You’ve probably landed on this page because you’re curious what this crazy ginger, personal trainer is all about, right? ?
Well, this is me in a few bullet points:
And I’m trying to help everyday people in two ways:
That’s the cliff notes.
But if you want to read my full story then keep reading ??
I’ll tell you what I’m all about…
The struggles I’ve had personal training…
The things I’m passionate about it…
And how I’m trying to help everyday people get in the best shape of their life. ?
I started working for a gym in 2008 when I was 18.
My job…working in the kids academy watching kids.
That’s how I got my foot in the door.
I can remember the looks I would get working in the kids academy from the moms. Little did they know, I wanted to be out on the floor doing personal training.
One day the Regional Manager walked into the gym to do an audit and as he poked his head into the kids academy he saw me training all the kids ?
I had the kids doing jumping jacks, wall sits, running wall to wall, and doing all sorts of things.
The regional manager looked at the gym manager and said we need to get this guy out on the gym floor!
I looked at her and smiled.
I finally was going to get out there.
She originally told me I would have to do the kids academy for six months.
Later that week I printed off my personal training certification, handed it to management, and in return they gave me a shirt and a badge that said “Kevin Andres” Personal Trainer.
I was PUMPED!
But I remember asking:
“What do I do now?”
My personal training manager looked at me and said you got your certification, you know what to do…you got this!
Well, 3 months later I was fired for lack of performance.
I didn’t know what to do.
I wanted to help people but I didn’t know how.
So, I would train the one person they gave me to get started and then go play basketball the rest of the day.
When someone would ask for help, I would help them.
What I didn’t realize was that everyone wanted help in some capacity but a lot of people are too timid to ask for help.
After getting fired from being a personal trainer I realized a few things:
I still had this burning fire in me to play basketball.
When I was personal training in 2008 it was probably a job to me. I know now that personal training is way more than a job.
You are more than a trainer to someone. You are a friend, a coach and even a family member. You get really close with the people you work with. At least I do, because I really care (more on that later).
So, for the next few years I tried other things.
My friends told me to give up on being a personal trainer and that I needed to focus on getting one well paying job versus the three I had. Since I was only training 1-2 clients a day I needed other jobs that were hourly to make sure I would could pay my rent, pay for food, and survive.
I was definitely surviving and not thriving. One other thing I forgot to mention, is I was also enrolled in a community college at the time and basically living out of my car.*
*I lived at a friends house but he had parties all the time and I needed to get up early to train my client at 4 am.
Yeah…the one client they gave me was at 4 am. I took anyone I could get.
So, I would sleep in my car in his driveway so I could get enough rest.
I knew that I wanted to help people and that I loved community but I also had to find a way to make money.
Living out of my car in my friends driveway a few nights out of the week wasn’t sustainable.
I had no money.
No place to go (I could always go home of course) but my family had moved to Nashville and I was living in Texas at the time, more on that later.
I called my friend Randy, who is a Navy Seal, and he welcomed me into his home.
He encouraged me to join the military.
I could get benefits, community, and really grow a lot.
So I did.
I enlisted in the Air Force as a TACP – Tactical Air Control Party, which is a special operators job.
Yes, of course, I chose the hardest and most challenging job because it’s who I am.
I enjoy doing things that other people are not willing to do.
I was in incredible shape.
Not that I’m not anymore, but I was on another level.
I was running 5K’s in under 18:00 minutes, I could do over 30 strict pull ups (still can do that by the way), and really was just in incredible shape.
I was ready to take on the challenge not only physically, but mentally.
Well, at the time I had bad credit.
After a year of training with the TACP team…
They let me go.
They wouldn’t give me my top secret which is needed because I was marked as unreliable.
I was in great shape and had never stopped training for basketball so I decided to chase my dream again of playing professional basketball.
I emailed every single agent on the planet. Which is much like how I landed playing basketball in college (that’s another story).
Every one of them.
A few got back to me and asked for film.
I reached out to my college coaches to try and get film but my campus had closed.
Closed.
Yep.
They said all of the files and information had been given to a school I can’t even remember now in North Carolina.
So I started putting together film of me training.
A few invited me to basketball camps to try out. Some were in Barcelona.
I was able to create a “highlight reel” (that I can’t find now) and send it out to other scouts and teams.
I was doing basketball training 4-5 hours a day.
I got my call a few weeks later.
A try out for a basketball team in Austin, Texas.
The Austin Boom. A new team a part of the American Basketball Association the ABA.
A few months later, I was playing in my first professional basketball game.
I was so happy.
I had reached a dream of mind.
Something I knew I was capable of.
Ever hear of “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”
I always told myself I had both, and that nobody would work harder than me.
Especially when it came to skill work, conditioning and effort.
I couldn’t help my height ? which is why I always put a large emphasis on strength training. I didn’t want to be getting pushed around on the basketball court.
To keep a long story short, and how this all relates to my personal training, the turning point is now.
In the middle of the season we had a big game, sponsors coming out and a bunch of support (we were new to the ABA) and trying to get funding to help the team grow.
The game was a nightmare.
Our team was not acting like professionals. Coach had picked up some new. guys last minute to get more talent for our big game and that lead to a lot of problems.
Guys who had been busting their butt were upset and screwed with the chemistry of the team. But we got over it.
What we couldn’t recover from was the unprofessionalism on game day and the fights that broke out.
The sponsors wanted nothing to do with us and we lost the team shortly after.
I went back to personal training.
None of my friends were encouraging.
They said you tried this last time and you failed.
Go get a real job.
This time it was different.
I had a leader, a professional, a guy who I could look up to and still do to this day, Chris Ybanez, who now has his PHD and is a true fitness guru.
I was also surrounded by other professionals like David Zabinski (who nows runs Colossal Strength and was voted one of the top personal trainers in Houston, Texas).
I was motivated.
My personal training took off.
I was having small groups of 10-15 people wanting to train with me everyday.
I was having so much fun training that when the next opportunity to play basketball came around, I decided to stick with personal training.
I spent the next few years climbing the corporate later because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do to “make it” in this world.
I quickly realized that more management roles meant less personal training.
It wasn’t for me.
I really loved the relationships I got to build with people, and building a community, and I wanted to help more people.
I realized something. Everywhere I went I was able to build a following of people with fitness through personal training I did this in:
I was always inviting people to join our workouts because look, accountability and community is what really helps you make progress.
Over the years of doing personal training. I got to meet so many people and training just isn’t in everyone’s budget. But I wanted to help those people too.
It got me thinking.
How can I help these people too?
So, I started to hand out binders.
Binders that had a 30 day plan to follow and they could reach out to me anytime they had questions.
A lot of people didn’t understand what most of it meant.
As a personal trainer I know how important progression overload and variety is, so when I would give people these binders I would give them the exact material that we would follow if we worked together.
At the time, it made a lot of sense.
I was trying to help them by giving them my resources and workout plan.
Since most people weren’t familiar with a lot of the exercises, I decided to start making video tutorials on our K Squared Fitness Youtube channel.
We now have 1,000 videos covering a variety of different things:
And anything else you want to see. Be sure to subscribe and comment with what you would like to see as well!
I can’t do anything 50%, you know, so I spent 3 hours a day filming all these exercises for the better part of a year. I couldn’t have done it without my man, Goose, who would show up rain or shine and we would film out of of my garage gym.
But I had a vision.
My vision was to help more people.
I wanted to give everyday people the tools they needed to exercise.
Step 1 – I started giving everyone binders and that didn’t work
Step 2 – Okay, I need to have a video library so everyone can reference something they aren’t familiar with.
I thought, “Boom! This was the answer. Now if people don’t what an exercise is, they will just look it up!”
That’s not quite how it works.
People just want to be told what to do and not have to think about it.
At least from my experience.
They didn’t want to have to do research on what the exercises were the night before. Some did and then only to find out…
“Dude I can’t do that”
Few would take the time to look at the exercises and only to find out they couldn’t actually do it.
For example:
A Strict Pull Up, V Up, or a DragonFly.
Step 3 – I need to give them the actual progressions to each exercise so they knew the steps to achieve the exercise.
What do you think happened next?
I quickly realized that people were not going to look up every single progression.
I actually got discouraged.
I thought that my workouts were too complicated. The timers, the amrap, the emom, the progressions, nobody knew what any of it meant.
And on top of that…
I didn’t know how to make a website and didn’t have the money to pay to have someone build a site.
Step 4 – Create a website. My first site was born Kevin Andres Fitness.
We will get to how it became K Squared Fitness very soon ?
I had that site for years and never knew how to post workouts online so people could just reference everything there instead of having to haul around the binders.
Years go by and I have my website that doesn’t do anything but have a cool picture on it of me that says I’m a personal trainer.
This is when K Squared Fitness was born
On January 26, 2018 I met the love of my life, Katie. Although we weren’t on a date.
I was a personal trainer and she had a free personal training session with me because she had recently started working at the company that I worked at.
I won’t turn this into a love story but when I first saw her smile, her eyes, I knew that I wanted to get to know her.
Our relationship quickly escalated and as we were getting to know each other she asked me:
” Do you see yourself always being a personal trainer?”
She wanted to know what type of career I was going to have. I told her that I wanted to have an online business that provides workouts and maybe sells clothing. I even said hey, we could call it:
This was honestly less than a week after meeting her. February 2, 2018.
Yeah, I know.
But I will tell you what it did for me personally and my business.
I told this woman that this is what I wanted to do and honestly I had a website and wasn’t really fulfilling what I had set out to do.
Meeting Katie and telling her that is what I wanted, helped me take the next steps.
November 10, 2018. We launched ksquaredfitness.com
I was on a mission to help as many people as possible get into the best shape of their lives and this time I wasn’t going to let anything stop me.
I quickly took Step 5 – Posting workouts online so my clients could access their workouts from anywhere. The next steps would quickly follow after:
Step 6 – Attach video hyperlinks to each exercise so people wouldn’t have to search on youtube for the exercise they could just simply click on it.
Well, I thought it was simple.
It was progress.
Because people were running into the same issues. Although the hyperlinks were helpful by the time they started their workout the next morning they would forget what “Straight leg bottom balance” meant and would have to look it up again.
Katie and I were having a blast getting our company off the ground. We were booking photo shoots, getting K Squared Fitness clothing and trying to build our brand.
The problem was that people were still having trouble following our workouts.
Let’s be honest…
It wasn’t what most people wanted when they worked out.
People like you are busy. They just want to be told what to do. We talked about this earlier.
By the way if you are still reading this, you are awesome and I love that you have taken the time to learn about who we are and how hard we have worked to get to where we are today.
Speaking of…
Just like with workouts, you have to have a plan to execute first.
We mapped out a plan and then it was just about following through with it.
This is where is started…
Creating an online fitness brand is not just a hobby for me. I didn’t buy all of this fitness equipment and have this vision because I like working out a lot.
I could have just joined a gym if that was the case.
But I love helping people and I’m extremely passionate about that.
This is the house that Katie and I moved into after we got married.
Yes, we had to make the garage a part of the vision for filming and things of that nature.
The walls were horrible.
No way we could have this as our background for the videos. There were so many holes in the wall that we actually had to put up wood all around the garage.
My personality wants to get everything done all at once.
Well, it just doesn’t work that way when you are working on something big.
You have to keep showing up.
You have to keep your eyes on the prize.
Sara and Alex showed up to our house, just about everyday, to help us build K Squared Fitness. I can’t thank you both enough.
You guys are so awesome.
This is why I love personal training.
Over the past decade I have created workouts for just about any situation.
As a business owner (even though for fitness) I’m just like you.
I don’t want to have to think about what my workout is going to be.
That’s why I have created multiple different training programs.
We have programs that are just 15 minutes with hardly any equipment needed, which is great for the days you just can’t find the time to slip away, and many others. We will talk more about that later.
Although we have an online fitness business.
Our goal of helping those around us had never changed.
We never wanted to take the “personal” out of personal training.
We created our online platform to be able to help those that were perhaps not local or couldn’t afford personal training.
Our local community continued to grow.
Not only were we growing in our local community and gaining incredible friendships. We were beginning to expand to working with NFL Athletes like Daquan Jones.
DaQuan and Alexis Jones have since become incredible friends of ours… honestly, more like family.
Looking at this photo just makes me smile.
They are such great people.
Alexis has now started her own company Noted which helps online shoppers to never miss a return window again.
DaQuan or “Jones” as I call him has been incredible friend. He has introduced us to other NFL athletes like:
You can see why them and other people in our community have decided to team up with K Squared Fitness by watching below.
Remember these:
Step 1 – I started giving everyone binders with workouts in them.
Step 2 – I created a video library
Step 3 – I created progressions to exercise
Step 4 – I created my first website, but did nothing with it.
Step 5 – I met Katie and that pushed me to get serious about what I wanted to do. We launched K Squared Fitness.
Step 6 – We begin attaching hyperlinks to each exercise online.
Step 7 – Katie and I launched our very own…
We launched our fitness app to make our fitness programs and personal training available to more people at a fraction of the cost.
The app solves all the programs I was trying to fix for my clients.
Workouts to print out? ❌
Losing binders? ❌
Looking up youtube videos to see which exercise to do? ❌
Complicated progressions to each exercise? ❌
Our fitness app is…
“A personal trainer in your pocket”
Workouts on your phone ✅
Videos on screen of what to do so you can just follow along ✅
Exercise too difficult? Simply click easier ✅
Exercise too easy? Click harder ✅
Stopwatch on the screen? ✅
But there are still so many more things I need to learn:
And so many more.
And that’s why I’m trying to help everyday people get back into the swing of things and get in the best shape of their lives.
Health, wellness, and feeling good makes life a bit easier as we take on this world.
I’m offering education, support and workouts in a bunch of different ways.
I post new workouts and exercise education on our Youtube Channel every week.
And as you read, we have an awesome fitness app that acts a personal trainer in your pocket (on your phone) so you can skip all the headaches of trying to figure out what to do every day.
Also…Katie and I are married now, expecting our first baby, and I will spend the rest of my days pouring my love into her and our relationship ❤️ That’s where the K “Squared” comes from ? Kevin & Katie!
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And that’s my story! ?
I hope that gives you an idea of what I’m about, and why we do what we do.
Enough about me.
I would love to get to get to know you a bit better ?
P.S.
Thanks for being awesome ??
