Trenton Campbell

In 2005, I had a motorcycle accident that tore my knee cap open, broke my wrist in several areas, and delivered a great amount of road rash all over my body. Due to the severe injuries and the extreme frustrations of my limitations, I stopped working out….I gave up. When I came to the realization that not caring about my health/fitness was the worst decision I could have made, I was depressed and almost 25 pounds overweight. The journey back to wellness was going to be difficult due to the nagging issues from the accident. This is where I became so deeply indulged with proper form and technique. One little slip or careless position could set me back months.

I grew up in the mountains of east Tennessee. There’s not much to do there except split wood, farm, play football or wrestle. From a young age I’ve been asked to perform strenuous functional movements. Whether it was moving logs twice my size, move a ton of concrete blocks, wrestle for six minutes, or sprint for a touchdown. I really didn’t understand how or why my body did these demanding movements until later in life. In college, I had become a traditional lifter (i.e. Monday’s chest, Tuesday’s Legs, Wednesday’s arms, etc.). It became about the physical look or seeing how much I could lift, without any regards to form. Even though I was getting bigger and stronger, I lost mobility and started to have more injuries.

For the first time in my life I stopped training like a gym rat and started strengthening my natural movements. I began researching functional movements and studying the science behind why/how our body performs these actions. This is where CrossFit came into my life. I knew about CrossFit, but allowed the people around me to taint my perception of it. What people constantly told me was, “it’s reckless”, “they don’t care about how they do it”, “people get hurt”, or my favorite “CrossFit doesn’t even do pull-ups”. Funny how things work out, the military offered to send me to study CrossFit and learn the theory behind it. Always thirsty for knowledge, I accepted. Once I got past the candy coated shell of CrossFit and started to understand it’s fundamentals, it was eye opening. With the change in my own thoughts of fitness, I realized I was already starting down the path to CrossFit.

After finally regaining my fitness and graduating college, I joined the military. I didn’t want to do just any job in the military, I set my goals to become an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Tech (Military Bomb Squad). The training for this job was probably one of the hardest years of my life, but in the end it was worth every minute. It’s funny how you think you are in shape until asked to perform demanding functional movements under load or stress. My teammates and I quickly learned that we needed to have the ability to quickly move heavy loads over long distances. We had to despise mediocrity and train our bodies way beyond it.

As my CrossFit foundation grew stronger, so did my desire and passion to teach others the benefits of this program. In December 2012, I returned from a deployment with a need to open CrossFit Ballwin. The ultimate goal in mind was to create a CrossFit gym that was the catalyst or guide to a lifestyle change for anyone. My promise to CrossFit Ballwin is to create a fitness community or environment that is peer accountable, motivating, directive, safe and educational. If any CrossFit Ballwin client has a desire to reach a goal, then it is my goal to exceed their expectation in helping them obtain it!