About Camryn.
Personal Trainer, Health Coach, and the Story Behind the Studio
ACE-Certified Personal Trainer. Master Certified Health Coach. Lifelong yogi. San Diego native. Coaching women 35–65 to build the kind of strength, vitality, and confidence that holds up to whatever life delivers next.
How I Got Here
I grew up in San Diego, and like a lot of San Diego kids I was always moving. Hip hop and modern dance through middle and high school. Hot yoga in college. Reformer Pilates, strength and conditioning classes, cardio circuits, hikes, beach walks, the kind of casual athleticism that comes naturally when you live somewhere people work out year-round.
Then I went to Boston University, earned a degree in Hospitality Administration, and headed off to what I now affectionately call my I-need-to-prove-myself-as-an-adult career. Human Resources. New York, then Los Angeles, then Santa Barbara. Big buildings, big jobs, big calendars. On paper, the trajectory was right - promotions, paychecks, the kind of credentials that make holiday-card updates easy. In practice, I was burnt out, sedentary, and quietly losing the relationship with my body that had defined the first 25 years of my life.
By the time I came home to San Diego, the gap between who I was on paper and who I felt like in my body was enormous. So I did the thing you’re supposed to think about for a long time and instead just did it: I enrolled in an intensive yoga teacher training. I had no business plan, no five-year roadmap, no exit strategy from HR. I just knew, with the kind of certainty that doesn’t come from spreadsheets, that this was where I needed to start over.
Why Strength Training Became the Center of the Work
Yoga taught me something about my body that no fitness class ever had: the capacity to move with awareness. To feel breath shape posture, posture shape strength, strength shape presence. After two years of teaching yoga and slowly rebuilding my own physical practice, I committed to consistent strength training for the first time in my life and the change wasn’t just physical.
My body transformed in ways I had only ever vaguely imagined. I felt my emotional and spiritual fitness expand alongside the physical. I slept better. I thought more clearly. The chronic anxiety that had hummed underneath the HR years quieted. I felt strong in a way that wasn’t about how I looked but about what I knew my body could do.
That’s when the path forward became obvious. I earned my ACE Personal Trainer certification in 2023. I added the Master Certified Health Coach credential in 2025. And I built Camryn Elyse Fitness around the integration that had changed me - strength training informed by yoga, structured by science, paired with nutrition and lifestyle work, delivered to the women who most need it and most often go without it.
If you want to see how this philosophy translates into the actual day-to-day work, the Camryn Elyse Fitness homepage walks through the four pillars of the coaching and the formats clients can choose from.
Who I Coach and Why
My clients are women between 35 and 65 - professionals, mothers, business owners, women in transition, women navigating the physical changes of midlife. They come to me because something has shifted: the workouts that worked at 30 stop working at 45, recovery slows, energy fluctuates, and the mirror starts to feel like a stranger.
This is the demographic the fitness industry has historically failed most thoroughly. Women in midlife have been sold restrictive diets, gimmick programs, and toning-and-shaping protocols for decades. The result has been a generation of women who are simultaneously underfed and undermuscled, exhausted and apologetic, convinced their bodies are the problem when the actual problem is that no one ever taught them how their bodies actually work.
My job is to teach them. Strength training, structured and progressive. Nutrition, evidence-based and sustainable. Lifestyle and habit work, because none of the rest holds without it. The coaching is honest, demanding, and respectful of the lives my clients are actually living. It’s not boot camp. It’s not therapy. It’s the work of building a body and a relationship with your body that holds up to the next forty years.
Credentials and Continuing Education
ACE-Certified Personal Trainer
Earned September 2023. The American Council on Exercise is one of the most respected personal training certifications in the United States, with rigorous standards for exercise science, programming, and behavior change methodology. I maintain my certification through ongoing continuing education.
Master Certified Health Coach
Earned March 2025. The most rigorous tier of health coach certification, grounded in evidence-based behavior change methodology rather than wellness-influencer pseudoscience.
This is the credential that supports the nutrition and lifestyle coaching work, the framework for understanding how habits actually change and how lasting behavior shifts get built.
What Camryn Elyse Fitness Stands For
Fitness
Cultivate mental and physical strength through structured, organized, personalized training that respects the whole body: muscle, bone, joint, breath, mind. Strength training isn’t about beating your body into submission. It’s about meeting your body where it is and progressing it forward, deliberately and durably.
Fortify
Support your body with nutrition that fuels what you’re asking it to do. Adequate protein, sufficient calories, real food, sustainable habits. The training doesn’t work if the food doesn’t back it up, and most of the women I work with arrive having been undereating for decades. Fortifying is the un-glamorous, deeply important work of feeding yourself like your body matters, because it does.
Flourish
Achieve a state of overall well-being where physical strength, optimal nutrition, mental clarity, and renewed confidence merge into something that feels less like a fitness program and more like a way of inhabiting your own life. The flourishing is the point. The fitness and the food are how we get there.
What Makes My Approach Different
There are good personal trainers and good health coaches in San Diego. I don’t pretend the field is empty. What I do think is rare and what consistently shows up as the differentiator in feedback from my clients is the integration of three things that rarely live in the same person:
Strength Training That’s Also Mind-Body Work
Most strength coaches treat the body as a machine to be loaded and progressed. Most yoga teachers treat the body as something to be felt and understood.
I treat the body as both because it is. Every lift gets coached for both bar path and breath, both bracing pattern and presence. The result is strength that feels embodied rather than imposed, and a relationship with your own body that actually deepens as you get stronger.
Nutrition Coaching Inside the Same Coaching Relationship
Most fitness coaches don’t coach nutrition. Most nutrition coaches don’t coach training. The integration matters.
When the same coach is watching the food logs and the lift numbers, the protein intake and the recovery quality, adjustments happen faster and the work compounds more reliably. Camryn Elyse Fitness was built around this integration on purpose.
Honest Scope of Practice
I am a personal trainer and health coach, not a Registered Dietitian or a licensed therapist. I work with healthy adults pursuing strength, nutrition, and lifestyle goals - not clinical conditions.
If a client’s situation calls for clinical care outside my scope, I refer out. That clarity protects clients, keeps the coaching honest, and lets me do the work I actually do well rather than the work I’d need different credentials to do.
Where the Work Happens
The studio sits at 4030B Sports Arena Blvd in San Diego’s Midway district, minutes from Point Loma, Ocean Beach, Mission Hills, Bay Park, and Mission Valley, with clients also driving in from Hillcrest, Bankers Hill, Balboa Park, North Park, Mission Beach, Pacific Beach, Little Italy, and Downtown.
I chose the location deliberately. The Midway area is geographically central to the neighborhoods where most of my ideal clients live and work, parking is straightforward, and the studio space itself is set up specifically for the kind of strength training I coach - racks, barbells, kettlebells, real equipment for real lifting rather than the aesthetic-first equipment of most boutique studios.
For clients outside San Diego or with travel-heavy schedules, the same coaching philosophy is delivered through online programming fully customized, weekly form review, monthly Zoom check-ins. The format changes. The work doesn’t.
What Clients Say
When I’m Not Coaching
I still practice yoga most mornings. I still lift four to five times a week, because I won’t coach my clients to do something I’m not doing myself. I read more research papers than is probably healthy, take continuing education courses I find genuinely interesting, and spend a lot of time outside hiking the Torrey Pines trails, walking Sunset Cliffs, pretending the Pacific Ocean is the entire reason I came back to San Diego in my late twenties.
I believe in unhurried mornings, sufficient sleep, weighted training as a form of meditation, the value of doing hard things on purpose, and the surprisingly underrated joy of a slow Sunday.
How to Start Working Together
Every coaching relationship at Camryn Elyse Fitness starts with the same thing: a free 20-minute phone call. No pitch, no pressure, no payment information collected. Just a conversation about what you’re looking for, what’s worked and hasn’t worked before, and whether the way I coach is the right fit for what you need.
If it is, we’ll talk through the format that makes the most sense. 1:1 in-person training, online coaching, small group classes, or some combination, and figure out a starting point. If it’s not, I’ll tell you, and where I can, I’ll point you toward someone who is.