Katie McKowen has been a coach at Wellness Elite Fitness since the facility opened. She holds NSCA-CSCS and FRC certifications, trained as a collegiate rower at Rice, and writes most of the member programming the strength floor runs week to week. She sat for this conversation in the coach’s office on a Tuesday afternoon in January, between a 7 a.m. member and a 2 p.m. assessment. The following is edited for length. Her voice has not been smoothed.
A member gets an evidence-based plan. It lands on your desk. What happens next?
I read it twice. The first time for what the physician is saying out loud — the training targets, the restrictions, the modalities he wants in the week. The second time for what he is saying quietly — which lab is he worried about, which direction is he trying to nudge the body, what did he leave out that I should ask him about. The second read is usually where the week actually gets written. If I only did the first read, I would be a technician. The second read is the craft.
Members interact with Atlas — the AI concierge — between sessions. How does that change the job?
It makes my job more coherent. Atlas knows what I wrote for the member this week, what the physician said last month, what the member’s sleep looked like last night. When the member asks Atlas a question on a Wednesday, the answer is consistent with what they heard from me on Monday and what they will hear from the physician next month. That consistency is a big part of why a member gets better faster here than at the generic gym. There is no drift between the people advising them. Atlas is a voice, and the voice is ours.
What does a typical week look like for a forty-five-year-old member new to evidence-based training?
Three lifts. Two Zone 2 cardio sessions of forty-five minutes each. One recovery touchpoint — usually sauna or cold plunge. One full rest day that is not a rest day, meaning walk the dog, go to church, cook dinner, do not hit the gym. That is it. The common mistake is to add a fourth lift or a fifth cardio. The body is not a billing clock; it does not compound through overbooking. Compounding happens when the stimulus is right and the recovery is sufficient. If I have to move a variable, I move sleep first, not training.
You train on Panatta, Atlantis, and Watson. How does that shape how you write a session?
It shapes it a lot. Panatta hack squat, for example, has a pad geometry that lets me load a member with cranky knees into a deep range they cannot access with a barbell. The Atlantis chest supported rows stabilize the scapula in a way that is easier to coach. Watson deadlift bars have a knurl that grips a sweaty palm and a spin that is honest in a pull. I can coach a cleaner pattern on these machines than I can on most commercial equipment, and the member feels the difference in their spine the next morning. The equipment is not decorative. It is load-bearing. It is why some of our members with old injuries train pain-free for the first time in a decade.
What is the most common pattern break you coach?
Breath. Members come in holding the breath at the bottom of every lift. The rib cage elevates, the diaphragm cannot descend, the intra-abdominal pressure is a stress response rather than a stabilization. I coach breath first, load second. Most members add about eight to ten percent to their working weight in a month just by fixing the breath. That is not a personal-training trick. It is biomechanics. The coach whose sessions live on volume instead of precision is leaving that eight to ten percent on the table every session.
The body is not a billing clock. It does not compound through overbooking.
Katie McKowen · on writing a member’s week
What do you see members improve at fastest, and what is slower?
Fastest: posture, breath, the way they move through a doorway. Those change in the first three weeks and they change the photograph of a person before anything else does. Slower: body composition. Real composition changes show up at four to six months, not at four weeks. Members who come in with a four-week expectation from a commercial transformation program are often surprised that the scale does not move quickly here. What moves quickly is how they feel in their clothes, how they carry a grocery bag, how they sleep. Those are the actual outcomes. The scale is downstream of all of them.
How do you coach differently for a member in their sixties versus a member in their thirties?
The load and the tempo change. The movement patterns do not. A sixty-year-old still needs to squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, rotate, and brace. What changes is how much and how fast. I warm up longer. I load lighter for longer before I add a plate. I leave more days between heavy sessions. I take connective-tissue tolerance more seriously than muscle tolerance. A thirty-year-old can abuse their tendons and get away with it for two weeks. A sixty-year-old cannot. That is not fragility, that is tissue biology. Coach to the biology, not to the idea of the person.
What do you wish more members understood about recovery?
That it is not optional. A member who lifts well and recovers poorly is a member who plateaus. I write the recovery into the week the way I write the lifts into the week. The sauna on Thursday is not a perk. It is programming. The sleep on Sunday night is not a suggestion. It is programming. The difference between a member who gets results here and a member who does not is almost never the session. It is the seventy-two hours between sessions. That is where the adaptation happens.
Last one. What keeps you sharp as a coach?
The members. I learn something new every week from a member who is an expert in something I am not. A lawyer taught me how to read a contract last month. A cardiologist taught me something about exercise tolerance at altitude that I had wrong. The coach who thinks the expertise only flows one way is going to be a worse coach five years from now than five years ago. The relationship is the medicine. The coaching is the easy part once the relationship is right.
— Katie McKowen is a licensed staff coach at Wellness Elite Fitness. She programs training for members; physician-supervised lab review is available to members through Elite Aesthetic MD, the independent practice located inside WEF. This conversation is informational; it is not medical advice.