Meet Personal Trainer Amanda Radich

Tahoe Fitness Loft personal trainer Amanda Radich

Personal training is one of our core offerings at Tahoe Fitness Loft, and we’re excited to share more about the incredible people who are here to help you meet your health and fitness goals. 

This month, meet Amanda Radich. Amanda has been working as a trainer for the past decade and joined the TFL team just over three years ago. She offers one-on-one training, with a focus on functional training, strength, and movement, and she often works with people experiencing chronic pain and navigating injury. 

Amanda is a lifelong athlete who played soccer during her collegiate years—she was a goal keeper—and she wanted a way to continue her athletic life after graduation. 

Sports had always been such a strong driver in her life, but without a team and the structure of college sports, she wasn’t sure what else could fill that space. Amanda didn't find a career path that incorporated her love of being an athlete right away. She worked in the corporate world for a time. But it wasn’t really what she wanted to be doing. 

Personal training, she discovered, was an excellent fit. 

Life of a Personal Trainer: Amanda’s Approach

Amanda found her passion in sharing her love of movement and wellness with others, helping them discover and nurture their own athletic identity. 

“I want everyone to know that they actually are an athlete,” says Amanda. “We’re so much more capable than we tend to give ourselves credit for.” 

Amanda is quick to add that being an athlete can mean many things: from skiing, hiking, and mountain biking, to shoveling snow and walking. Being athletic is about moving your body, whatever form that takes. 

Amanda’s aim is to make sure that the people she works with are ready for and capable of living the life they want to live—strong, healthy, and capable. 

This is why the backbone of her work is functional movement. Amanda focuses on seven fundamental movement patterns that are at the core of everyday activities—pushing, pulling, squatting, lunging, and the like—and concentrates on strength, mobility, and stability. 

“I see my clients being more resilient in their day-to-day living,” Amanda says. She notes that her clients tell her about how the work in the gym translates to making daily tasks easier: whether it's putting on their shoes, carrying groceries, or not falling after encountering a tripping hazard—or performing better in their chosen sports. Amanda also works with competitive athletes of all levels. 

Working With Clients

New clients go through a thorough screening, to establish where they are at and create a starting point. A priority for Amanda is ensuring that clients start with what they can do without causing pain. She says that a common issue she hears about from people working on their own is that they believe being in pain is part of the process of getting fitter and more healthy: the “no pain, no gain” theory lives on, despite how damaging it typically is. 

Amanda is quick to show her clients that the process of achieving strength, mobility, and wellness shouldn’t be painful. Sometimes challenging and occasionally uncomfortable, perhaps. But pain doesn’t need to be part of a successful path to health.  

Amanda works with clients of all ages, from preteens to adults in their 80s, and people come to her with a wide variety of needs, goals, and challenges. Because many people she works with are experiencing ongoing pain, she says it’s very common to see people with lower back issues and also shoulder trouble. Working through a process of trial and error to be able to address each person's specific needs, she helps people get on a path to wellness.

While every health journey is unique, Amanda says that consistent effort does pay off. She’s seen clients work through difficult, painful, chronic circumstances, and arrive to a point of moving better, greatly alleviating and even becoming totally free of pain, and feeling stronger and more confident in their abilities. Again she emphasizes how important it is for people to gain an understanding of how capable their bodies really are.

Keeping it Fun, Adjusting to the Day

Throughout the process, Amanda focuses on “keeping it fun,” she says. “I want people to feel good.” 

So that’s a regular theme: keeping things fun and focusing on feeling good. To that end, Amanda is always sure to check in with clients when they arrive and she caters sessions to meet people where they’re at today. 

“How much sleep did they get over the past few nights? How much stress do they have in their lives right now?” Amanda mentions about the types of questions she asks clients. “I adjust to make sure we’re doing enough but not too much. Does this need to be a more restorative session or can we do something more strenuous?” 

Amanda also adds that, while people come to her with physical needs and goals, her work regularly touches on mental health. “The mental game is a big part of what we address,” she says about working with her clients. “The mental and physical are so connected, and many of my clients are very aware of that.” 

From navigating the specifics of physical needs and goals to talking about the mental and emotional challenges and accomplishments that accompany the process of moving toward a healthier tomorrow, Amanda has found a great joy in her work as a personal trainer. It's this holistic process that's kept her so engaged in her work.

Evolving Her Personal Training Practice

As to her own journey as an athlete, Amanda just started pursuing a new passion, one she’s been interested in trying for a white: ice hockey. She brings her own continually growing wealth of athletic experiences to her practice with her clients.

This growing love of ice hockey has also inspired Amanda to add a new certification to her list of credentials: she is working toward achieving the highly respected Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) certification. This will be yet one more set of tools Amanda will bring to her robust personal training practice.