Sam Iannetta
My name is Sam Iannetta. I grew up an exceptionally skinny yet perpetually hungry kid. Fortunately, having parents who emigrated from Italy meant there was never a lack of food in my house. At the age of 10, I got fascinated with weightlifting and exercise. I took little jobs for neighbors and a local store and purchased my first weights. A year later, a Police Athletic League opened 3 blocks from my home. I started working out with police officers twice to three times my size. There was a great passion in them because they needed that high level of fitness, their lives depended on it. Inspired by the people around me, I worked out hard and started gaining serious strength. Many officers had injuries, aches and pains. I had a deep desire to help them. I started researching rehabilitation, injury prevention, and biomechanics. I became the “go-to-kid” for problems with their bodies. I had no idea it would become my life’s work. Currently with over 44,000 hours of one-on-one personal training and over 3,000 hours of group instruction of children to seniors, I am considered by some to be one of the most experienced personal trainers in the United States.
In 1992, I started creating a system of analysis of human movement that incorporated my years of knowledge and experience but I added one more crucial element, Common Sense. I found out some time later it was not so common. In 2002, I opened a fitness center in Boulder, Colorado called Sam Iannetta’s Functional Fitness and Wellness Center and trained others in my system. The trainers stated, “It was like having a new set of eyes”. They could see problems in clients’ movement long before an injury occurred. We train 700-1000+ sessions a month in a 2800 square foot facility. Denver, Colorado is always among the top 10 fittest cities in the U.S. and Boulder makes Denver look lazy. In 2008, I founded the concept of Fitness Longevity™ which is my system of fitness based not on how fit someone can be, but…how long they want to stay fit.
Here I was in what people called an incredibly fit city, yet clients came in with injuries, pain and premature wear and tear. In 1995, I created the concept of the S.P.O.R.T. Paradigm© standing for Specific Performance of Repetitive Trauma. This is the paradigm that we all grew up in learning Sports Education in our Physical Education system. P.E. wasn’t physical education; it was S.E. or sports education teaching little or nothing about your physical body. My clients realized that in committing to playing any sport or sport like activity, they were signing an unwritten contract, “I am willing to sacrifice my body for my sport”. I coined the concept of the Fitness Longevity Paradigm© as a replacement for our current SPORT Paradigm©. Let me help install the idea that maintaining fitness should be for life. This is Fitness Longevity™. Find out more www.functionalfitnessusa.com, www.livingfunctional.com or email [email protected] Phone: 303-440-1440.