found an MMA gym offering CrossFit classes in a space that was previously a racquetball court. While none of the coaches had adaptive fitness knowledge, the community was supportive and encouraging.
“It was just a good, small group of people and it really did save my life,” Alec said.
Through that group, Alec was able to get back into shape and return to active duty for two more tours of service.
Once he left the Navy, however, Alec wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with himself. What he did know was that he wanted to recreate the welcoming gym environment he’d experienced after his injury.
So, in 2012, Alec opened Fathom CrossFit in San Diego. And true to his word, he made sure the gym was welcoming to all athletes. What Alec didn’t know at the time was that working with adaptive athletes would become his life’s work.
Initially, Alec began working with adaptive athletes via a recreational therapy program with the Wounded Warrior Battalion at San Diego’s Navy hospital. Every Wednesday, a chartered bus would arrive at the gym, but Alec never knew in advance who would come to the class.
“It could have been people with amputations or a brain injury,” Alec said. That meant he had to quickly learn how to teach whatever skill he was introducing that day—whether it was a kettlebell swing or a pull-up—to people with a variety of abilities.
Alec led that class for five years, learning through trial and error how to work with whoever came through the door on that Wednesday. That experience, in addition to his own injury, gave him a deep sense of compassion and knowledge about the needs of the adaptive athlete.
Then, in 2017, CrossFit asked Alec to develop and launch the CrossFit Specialty Course: Adaptive Training, bringing adaptive fitness education to CrossFit coaches around the world.
He designed and ran the specialty course for two years, teaching coaches, gym owners, and athletes around the world how every person can participate in CrossFit workouts, regardless of their ability.
Alec felt so strongly about the mission that when CrossFit discontinued all of their specialty courses in 2019, Alec knew he didn’t want to abandon what he’d started.
That’s when the course he designed and owned became independent of CrossFit, and Alec founded the Adaptive Training Academy (ATA) as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to expanding accessible and inclusive fitness worldwide.
“Overnight, we created The Adaptive Training Academy to continue running the same course, and we still run that course to this day,” Alec said.
Now that it’s not associated with CrossFit, the course has a more multidisciplinary approach, applicable to any fitness methodology
“We definitely still have a functional fitness backbone,” Alec said, “because we believe functional movements and functional fitness works best for people with disabilities because it has the most transference for them to the real world.”
The Adaptive and Inclusive Trainer Course is now a two-day seminar course, offered in person and online.
Alec said about 40 percent of the people taking the course are trainers, many of them CrossFit coaches. The next biggest group, about 30 percent, are physical therapists, occupational therapists, and recreational therapists. The rest are a mix of adaptive athletes who want to learn about adaptive fitness for themselves or who aspire to be coaches, and program managers who run dedicated adaptive programs at the VA or a similar facility.
Leading the seminars are a group of trainers dedicated to increasing access to fitness, and many of them are adaptive athletes themselves.
Tom Miazga, one of the seminar staff, is an athlete with cerebral palsy and a wheelchair user. He was a Paralympic swimmer and just won his tenth consecutive CrossFit Games title and a Hyrox world championship.
Another coach on the seminar staff, Mike Egan, is a combat veteran and a bilateral amputee. He is also a CrossFit Games competitor, but Alec said he’s recently been running ultramarathons. Mike is also a coach for the Marine Corps’ powerlifting team.
The director of content development at The Adaptive Training Academy is Jenna Muri-Rosenthal, a brain injury specialist and a speech pathologist who worked in acute care for a long time.
Jenna has experience working with people with various types of brain injuries, either from an accident or a stroke. Over the years, she noticed that while people benefitted from excellent physical therapy while they were in the hospital, they’d often be left on their own once they got home.
“She started to do personal training for people on the side, out of a gym,” Alec said about Jenna, adding that her program grew rapidly, filled with people who needed more care after they left the traditional healthcare system.
Now, in addition to working for the ATA, Jenna has her own gym that is designed specifically for people with neurological conditions.
Jenna’s experience mirrored Alec’s own—that even with the best healthcare, at some point, the care ends. While this works well for a temporary injury or illness, it’s not ideal for people navigating the world with a new, permanent adaptation.
“I had really great care in the Navy as far as medical care, surgeries, physical therapy, all these things. But there's this endpoint where you can have really great physical therapy and all this support, but at some point you can't be in it forever,” Alec said.
People with a disability, who are often suffering from trauma, are often pushed into the world without any support, Alec said.
This is what’s at the heart of ATA’s mission. It’s providing the skills people need to have an active, healthy life even after a life-changing injury or a lifelong congenital condition.
About Author, Hilary Achauer