Stronger Together with Sandpoint Strength

When Crystal Baines joined Sandpoint Strength, she was an overwhelmed single mom of five who couldn't run around the block without an asthma attack. More than a decade later, she's lost over 100 pounds, cut her body fat in half, performs weighted pull-ups, and coaches others through the same journey. But this isn't a story about quick fixes. It's about showing up when you don't feel like it, worki...

At 67 years old, Lenny Hess isn't slowing down. He still skis, hikes, travels the world, climbs ladders for work, and is always planning his next adventure. But getting started at the gym wasn't easy. Like many people, he was intimidated by what he thought CrossFit was and almost let that fear keep him away. In this conversation, Lenny shares why accountability matters, how strength training has h...

Tonisha Monteith spent 14 years doing gymnastics she didn't want to do, quit at 18 when she dislocated her elbow, and spent the next two decades resisting anything that looked like a gym. In between, she had two kids, fostered five more, adopted three — including one she had a dream about before she knew he existed — navigated adrenal fatigue, panic attacks, and autoimmune issues, and tried CrossF...

Kenny loves lifting weights. He will tell you this repeatedly. But as he gets older and starts thinking about being around when his son has kids, and his kids have kids, he's paying a lot more attention to the numbers that predict whether he'll actually make it to that table. This solo episode walks through five cardiovascular metrics — resting heart rate, heart rate recovery, heart rate variabili...

Aaron has done Hyrox solo and as a partner. Mike found it on his own, signed up, and trained for eight weeks — mostly so he'd have something to actually work toward. They finished together in 1:11, beat their goal time, and are both vaguely considering doing it again despite spending the final two weeks of training fantasizing about going back to regular class. This is a debrief on what Hyrox actu...

This is Sarah Adair's second conversation, and it's the one a lot of men have been waiting for. She covers everything that should be in a men's hormone blood panel — total testosterone, free testosterone, sex hormone binding globulin, estradiol, thyroid, cortisol, and why most of those numbers mean less than you think in isolation. She also breaks down why the standard every-two-weeks intramuscula...

Nick Bandy spent the winter working with football and softball athletes on strength, speed mechanics, and durability — and the feedback started coming back in April when they showed up to their first camps and outran everyone. The point of this conversation is simple: if your kid plays a fall or winter sport, right now is when the work should start. Not six weeks before tryouts. Not the week schoo...

Karie Lee Knoke called SSC asking about a women's fitness special. She said she needed to gain about 30 pounds and get a lot stronger. When pressed on why, she asked for an NDA. She was preparing for Season 9 of Alone — 75 days solo in Labrador, a 50-pound recurve bow she could barely draw, a blizzard that lasted three days in November, and a final decision she had to make twice because the first...

Recorded around Valentine's Day, this one is Kenny and Jenn talking through something they've had a thousand versions of privately — how your health affects your relationships, what happens when one partner starts improving and the other pulls them back to the couch, and why training for the person who picked you is a better goal than training for revenge. They also get into GLP-1 medications and...

Ammi Midstokke has been on this podcast more than anyone else, and this episode is probably the most honest one yet. It starts with a conversation about why Kenny can't get people to come on his podcast — nobody thinks they have anything worth saying — and spirals out into why that's wrong, what imposter syndrome actually is versus what it isn't, what writing for a living actually looks like, how...

Tabitha Barron is a women's health nurse practitioner who has spent her career in GYN, runs a solo practice in Sandpoint, and is very clear that anything she says on camera today she might look back on in ten years and cringe — because the field is moving that fast. This conversation covers where women's health actually is right now versus where it was five years ago, why hormones are helpful but...

Trina Kennedy is three and a half weeks out from a hysterectomy and already back at the gym — on the bike, doing light core work, staying within her restrictions, while her surgeon continues to describe everything she does as sounding "really hard." This is her second conversation, and it goes deeper than the first. She's a 20-year registered nurse who now works in the optimization space, and she...

Kenny and Ammi are back for their third episode, and this time the topic is supplements, biohacking, and the cultural obsession with finding the next thing that will shortcut the basics. Ammi is a former nutritionist who has tried most of this stuff firsthand — including peptides for a torn hamstring, with real before-and-after bloodwork. Kenny is a skeptic who has been watching trends roll throug...

Michael Welp has been an 8am regular at SSC for eight years. In his other life, he's spent 30 years running experiential leadership programs — most famously for white men in corporate settings — focused on listening, belonging, and what it actually takes to see the people around you. Christopher Ruffo called him a crackpot facilitator on Tucker Carlson's show. His clients' co-workers noticed they...

Chandler Kees joined the SSC teens class at 13 years old. Nearly everyone from that original group eventually stopped coming. He never did — except for the year he spent welding pipeline on the North Slope of Alaska, 84 hours a week, six days a week, in minus 40 degree darkness. He came back at 22, started Keys Metalworks, and now makes custom furniture, ski benches, and structural metal work out...

Jorn Reger was 26 years old, newly moved to the States, walking through a Walmart parking lot on the phone with his dad when his face started drooping, his words slurred, and his heart started racing. Thirty-five seconds later, everything was fine. By the next day he'd had 43 of those episodes. He was diagnosed with MS. Instead of getting on the pharmaceutical track, he chose diet, movement, and g...

Sarah Adair is a nurse practitioner with 15 years of experience, most of it in emergency medicine before she pivoted to preventive and functional care. She opened Revival Wellness Clinic in Hayden and recently in Sandpoint, and she treats the whole person — which in practice means a lot of hormone replacement therapy for women and men, and an increasingly deep dive into peptides. This conversation...

Ammi Midstokke is back — the most requested return guest on the podcast — and this time the topic is alcohol. Not a lecture, not a recovery story, not a sobriety manifesto. Just an honest, biochemically grounded, occasionally very funny conversation about why people drink, what it actually does to the brain, and why the question most people never ask is the most important one: why? Ammi has done m...

Dawn started CrossFit in 2010 when nobody really knew what they were doing. By 2014 she had found her home gym in Reno, gone fully competitive, and started coaching. A few years later she burned out completely — took three years away from everything CrossFit related, moved to a cabin in the woods with her husband, and eventually came back. She came back different. Now she does the Build program on...

Jenn Karkoski joined Sandpoint Strength during a difficult season of life, looking for something that was just for her. Nearly 10 years later, she’s become one of the most consistent, positive, and quietly tough people in the gym. In this conversation, we talk about overcoming injuries, falling off a pull-up bar during the Open, endurance races, motherhood, community, and why the 6am class feels m...

When Matt Curmi first walked into Sandpoint Strength, he was intimidated, out of shape, and unsure if he belonged there at all. What most people didn’t know was that before the 6am classes, Matt had already lived a life most people only read about — crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat as a teenager, surviving hurricanes at sea, living in multiple countries, training under Michelin-star chefs, and...

For years, the fitness industry promised the same thing: lose the weight and you’ll finally feel good about yourself. Writer, athlete, nutritionist, and longtime SSC member Ammi Midstokke has lived both sides of that equation — from obesity, to extreme endurance training, to chasing thinness, to helping clients navigate addiction, trauma, food shame, and body image. And her conclusion is uncomfort...

Aaron Vahrenwald has been water skiing since he was six years old. He won a US championship in 2005. He's been shortening the rope ever since — not always going lower, but always finding something to refine, something that feels better, something closer to that flow state where the rope turns almost solid and you stop thinking about anything else. He also owns Sand Creek Customware with his wife E...

Ken Wood got a health warning at 46 — cholesterol numbers heading the wrong direction, medications being discussed. He didn't want to go down that path. He came back to the gym. Two years later he's not on any medications, his heart rate recovery has crossed into high-performance territory, and he hasn't missed a single personal training session. He also texts Kenny three things he did well every...

Adam Gall started on a wildland fire crew in the Idaho wilderness at 20, moved to wolf biology work with the Nez Perce tribe, got a teaching certificate, quit teaching, became a fishing guide, guided elk hunts, and eventually started two outfitting businesses with his wife Anna — Dark Timber Outfitters and Timber to Table Guide Service. He also sends every booked hunter a blunt letter about physic...