For those of you who do not know me, my name is Jennifer and I have been director of Lifeline Personal Training for over 21 years.  I provide in-home certified personal fitness training for clients in the midtown and downtown Toronto region, including Forest Hill, Rosedale and my own neighborhood, the Annex.  You may see me biking around the city to see my clients, or running through the streets of the Annex or Forest Hill as I train for half marathons and 10k races. I am an ACE Gold-Certified Medical Exercise Specialist, an AAHFRP-Certified Post Rehabilitation Conditioning Specialist, and an ACE-Certified Personal Trainer.  I also have a Master of Social Work degree and am an Ontario Registered Social Worker.

Over the past 21 years, I have parlayed high-quality personal fitness training, rehabilitation, and social work into a unique practice that meets both my clients' physical and psychological needs.  I find it fascinating to solve the puzzle of how to create pathways for my clients to become healthy - and how to do this with medical problems.  I both help clients use exercise to manage their medical problems, and exercise in spite of their medical problems.

I was very lucky that early on, I had mentors from whom I learned a great deal.  I soaked in the knowledge of everyone I knew or encountered who worked in rehabilitation, from massage therapy to chiropractic, to physiotherapy to medicine, to naturopathy.  I viewed everyone I met in these fields as a repository of knowledge from which I could learn and absorb, in the days before the Google and Wikipedia.

I specialize in certified personal fitness training for people who are new to exercise, returning to exercise, and those with medical problems.   Every program I design, whether addressing low fitness level, overweight, injuries, cancer treatment side effects, arthritis, back problems, knee problems, movement disorders, brain injury, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, autoimmune disorders, and others, is evidence-based and draws from what research has been shown to be safe and effective for specific health problems.  I incorporate comprehensive initial and ongoing assessment, therapeutic and corrective exercise techniques, mental health counseling, as well as taking a close look at what motivates each individual.  The most perfectly designed exercise programs are not useful if my clients are not able to problem solve how to change their lifestyles, and incorporate what I recommend.

In my other life, I have three boys who are ages 13, 12 and 10, a wonderful husband whom I met on a bus in the mountains in Spain in 1998, and an adorable cat named Bentzi.  I am a sub-elite long distance runner who has struggled with many health problems – serious back and neck injuries, asthma, knee problems – of my own over the years.  Having experienced chronic pain, I have tremendous empathy for people who are currently in this situation – and am fascinated with how to enable people who live with chronic pain to adopt a more active lifestyle. Click to read articles I have written!