BODY POSITIVE, TRAUMA SENSITIVE, STRENGTH BASED, PERSONAL TRAINING
Meet Our Coaches
Lily Richeson (she/they) is a certified personal trainer and owner of Pressing on Fitness. She believes that movement based routines and rituals can help heal. Lily creates supportive, non-judgmental relationships with her clients. She encourages others to practice love and compassion for themselves and their bodies, while simultaneously helping them achieve their goals.
Lily has been in the gym since adolescence, but not always for positive reasons. For years of her life she was impacted poor self-image surrounding weight and struggled with disordered eating. It wasn’t until she first discovered the power of lifting weights for strength, and the ability of the bike to give you an escape, that exercise could be fun and rewarding in a variety of ways. Movement became her passion and an outlet to overcome aspects of anxiety and depression.
Practicing and competing in powerlifting, and in various cycling divisions has been a transformative experience for Lily. She loves to be active and engage with nature as much as possible through a variety of activities, and encourages clients to explore and connect to their bodies while connecting with the rich environment around them as a way to feel empowered. She believes that movement in the body can help restore a possible lost sense of resilience and help reopen the window of tolerance for nervous system activation for those who have experienced trauma.
Click here to contact Lily today for a free consultation!
Certifications
NASM CPT
Movement for Trauma Level 1 with Jane Clapp
Movement and Mobility 101 with Dr. Kelly Starrett
Kabuki Movement Fundamentals
NASM Certified Nutrition Coach
Hans Krieder (he/they)
Hans is inquisitive, compassionate, and enthusiastic about holistic modalities of healing and thriving. Their practice focuses on reconditioning, building, and maintaining their client’s strength, mobility, and cardiovascular health and wellness.
In the studio environment, Hans strives to help his clients develop confidence and self-efficacy in their bodies through creating a sustainable movement practice in accordance with their goals. They value and hope to promote embodiment, the feeling of power, and positive mind-body connections, while encouraging joy along the way.
Hans is a survivor with personal experience navigating gender dysphoria and disordered eating. They believe that the best way out is through and that everybody deserves the dignity of their individual process. He greatly values authenticity and feels genuinely privileged to join people where they are at in their journey.
CLICK HERE TO CONTACT HANS TODAY FOR A FREE CONSULTATION!
NASM Certified Personal Trainer
Maria Stocke (she/her)
Maria has never been a typical athlete. While she has always felt the calling to move her body, as a young person she found herself focused on art, especially music. Attending Tacoma school of the arts in high school there were no sports teams, no gym, no coaches. There wasn't even a mascot. She eventually attended Evergreen at 18 years old, but that didn't bring sports into her life either.
It wasn't until she became a certified yoga instructor in 2018 that she started feeling stronger and more flexible. She began to make the connection that movement is not only a serious hobby but an important way of life that needed to be explored. She knew there was more to learn. As some of her friends began to train as competitive powerlifters, focusing on building strength, she immediately knew that was the direction she wanted to go. She quickly became obsessed with the deadlift, squat, and bench and went on to become a personal trainer in 2019.
Learning and incorporating strength fundamentals into her life changed everything. Maria believes strength and learning compound movements are key to unlocking an important connection with your body. Maria focuses her training style on strength through powerlifting, while supplementing these movements with dumbbell and bodyweight exercises. She continues to incorporate her yoga background to increase mobility and flexibility with her clients.
Maria has recently moved back to Olympia after spending 10 years in the bay area working at various gyms in San Francisco and Oakland. She understands how hard it can be to find the time or motivation to create a workout or movement routine if you haven't been exposed to sports or gym culture. She also understands how intimidating it can be to start, and now looks forward to helping others find their motivations. Years of working with people has led Maria to have a confident and inspiring outlook that she hopes to bring to all her clients.
CLICK HERE TO CONTACT MARIA TODAY FOR A FREE CONSULTATION!
Certifications
NASM Certified Personal Trainer
Certified Yoga Teacher
Matsimela Ajani (HE/HIM) has been in the industry for over 15 years. He is passionate about movement, and is a firm believer that adopting focused physical activity into your daily routine will lead to a greater quality of life.
Matsimela is a multisport athlete; having competed in Football, Track and Field, Cross Country, Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai. He enjoys the unique challenge of training clients of varying experience levels.
He has trained a spectrum of clients, from those recovering from injury to people just stepping into the gym for the first time; from lifelong athletes to the aging community.
Click here to contact Matsimela today for a free consultation!
Certifications
ACSM Certified Personal Trainer
Sivananda Yoga Certified
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Purple Belt
Clayne Hawley’s (he/him) approach to personal training centers around the goals and capacities of individual clients. He believes movement should be empowering, therapeutic, and motivating.
Clayne designs programs drawing from several different traditions, including strength training (with free weights like barbells and kettlebells and/or bodyweight exercises), metabolic conditioning (like High-Intensity Interval Training and circuit training), and embodiment and mobility practices. He believes these tools can contribute to improving how one feels in their body.
The language and culture of the fitness industry can be laden with shame-based ideas and thought patterns that encourage us to feel disconnected from our bodies and ourselves. Yet the demands and design of our daily lives ask that we reinforce habits of holding or moving ourselves in ways that can cause pain and discomfort, leaving us with very few choices if we want to both work toward self-acceptance while expanding our capacity for movement.
Several years ago, Clayne suffered from a lower back injury. Because of this, he thought he wouldn’t be able to continue to train in the ways he had learned to love. He knows very well how discouraging chronic pain can be and how challenging and loaded the process of embodiment can feel. Clayne believes in the power of movement to nurture and regulate our emotional and psychological wellbeing and he incorporates this element into his personal training. Through that journey he has learned that healing happens concurrently with self-discovery, body-awareness, and the careful re-entry into the world of movement.
Click here to contact Clayne today for a free consultation!
Certifications
NASM Certified Personal Trainer
Barbell Medicine Pain and Rehab Level 1
Erica Leshon (she/her) has always felt a connection to movement and the body and began exploring the boundaries of her tissues early on.
All too young, Erica learned that if you did not have a “dancer’s body” or a “gymnast’s build”, you were never going to “make it” and you weren’t worth a coaches/instructors time.
While it took many years, she was able to reconnect with her strength and movement on her own terms in her own ways. Erica became passionate about helping others create a safer and stronger home in their bodies in 2016 when she became a BASI trained Pilates teacher.
Over the course of her teaching, the value of truly understanding the body from an anatomical and physiological sense became clear, and she decided to expand her education. Now as a licensed Physical Therapist Assistant, Erica is competent with treating injuries and training with illness.
Erica’s philosophy around training is first building a healthy postural foundation and adding on from there. She includes strength training, endurance training, joint mobility and muscle extensibility in her sessions. Her combined knowledge of strength training, Pilates, Physical Therapy and Yoga offers a wide variety of options and a holistic approach to whatever your goals may be.
Erica wants you to feel confident and comfortable in your body by being kind and compassionate with yourself. She wants to support and guide you through that journey.
Click here to contact Erica today for a free consultation!
Certifications
Licensed Physical Therapy Assistant
Graduate of Body Arts and Sciences Institute