Debra Corbo, BS, PT, CPT.

Debra has been a licensed, practicing Physical Therapist for the past 26 years. Debra graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Physical Therapy. Since this time she has worked in all facets of therapy such as pediatrics, acute care, orthopedics and rehabilitation. She has been in private practice for the past 12 years.

Debra was an avid sports competitor in track and field as a teenager specializing in distance running and has been a life long enthusiast of resistance training. After incurring a traumatic spine injury as a teenager, Debra has made it her life's goal to learn and understand how the body function's mechanically.

As a result, her diagnostic skills are at a level that is unheard of in Physical Therapy and exercise. Debra has taken dozens of courses to enhance her knowledge base and specializes in manual orthopedics, strengthening and flexibility. She has spent time as a lecturer and teacher as well as being a Certified Personal Trainer.


Douglas Splittgerber, CPT.

Doug has been involved in the world of exercise for over 40 years. Like Debra, he also incurred a major back injury while working at an iron foundry at 18 as a summer job before his first year in college. At that time, he only knew that if he held his stomach in, his back didn't ache as much as normal.

In 1969, he moved to Milwaukee and got a job at Harley-Davidson. This is when he was informed about his back injury, a Grade III, Spondylolythesis. The physician told him two things, don't lift anything over 30# and you're going to need a spine fusion by the time you are 30 years old. He needed to know more about his back and what he could do about it so he purchased Gray's Anatomy and a textbook on Kinesiology- The Study of Human Movement and began to read.

Being a skinny kid his whole life, he did something he always wanted to do, he began to lift weights. He knew he had to be careful with what he did and could not begin to do the crazy things he saw other people doing at the gym. Each day before going to the gym, he would review the body parts he wanted to exercise and the movements that these body parts performed. With this mental image, he would then proceed to exercise cautiously using moderate weights and total control always.

Little by little, his strength and muscles increased and his body weight inched upward. His practice of holding his abdomen in continued to keep his back ache to a minimum and was reinforced by seeing the protruding abdomens of every one at the gym. Little did he know this was the rudimentary beginnings of the very system they teach today.

In 1970, he joined his first commercial health club and began what has become his life's work in the health and fitness industry. As he continued to learn how to use his body and how to feed it properly, his once scrawny body was now beginning to mature into a well muscled machine.

This was the stimulus that allowed him to survive 10 years in one of the most dangerous and difficult professions that there is, an IronWorker setting steel hundreds of feet above the ground. He was ridiculed daily by his co-workers but always reminded them that he had to workout so that he could haul them around. None of them ever knew about the real condition of his back. All they knew was that he was this "big, muscle" guy and everyone wanted him on their crew. He retired from that crazy profession with all his parts intact in 1982.

At this time he swapped his hobby of weight training and bodybuilding and opened up his first gym in 1982. Over the course of the next 10 years, he owned and operated 5 facilities including 2 bodybuilding, hard core gyms, a hotel based facility, a lady's only facility and a 25,000 sq.ft. mega club with all the bells and whistles.

Owning his own gyms now gave him a chance to pursue the ultimate strength sport, Powerlifting. This was challenging to say the least because the weights he used were enormous compared to the 30# weight restriction that he was living with. The beauty of powerlifting though is that you have to have good lifting technique to lift very heavy weights.

Using his nutrition expertise, he was able to push his body weight up to 275# and won the Wisconsin State Junior Championships in 1985 at the age of 35 with a 700# squat, a 435 bench press and a 655 deadlift. All of this with a 30# weight restriction and a fractured spine.

The field of personal training came into existence in the mid-80's. One of the first programs created was by the American College of Sports Medicine which was part of the American Medical Association (AMA). He took this certification program at Memphis State University in 1988 under the tutelage of Dr. David Anspaugh.

As a gym owner/operator of multiple facilities, he felt he could not get enough education. In 1989, he took the program to become a Certified MedX Technician at the University of Florida in Gainsville, taught by Dr. Michael Pollock and Arthur Jones, inventor of Nautilus Equipment and the MedX Strengthening Equipment.

In January of 1991, he took the certification program at the National Academy of Sports Medicine in Chicago. He aced the written and practical test and was asked by the Academy to stay on and join the teaching faculty. This was a position he held through 1995, teaching anatomy and the biomechanics of exercise to new trainers, hence his moniker, "Trainer to the Trainers". He worked under the guidance of Dr. Ronald Klatz & Dr. Robert Goldman, co-founders of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, now commonly called A4M.

In 1998, he took the certification program with the International Sports Science Association, developed by Dr. Fred Hatfield, one of the foremost authorities in strength training and conditioning.

Moving to Florida in 1992, brought him the good fortune of meeting and working with his wife, Debra. It was at this time that he learned how he fractured his spine which was finally explained to him by Debbie. His association with Debbie and the combining of their two knowledge bases and two entirely different paths of learning have resulted in the understanding that they share about the human body and how we, as human beings, were designed to function. They have been honing their understanding of human function and developing the methods and techniques that make up The Alignment Resistance Training Method of stretching and strengthening.

TODAY:
He is now 58 and Debbie is 50 and they still aggressively pursue strength training whenever time allows. His spine is still fractured and he still has a 30# weight restriction on lifting and Debbie still manages her back condition daily.

They have no arthritis, no back pain and they still have levels of strength and muscle that exceed most 20 year olds. Doug and Debbie still squat and deadlift over 500 and 300 respectively and bench press close to 400 and 200 respectively.

They both fully expect to maintain this strength level for many years to come. They live what they teach people to do and put ourselves up as extreme examples of what the human body can do despite serious complications.

As they always say, "our body does not wear out from use, it wears out from abuse". Their other motto is "your body does not grow old and weak, we allow it to grow old and get weak". The decision is up to each one of us about how we age and the quality of live we have.