Coaches

“When someone enters into the world of policing they forfeit their right to not be fit” this saying is something that has always meant a great deal to Sled Dog coach Andrea Kwasny. It’s something she carries with her as she goes through her daily life, not only as a police officer, but as a coach at Crossfit Subzero and a role model in her community. Her fitness has allowed her to be the best partner she can be for her fellow officers by doing all she can to ensure their safety. Physique and crossfit training have allowed her to transform her body and mind from a sedentary heavy set law school student to multi time Police And Fire Games gold medalist and Canadian Medal of Bravery Recipient.

“Being able to collaborate with Andrea on the programming for our gym, my personal training clients and now with our new online athletes and blog is a tremendous advantage for me as a coach” says husband and business partner Bobby. “We have been together for 10 years now and our relationship as a couple has been enhanced because of our commitment to each other and each other’s health and fitness. The obvious benefit of being married to your training partner is awesome in itself, but the real value always shows itself when one of us is preparing for a show or big event. As an athlete, it’s great to have a supportive spouse, but to have someone who not only supports your efforts, but understands them, is an advantage that can’t be measured. We are a great team together, and I can only speak for myself, but I am accomplishing things (and having the courage to pursue others) that I never would have dreamed of on my own”

Coach Andrea’s fitness journey began when she was introduced to the magic of the compound lifts (squat, bench and deadlift) when she was 15 and she started going to power lifting gym on Vancouver Island with her dad and their family friend. She became a regular at No Limits Gym and even got her first job there to help pay for her membership. After a couple of years of consistent training she won her class and multiple local and regional level powerlifting events. While working three jobs and putting herself through university (criminal justice) and without the influence of the power lifting community that had helped keep her focused as a teenager, she found herself drifting away from the gym.

Now graduated and in the working in the court system, she joined a friend at Weight Watchers and took the first steps to regaining her health, fitness and shape that she had lost over the last 5 years. While making progress on her own, it wasn’t until she met Bobby that the progress really started to come. She then adopted CrossFit as her primary training system, began to educate herself on nutrition and recovery methods and was able to pass the basic physical requirement testing to become a police officer.

Fast forward to today, and you find her the embodiment of the perpetual state of readiness, healthy, strong, fit and with the look that she always wanted as a teenager, lean, muscular and ready for any obstacles and challenges that her daily life in law enforcement throws her way. From teenage powerlifting champion to sedentary university student to world Police and Fire Games gold medalist coach Andrea has seen it, done it and lived to tell about it.

The lead dog on the sled dog team, Bobby (or funbobby as he’s known to many) has spent over half of his life in the health and fitness industry. While sleddogstrength.com is just beginning to grow, the 47 year old Canadian has been living and working in gyms since 1992. “Any day in a gym is a good day” whether its working with personal training clients, coaching CrossFit classes at CrossFit SubZero or grinding away in his own workouts, the gym is where he belongs and where he is happiest.

While training 1000s of people with a wide variety of goals over his 25 year career, Bobby has banked a tremendous amount of  experience and knowledge on many things health and fitness related. The sled dog system is a compilation of all those years in the gym and countless hours of independent research. It is a hybrid system that has fuses together the most effective traits of many strength and conditioning systems to create one, effective system.

As with many fitness professionals, Bobby’s journey for knowledge started with his own goals. Early in his teenage years, he started lifting weights in his basement to get stronger and put on muscle to help improve his performance in a variety of high school team sports. In university, now obsessed with beach volleyball, he took to the gym to find a way to be able to compete with athletes much taller and more experienced. At 23, after deciding that his options for competitive sports were pretty limited, he started to race triathlons and would continue to do so for 10 successful seasons. After playing with traditional bodybuilding training for a couple of years to rebuild himself after years of endurance sports, he was introduced to CrossFit by his then boss James Fitzgerald of OPT (now OPEX).

He started training with the CrossFit system in January 2006 and became a certified coach in 2008, which lead to competing in numerous CrossFit and other mixed modal fitness competitions through a very successful 2012 season. He was preparing for the 2013 CrossFit Games as a masters athlete when he suffered a series of shoulder (rotator cuff ) injuries that effectively put his competitive CrossFit career on permanent hold. Two major shoulder surgeries left his body repaired but far from the “perpetual state of readiness” he had been accustomed to.

While he continued to lift and train as frequently as he could, the surgery had reduced his shoulder muscles and strength. After years of not being able to provide his upper body with any type of legitimate stimulus, he started researching the world of bodybuilding looking for information on what the “big dudes” were doing to get bigger. While always being a big fan of the sport and culture of physique athletics, his body was not designed to body build. Digging deeper, he found there was a division called men’s physique and it was designed to attract guys that couldn’t (or didn’t want) to pack on the pounds and pounds of muscle that are required to compete in bodybuilding. While he was still skin, bones and scars after surgery, he now had a goal to work towards that would support his need to pack on some muscle, to compete in a men’s physique competition

It was over the next 2 years of training that Bobby developed the Sled Dog system as you see it today. When compared to CrossFit, hypertrophy (or physique training) was boring and tedious, Bobby often compares the two genres of weight training as “hypertrophy is like playing chess and CrossFit is like playing call of duty” – boring yes but very necessary. on stage Bobby’s career as a masters physique competitor got off to a rough start over the first two years. He’s currently still training hard for his third show in late April 2017.

After spending countless hours in hundreds of different gyms around the world, Bobby has created the the Sled Dog community to be able lead individuals towards their health, fitness and aesthetic goals in a positive online environment. The Sled Dog project provides athletes from all over the world a chance to share his challenging and effective programming style, learn how apply his sensible and logical approach to nutrition and constantly evolve to a better version of themselves.