Coaches, fitness experts gather at strength and conditioning conference in Lynnwood

If you were a college football coach and wanted to open your own training facility with minimal space, how would you lay out the equipment, office supplies and storage while being ADA compliant? Or if you were operating a senior home, what exercise program would suit your population based on scientific evidence?

These topics were among several that were presented last weekend at the 2025 National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) Northwest Region Conference (NWRC) at Edmonds College. The conference was led by Regional Director Catherine King and NSCA Washington State Director Federick Brooks. Brooks, a Lynnwood resident, also owns Sound Sports Performance in Lynnwood.

“Our hope was to bring all of the great professionals – personal trainers, strength and conditioning coaches…physiotherapists and nutritionists – here to Lynnwood to learn from some of the best in the profession,” King said. “We’re really excited to have such great professionals bringing their knowledge and experience and sharing that with us.”

Brooks said that this is the first time he and King had collaborated to run the regional conference, thanks to an $8,800 tourism grant from Snohomish County.

“The stipulations of the grant is we had to do it in Snohomish County,” Brooks said. “The grant helped out with paying for the facility. It helped out with paying for the catering, and it just helped to offset some of the costs that we were going to have for the conference.”

Brooks served in the U.S. Marine Corps for 10 years, working as a radio technician and an instructor for the Marine Corps Martial Art Program. After his service, he earned a bachelor’s degree in exercise science from George Mason University and a master’s in exercise science from A.T. Still University of Health Sciences.

While Brooks was listening to the presentations at an NSCA conference in Portland, Oregon, in 2019, he decided that he could be a presenter. 

“Why can’t it be me?” he said. “So I made it a goal to myself to present at the next state clinic.”

Brooks was selected to fill the vacant NSCA state director position in 2023. He also made his second NSCA presentation at this year’s conference.

Brooks said that while NSCA training manuals and certifications include a section about facility design, most trainers and coaches focus on exercise program design and human physiology.

“Most of us are trainers or strength coaches, and we don’t necessarily think about what it’s like to actually design a facility,” he said. “It’s important to know what your facility looks like because you have to maximize the flow of your space. How many athletes, how many trainers or how many coaches? How many people can you get into your facility to train? How do you train? You really want to make sure that you know the clientele that you’re working with, either you’re working with patients in the medical or allied health field.”

Among the NSCA speakers were Seattle Sounders FC Coach Megan Young, Dr. Lukas Krumpl from the University of Washington, sports dietitian Emily Edison and Skyline Retirement Community Seattle Fitness Manager Tim Vagen.

Vagen said that his presentation, “Senior Training: The Good, the Bad, and the Ever Changing,” emphasizes the need for trainers to adapt their senior clientele’s varying conditions.

“Twenty minutes of lack of sleep can make a world of difference to seniors when they come in for their training program,” he said. “So my talk is to let the audience know that you can continue to see them and make small, minor changes that will make a world of difference in their training.”

A 45-year veteran in the strength and conditioning profession, Vagen said that he had seen improvements in how exercise programs are delivered to seniors, such as the trend of going back to bodyweight exercises.

Skyline Retirement Community Seattle Fitness Manager Tim Vagen talks about senior fitness and exercise program design at the 2025 NSCA Northwest Region Conference at Edmonds College.“When commercial fitness first started, everything was all about bodyweight training,” he said. “Jack LaLanne, everybody else was doing all of that. And then that went away because we had to go to [using] machines, and they were so much ‘better’ for you. And then all of a sudden, calisthenics are back, and for everybody, that’s the big word. Instead of ‘bodyweight training,’ they are calling it ‘calisthenics.’ That’s a classic example of what goes on. Don’t even get me started on nutrition.”

Vagen pointed to recent research showing that regular exercise delays the progression of dementia and Parkinson’s disease. In fact, a 2023 systematic review found that exercise during a 12-week period improves motor function among most people with Parkinson’s disease compared to those who do not exercise. The authors reported that the type of exercise does not seem to matter much and cautioned that the sample sizes of some studies are small and may skew the results.

“Each year, we go through a variety of standard senior tests that we collect data on,” Vagen said. “I have about 10 years worth of data on so many residents, ranging from 65 years old to over 100. We’re constantly looking at what’s going on with what [the residents are] doing and how it’s going to affect our exercise program.”

Lynnwood personal trainer and Irish dance teacher Dawn Madsen said she was attending a NSCA conference for the first time. She also was Brooks’ client at Sound Sports Performance and looked forward to hearing him speak. She said she got into personal training because several trainers had told her that she would be good at it, and Brooks was the one who gave her the final push to go through certification.

“I feel like most of my anger at the health care system is that it tends to forget old people,” Madsen said. “It tends to forget people in aging bodies, women in perimenopausal, postmenopausal bodies. Our society says you’re decrepit after 60, and that’s your inevitable fate. And I hate that. I hate that for my parents. I hate that for all of my family members, and thankfully, I get to help people not go down that path.

“And I feel like trainers should be more about encouraging people to learn about their bodies and learn what their bodies can do rather than telling them what they can’t do,” she added.