Spotlight Trainer of the Month: Jeremy Likness

Jeremy Likness is twenty-nine years old and lives in Lead, South Dakota. Jeremy left corporate America after ten years in the Information Technology industry. He resigned as Director of IT to pursue fitness full-time. Jeremy is certified through ISSA as a Fitness Trainer as well as a Specialist in Performance Nutrition.

While Jeremy lettered in high school track, after high school he stopped training and let a sedentary lifestyle take over. In 1999, he decided to make a difference in his life and lost over 65 pounds of fat. His wife followed suit, losing 40 pounds of her own. His life changed so dramatically that Jeremy realized his passion was to coach others to good health. After researching various organizations and talking to trainers, he decided that the International Sports Sciences Association would be the best path to gaining knowledge and starting his fitness career. He started his program shortly after being named a Top 2000 Finisher in a major physique transformation competition that featured 750,000 entrants.

Jeremy started a web-based physique consulting company called Peak Physiques and ran this for about a year. He provided fitness consultations part time while working as a development manager full time. During this period, he trained dozens of clients to good health over the Internet and wrote several eBooks. He also hosted a charity event that raised several thousand for the Make-A-Wish Foundation by inviting lifters to push themselves to achieve personal bests and collect donations against the amount of weight they would lift.

Changes in the economy forced Jeremy into mandatory overtime at his full time job and he ended up closing the doors to Peak Physiques. Several years later, however, his association with Australian physical preparation consultant Ian King helped him move back into the industry. Jeremy began improving his knowledge by taking the Specialist in Performance Nutrition course and simultaneously signed on as an independent distributor for pharmaceutical grade supplementation. He also began writing fitness articles for several online publications, and attributes his success to the fact that the publishers had a great deal of respect for ISSA. This allowed him to create many contacts in the fitness industry and ultimately launch his own website that is dedicated to physique transformation.

Jeremy puts family and faith before all else. He has a four-year old daughter who trains with him (she rides her tricycle while he runs on the treadmill) and a sixteen year old stepson who is devoted to basketball. Jeremy left corporate America to not only have a greater impact on other's lives, but to create time to be with his family and help raise his children with strong, positive values. He is looking forward to working with his son through the upcoming basketball season and introducing his daughter to organized sports. Jeremy recently moved to a town in the Black Hills of South Dakota called Lead from Atlanta, Georgia in order to be closer to outdoor activities such as skiing, snowboarding, hiking, and rock-climbing, as well as to be closer to his extended family.

Jeremy owns a few of his own businesses. While some are in real estate, his primary focus is health and wellness. Jeremy works with other trainers to create win-win situations by publishing their content on his website that serves to educate and inform visitors while driving them to quality products and services produced by others in the fitness industry. Jeremy also continues to write, and has just finished a major project called “Become the Journey: A Transformation Guide.” True his philosophy of creating win-win situations, Jeremy has focused on marketing this eBook, which focuses on the personal development aspects of healthy living and physique transformation, through other trainers who receive a large portion of sales while gaining quality content to market through their own websites.

You can visit Jeremy's website, Natural Physiques, at www.naturalphysiques.com , and learn more about his eBook at www.becomethejourney.com .