A San Francisco-based member is sailing and cycling with ease thanks to his training with an Equinox COACH.
Forged at Equinox is a series highlighting an Equinox member’s foray into a new workout regimen, with help from an expert coach. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Once Carlos Sosa hit college, his activity levels came pretty close to a standstill. He’d played varsity football in high school and practiced martial arts throughout his youth and, after earning his degree, tried getting back into a movement routine. He joined Equinox Van Mission in San Francisco, but nothing was sticking.
“I noticed I needed to exercise and ultimately lose weight so that I could have better movement,” he explains. A few months of exercising solo with little success “led me to seeking help and working with Dennis,” he says.
Dennis Torres, a COACH + at the Club,, had a few key goals for Carlos: Learn how to properly breathe and brace the core, open the chest, correct posture, and perform movement patterns without compensation, he says. That meant prioritizing mobility work, much to Carlos’ surprise.
“I thought that [the focus] was going to be mostly weight loss,” Carlos says. “...I was used to lifting weights or just doing pull-ups and stuff like that with bars. And Dennis was like, ‘No, no, we need to focus on movement and form.’ Compared to what I remember from when I was young, I was just doing things before. I was just working through things. And now it feels like I'm actually thinking about my whole body.”
Since the duo first began training together in late November 2022, Carlos has made significant improvements in his strength and mobility. He has gradually progressed from kettlebell squats to landmine squats (programmed to help him stay upright throughout the movement), then onto front squats (as he worked on thoracic mobility), and finally back squats — with tempo work, says Dennis. He’s cut the incline on his elevated push-ups by half. And he’s made strides toward his weight goal, even gaining 20 pounds of lean muscle mass.
Other folks on the Club floor have taken notice of his progress, too: On more than one occasion, another member has walked up to and congratulated Carlos after a round of perfectly performed squats or advanced thoracic mobility drills. “He's gotten really mobile — it's actually really impressive to see,” says Dennis. “There are some people that watch him do certain things, and they're like, ‘Wow, I can't even do that…’ Just to see other people noticing the hard work that he's putting in is really, really cool.”
Here, Carlos and Dennis share how their training has improved life outside the Club, the importance of good cueing, and the value of exercising in a space with members of all backgrounds.
Why was reinforcing core engagement a top priority when you first began training together?
Dennis: “If you don't know how to utilize your core, if you don't know how to engage it and you don't have that awareness, then you start compensating with the rest of your body. We haven't had any low back pain or things of that nature because he's gotten really good about being aware of his core and its bracing. That proximal stiffness that he's creating is creating that distal strength, so he's been able to really master more of these movements because of that. It's so funny to hear him sometimes, like, ‘Yeah, the rest of my body feels great, but my core is dying.’”
Carlos: “I still remember one of the first things he told me was that you want to protect your spine, and that's the thing I'm always thinking about, like, protect your spine [with your core engagement], and you'll [perform] with upright positions and good movements. I always hear from my friends, ‘My lower back hurts,’ and I'm like, ‘Yeah, that shouldn't be the case. That's not right. Your form is probably not good.’”
Dennis: “When Carlos goes on vacations or whatever, he'll coach his friends. The things that he's learning in here, he's starting to use out there and apply that to helping other people, too. The knowledge is traveling.”
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How does your training sync with your activities outside the Club, and what improvements have you seen?
Dennis: “Carlos does his own conditioning outside [of the Club] — he's very active. He hikes, he also has a [sail] boat that they spend time on, and he cycles; he was spending this past weekend on a cycling trip with some friends. He does activities outside that help his cardiovascular aspects. We're primarily focused on making sure that he's able to move and able to have stamina in those activities, feeling more comfortable. The work we're doing here is basically to make those things a little bit more enjoyable and manageable, essentially.”
Carlos: “The more I work with Dennis, the more I notice an improvement in all the other activities. I do dinghy sailing; you hike out a lot of the boat [leaning over the windward side of the boat]. It's a 14-, 15- foot boat. I'm tall and big, so even when I’m feeling the whole force, my core strength definitely helps me go back on the boat, especially when there's a lot of wind.
“And the same goes with cycling. I'm really good at climbing, going uphill, because I have big legs. But coming down, before I was just always trying to recover, always trying to breathe better and get more air in. And now, recovery is really quick. Once I'm back down from the uphill, I can go down faster and not only focus on breathing but I'm actually enjoying going downhill.”
What are some challenges you’ve faced, and how have you overcome them together?
Carlos: “There's always things where I'm feeling myself [too much] and [the form] doesn't click with me. It's not because of Dennis; it’s more, like, there's so much stuff that I'm feeling. Dennis has helped me with calming down, focusing on the form, and putting everything else outside. That has definitely helped. With the focus on the form, I can actually feel what is working more than the other and I can reset and reposition myself. I overcompensate a lot — that's a big challenge for me. But Dennis will catch me or I’ll [now] catch myself.”
Dennis: “A lot of that has to do with good cueing. If he's having trouble with this and he's all over the place, how can we make this simple so that he can really focus on this one thing and not everything else? For example, we were having trouble really engaging [the core] until he learned how to ‘sneeze,’ hold his core a little bit more [with that image]. [It’s finding] the right verbiage to get somebody to be like, ‘Oh, lightbulb, that makes sense.’ The right cueing, along with teaching him to be more in tune with his breathing, really changed how he was able to focus on certain movements.”
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There are individuals at the Club that do incredible things that you wouldn't believe just from looking at them — that's really inspiring.
Although your main goal is weight loss, how are you measuring progress outside of the scale?
Dennis: “When we first started, Carlos was weighing himself, like, every day and was like, ‘Oh, I dropped a pound. Oh, I gained a pound.’ And I'm, like, ‘Look, your body is going to fluctuate. You can't be looking at the scale every day. Take a step back from that. Let's focus on how you're feeling. Do you have more energy throughout the day? We'll see those other changes as they come.’ At the beginning, he was very, very focused on that scale. Him taking a step back from looking at that, I think, really made a big difference. Then, he wasn't checking for that as the only measure of improvement. It was also his performance, and he could start to see how that was changing.”
Carlos: “It was really satisfactory when I actually could do a Bulgarian split squat. That was a lightbulb moment. I couldn't believe it because I felt really big when I used to do them in the beginning. And now, I felt solid, I could do them. Then we increased to handling a ball, staying in the middle, getting lower. Those things encouraged me. We kept on doing more and more, and certain exercises that I couldn't do, now I could do them with a different variant. The fact that we just keep on incrementing and doing different things is really rewarding.”
Dennis: “He's now doing Copenhagen [planks], 10-second holds from his knee, which is solid. Eventually, we're going to try to hold that a little longer or extend from the foot rather than just the knee as he gets more and more comfortable with that position. We're working on pull-ups right now — not full bodyweight, it’s seated pull-ups so he can get that form down. Once he's got that mastered a little bit, we're gonna work toward doing assisted pull-ups; he wants to be able to do a full pull-up…We've got him from push-ups on a 24-inch box down to a 12-inch box, and we'll be down hopefully to the floor soon enough. The sky's the limit as long as it keeps working.”
What do you enjoy most about training in an Equinox Club?
Carlos: “One thing I find really nice about going to the Club is that you see other people and you aspire to be like them. You see individuals with different bodies. At least at our Club, there are people you wouldn't believe can do what they do. It's like what they say: Surround yourself around the people who you want to be. It goes back to what Dennis said: Weight doesn’t matter in a sense. What matters is your form and how you move. There are individuals at the Club that do incredible things that you wouldn't believe just from looking at them — that's really inspiring.”
Photos By Tylor Uberoi Norwood