About me

Hi, I'm Jeff

Jeff Shaverian · Phan Công Bình · Fitness Trainer and Physical Therapist in Da Nang

I help people get stronger, build muscle and lose fat without getting hurt. I do it by fixing how you move first, then loading it properly.

Where it started

The calf and the bull

Milo of Croton was a wrestler in ancient Greece. The legend says he lifted a newborn calf onto his shoulders every day, and kept lifting it as it grew, until he was carrying a full-grown bull. It is the oldest story about getting stronger, and most of the fitness world stops there: add a little weight, every day, forever.

I met Milo again while I was a student physical therapist at SSM Health, in Rebuilding Milo by Dr. Aaron Horschig and Dr. Kevin Sonthana. Dr. Horschig, the physical therapist behind Squat University, asks the question the legend skips: what happens when the person carrying the bull starts to break down?

Reading it while I was learning to treat real patients changed how I saw strength. The people who broke down were rarely weak. They had added weight, session after session, on top of a movement that was slightly off. The load grew, and the fault grew with it.

What I learned

A squat is a movement first, an exercise second

Before a squat is a leg exercise, it is something your whole body has to organize. Ankles, knees and hips bend together, your trunk stays steady over your feet, and your left and right sides share the load.

To squat symmetrically, three things have to work in harmony:

When one piece is missing, your body still finds a way down. It shifts weight to the stronger side, lets a knee drift in, or tucks the pelvis. At body weight you hardly notice. Add 100 kg and repeat it a few thousand times, and the shortcut becomes the injury.

Always learning

A disciple of experience

How Leonardo da Vinci described himself in his notebooks.

Leonardo da Vinci had little formal schooling and called himself a man without letters. He taught himself anatomy by dissecting and drawing the body, and his notebooks are full of muscles, joints and how they move. Nobody handed him that knowledge. He went and got it.

That is how I treat my own learning. School and SSM gave me a foundation and my first real patients. But the most up-to-date knowledge does not live in a classroom. It lives in this year's research, in the clinicians and coaches who test their ideas, and in what I see on the gym floor every day.

So I keep reading, keep testing, and change how I coach when the evidence changes. You get today's science, not what was taught ten years ago.