Present Tense Fitness

Present Tense Fitness Personal training for dancers and general population clients.

We are Susan and Jason, two strength coaches from Dayton, Ohio. I wanted to do a post about what we do, because as much ...
09/03/2026

We are Susan and Jason, two strength coaches from Dayton, Ohio. I wanted to do a post about what we do, because as much as we talk about our work, sometimes people don’t quite understand what it is that we do.

1.) We are the co-owners of Present Tense Fitness, which has a brick-and-mortar in Dayton, on 6th Street in the Oregon District. We opened it in 2016, and it’s a family and community effort. We laid the floors and painted the walls and put together the equipment and built the lifting platform and and and.

2.) We are both associate faculty at the School of American Ballet. We’re strength coaches there, and between the two of us we write about 100 individual—truly individual—programs. We also put together every piece of equipment you might see on SAB’s Instagram. Because that’s what we do: we make sure the work is done right the first time.

3.) I am the strength coach at New York City Ballet, for which I write about 40 individualized programs. I coach groups of professional dancers simultaneously. I piloted that program in Spring 2025 with 16 dancers, and it’s more than doubled in size in a year. I don’t know of a dance company in the world doing it the way that we’re doing it there. I wish more people knew about it. It’s part meathead ish and part pre-hab, all at the same time, and all crafted for the individual.

Between the two of us, my expertise is more along the lines of “lift more, jump higher, move athletically,” and Susan’s is “if you have persistent aches and pains, lemme get you back to moving the way you need to move.” Our skill sets are perfectly complementary, but because those skill sets overlap, and because we share a programming philosophy, we can share clients/dancers and make sure their work is seamless.

We’re heading into the part of the year when we’re essentially working three full-time jobs. I share all of this not to brag, but to say, we’re incredibly proud of our work and the dedication with which we go about it.

“What did we do in August” people in New York ask.

We worked.

I think about this constantly. In the face of the quantitative data showing in no uncertain terms that women are punishe...
09/01/2026

I think about this constantly. In the face of the quantitative data showing in no uncertain terms that women are punished for existing in larger bodies, how can I make a compelling argument for focusing on strength in a way that reaches people? I’m not sure I’m there yet. But this is an attempt.

Getting strong changes lives, and it’s accessible to everyone, in every body. I think that’s important and worth yelling from every rooftop.

There’s a lot that I glean from my initial conversations with people. And the clearest tell that someone is chasing a fe...
08/25/2026

There’s a lot that I glean from my initial conversations with people. And the clearest tell that someone is chasing a feeling rather than an adaptation is that they try to dictate what their training should look like. It’s the guy who wants to put on mass who tries to tell me that they need heavy back squats (maybe they do maybe they don’t). It’s the person who has conflated being lean with being strong, so they tell me they want to get stronger but want to do a ton of supersets (sometimes supersets are helpful, sometimes they’re not).

The point is, if you’re reading this post, what I encourage you to do is think about whether you’re chasing a feeling while you’re working out, or whether you’re chasing the adaptations that come from several weeks of intentional training and programming. Knowing the difference between these things can be the difference between achieving your goals or not.

The clients I’ve worked with who trust and commit to a process are most often the people who like the way they feel after they’ve achieved their actual physical goals. They feel strong because they are strong. They feel athletic because they are athletic.

08/21/2026

Courtney has been training with PTF Dayton strength coach and exercise physiologist Christina Machi for a while now, and Christina shared these videos with me of a recent session.

Training relationships, at their very best, are partnerships, and so when we see a partnership like this we know there is mutual trust, there is both questioning and listening, and as you can see, there is the reciprocal hard work that makes progress possible.

Courtney was diagnosed with MS in October 2007, and reached out to us to help her stay strong. (This is all shared with permission). And the thing I want to point out here is how utterly familiar this training should look to you. A landmine press and a cable single arm row, executed with precision and focus.

Just like a young high school athlete.

Just like a professional dancer.

If training relationships at their best are relationships, then strength and conditioning itself at its best is universally applicable. It is for everybody, and every body.

Courtney and Christina are killing it—together. No AI necessary.

With this change and prescription and my now ubiquitous readers, my transition to Strength Coach™️ is now complete.Upon ...
08/11/2026

With this change and prescription and my now ubiquitous readers, my transition to Strength Coach™️ is now complete.

Upon entering the training studios, every client and dancer shall dry scoop protein and drink a gallon of milk.

It’s a gorgeous day here in New York. I’m underslept and underfed, but it’s a gorgeous day here in New York.
07/20/2026

It’s a gorgeous day here in New York. I’m underslept and underfed, but it’s a gorgeous day here in New York.

We’ve been training dancers for many years now, and one of the things that comes up often is having to re-teach dancers ...
05/24/2026

We’ve been training dancers for many years now, and one of the things that comes up often is having to re-teach dancers how breathe. They walk into gym spaces having been taught patterns that not only don’t serve them, but very often cause the very problems (back pain) those patterns were meant to prevent.

So it ends up looking like this.

1.) Dancers are taught breathing patterns that don’t match up with the physiology or biomechanics of breathing.

2.) Dancers experience back pain as a result.

3.) Dancers are told their cores are weak, and then do a bunch of exercises supposedly targeting the transverse abdominis.

4.) Dancers’ back pain persists and even increases.

5.) Repeat.

If we can break this pattern, and I think we can, then I think we can significantly reduce incidents of back pain in dance populations.

In Part III of this series we will discuss how we train the core.

I call this the chaos gauntlet. Dancers jump these ten randomly placed hurdles and then immediately do 10-15 seconds on ...
05/15/2026

I call this the chaos gauntlet. Dancers jump these ten randomly placed hurdles and then immediately do 10-15 seconds on the CrossFit-style bike (in this case, the Rogue Echo), completing 3-10 rounds without rest.

Why the chaos (hurdles of different size)? — I want their brains to have to navigate a “puzzle” under the stress of fatigue.

Why combine cardio with the hurdles? — I want them to have to organize their bodies and maintain good jumping/landing mechanics while tired.

Why do this at all? — This is a way of being sport- or dance-specific without the activity looking exactly like dance. It’s a safe “laboratory” way of introducing difficulty without putting dancers into real danger. We chase cardiovascular, connective tissue, muscular system, and nervous system adaptations that will translate into (hopefully) a less scary time onstage.

Another way of putting it is that we want to chase the adaptations in a controlled environment such that the inevitable chaos of the stage can be handled no matter what comes up.

I talked a few posts sho about the values of dependability and urgency.Urgency might seem at odds with this post, so I w...
05/07/2026

I talked a few posts sho about the values of dependability and urgency.

Urgency might seem at odds with this post, so I wanna explain.

Urgency is different from reactivity. Urgency means we take ourselves seriously every single day with the tenderness to know that taking ourselves seriously doesn’t mean that we are perfect every single day.

It means we commit to a process. And when we fall short from our process, we take ourselves seriously enough not to judge that falling short but to analyze. I think we often confuse self-flagellation with self-improvement.

When we do this. When we commit to taking ourselves and our bodies seriously, slowly but inexorably over time we learn about ourselves. What works. What doesn’t work. And the urgency is in committing to THAT every day. Not perfection.

Because you know life will hand out behind whoopings when we least expect it. When that happens—none of us can escape that—the urgency we had during calmer times will be there for us.

It won’t save us from the turmoil—I mean look around right more!—but it can help us create a bridge from survival to wonder again when the time is right.

Address

222 East 6th Street
Dayton, OH
45402

Opening Hours

Monday 7am - 7pm
Tuesday 7am - 7pm
Wednesday 7am - 7pm
Thursday 7am - 7pm
Friday 7am - 7pm

Telephone

+19373967073

Website

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