Chris Kalisz worked as a professional wrestler for a dozen years, performing with World Wrestling Entertainment and a series of independent leagues. While his audiences enjoyed his performances, the physicality of his line of work took an acute toll on Kalisz”™s body.
“I started breaking down,” he recalled. “I took some really bad injuries inside of the ring about three years ago.”
Recognizing that his wrestling career was coming to an end, Kalisz wondered how average people would cope with the body pain he was experiencing. “I realized that I couldn”™t move my body the way that I used to,” he said. “And if I couldn”™t do it as an athlete, then I realized that 99 percent of the population are going to experience a lot of issues based on overcompensation, overtraining and under-utilization of specific muscle groups.”
Tapping into his parallel career as a certified fitness trainer and exercise training specialist, Kalisz began experimenting in what he described as “movement patterning and mobility techniques that are designed to help rebalance the body from a breakdown and to help reduce and eliminate the pain they are suffering from.” From these experiments came an enterprise that he launched in 2015 as The Mobility Project, which he conducts from Access Fitness in Norwalk, where he also offers personal training services.
For those coming to The Mobility Project for the first time, Kalisz begins with what he describes as a flexibility dynamic movement assessment. “It would be a muscular activation assessment, figuring out which muscles are active and which are inactive ”“ which could cause issues if muscles are not working correctly,” he said. “Balance, coordination and stability levels are determined at that point in time.”
Kalisz combines personal training, massage therapy and physical therapy exercises with his clients. They typically range in age from 40 to 70 and often come to him as a last stop before surgery after failing to get results from physical therapists, acupuncturists and chiropractors. He stressed there is no one-size-fits-all approach to helping people achieve their goals.
One of the greater challenges Kalisz has faced is persuading people to change their predetermined timelines regarding when they will be relieved of pain.
“The most common mistake that people make is their resistance to the timely manner of maintenance that needs to get done,” he said. “People want to get back into (a regular life) as quickly as possible and may neglect the right approach. They either wind up back in therapy because they break down much quicker than they should or they are just afraid to get back into doing what they want to do, which means they limit themselves to restrict certain movements and patterning because they are afraid of breaking down.”
Kalisz is skeptical about rushing into opioid use for pain reduction.
“As with everything, there is always a time and a place for medication,” he said. “For me, it is up there with surgery ”“ it is more of a last resort type of effort.”
“I look at the body this way: if you are experiencing pain, there is a problem that is causing the pain. What I don”™t like about the pills is that the doctors are going to prescribe because that”™s how they”™re going to get paid. They”™re not going to tell you to try meditation or join a gym ”“ they are going to write a scrip because that is where they are going to get a cut of the commission. The pills are kind of the quick fix that people are looking for in trying to address the symptom of the pain and not really fixing the problem. The problem is still there and people are chasing that feel-good notion of getting rid of pain without getting rid of the problem, and it will always persist.”
Kalisz is expanding The Mobility Project into 90-minute and 2-hour seminars at local CrossFit gyms. He also launched an on-demand video library, called Mobility Project 24/7, offering more than 70 videos of self-corrective techniques that people can do on their own. The video library is available on Vimeo with a $9.99 monthly subscription.
“It is designed to teach people how to prevent their bodies from breaking down, so they don”™t have to go through physical therapy,” he said.
