By Dan Potts

My work in and around the fitness industry began in the early 1970s through education, certifications, and studies that involved and exposed the emerging change in American culture, and the desire for more information about the health of our country. The joke back in those days was regarding how to get America into shape was: Are Americans over- or under-informed regarding their knowledge of fitness, diet and movement? And that question remains the elephant in the room to this day.

However, in those days, as I traveled regularly to the Cooper Institute in Dallas, Texas for more education and knowledge about this subject, I was acutely aware that the onus for Americans changing was eventually going to land in our individual laps, so to speak. And, for a long, long, long while, it did — and boy, what a beautiful feeling it was to be part of something that you knew was benefiting so many. We literally had a ball being part of that new information source that was drenching the country.

I was selling equipment at the time with my dear friend Leo Rubstello at our downtown Seattle store at the corner of 5th and Virginia. We literally had every manufacturer of exercise equipment in America at our disposal and were the national distributor of most of them, selling hundreds of thousands of pounds of weights every month, and leading everyone in the country in exercise bike and treadmill sales. We were getting America healthy, and I was absorbing everything in resistance, cardio training and diet that I could. That high lasted into the late ’80s, as we transitioned into the cosmetic training of competitive bodybuilding and everyone knew of a name that they would never forget: “ARNOLD” We jumped toward the new axiom of fitness — big muscles — and trudged on, leaving the “weak” ones behind.

My career began to change in that I started working with competitive people — the U.S. Olympic Team, the University of Washington national champion football team (many of whom I see on regular basis still to this day), professional golfers, and eventually moving into my true passion — elite baseball athletes at the high school, college and professional levels.

Through this transition in career and focus, however, I was able to see long before even the health leaders of America did, that we as a country were heading into a veritable health pit of gloom and doom that was based not on lack of information, but rather on our new sedentary lifestyle that has been nudged along the way with the most accessible and damaging nutrition that we have ever seen in America.

While we are concerned with 3-day walks to cure all the scary cancers and diseases that have popped up (we actually are only contributing to the welfare of all the drug companies who are merely managing these diseases), we are literally on the other end (nutrition) killing ourselves, and making it impossible to find the “cures”.

So, at this time, with the help of My Edmonds News , I am attempting to become a knowledgeable, informative and directional force for readers, in the form of the questions and answers surrounding the health and fitness industry, and our state of health as a country and as a community in beautiful Edmonds.

We will cover anything you like — anabolic steroids at the high school level, obesity, Type II diabetes, sports injuries, artificial knees and hips, supplementation, and sources for better health and fitness. So, leave your questions below– no matter how trivial they may seem to you — and we’ll get you some honest, hard-hitting answers.

Long-time Edmonds resident Dan Potts the owner/operator of Advanced Athlete Strength Training, LLC.