The workday ends at 7pm. By 7:45 he is in the gym, either running his own session or testing a program he is about to hand to a client. Home by 9, eat, shower, sleep, and the next morning the schedule repeats. Two days on, two days off, rotating weekends, seven to seven at the Sheriff's Office. The training business runs in the seams.
JaeShawn Robinson is a personal trainer and tactical athlete based in Nashville, Tennessee. Four years into training clients, two years into law enforcement as a corrections officer. He calls it tactical athlete work because the two disciplines share more than most people think.
The money math is simple. A client books a consultation. They talk goals, current reality, injuries, and what has kept them out of the gym before. Paperwork gets signed. Payment or a deposit clears before any session is scheduled. From there, in-person, online, or hybrid clients start inside of two weeks.
I was not the man I had needed to be, there was a man I had yet to become.
A smart outsider assumes personal training is easy work. Robinson will tell you it can look easy from the outside, and that the reality is the opposite. Coach, teacher, role model, and leader, all at once, for every person who walks in. It demands attention to detail, patience, and communication most people burn through in the first six months. He says the discipline required is the same discipline that keeps him effective in corrections.
Off-days are for the second job inside the first one. Wake at six or seven, journal, read, pray. Breakfast, shower, then thirty minutes to an hour in email, DMs, and texts following up with clients and prospects and reaching out to leads. Then four to six hours studying for the NASM CPT, the first of four certifications he intends to stack. Lunch fits somewhere in the middle. Evenings are the gym, a walk, dinner cooked at home, and the week planned out in advance.
He grew up in Aurora, Illinois, a suburban city of about 180,000 people forty-five minutes from Chicago. Three-sport athlete at West Aurora High, class of 2017. Track, wrestling, football for the first two years, then track and football when he narrowed the load. The strength coach there, Thomas Kraus, is the one he points to. Kraus taught him what it meant to take fitness seriously, from conditioning to strength work to yoga and mobility, the kind of training that keeps a body functional into the late twenties and beyond. His uncle, Dr. Jerry Alexander, gave him the other half of the framework. Without struggle, there is no appreciation of success, where failure is not an option.
The turning point had a location. In 2023 he left his mother's apartment and moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, chasing what he thought would be a lifelong relationship. It wasn't. He was working at a Dollar General warehouse for low pay, renting a one-bedroom for $675 a month, and asking for help every other month to cover it. He was 24, single, no kids, and still could not make the numbers work.
Train the mind to be Strong, and the Body will follow.
He says he would not undo the move. Halfway through that year in Bowling Green he was ready to pack up and drive back to Illinois. That is when he found the Sheriff's Office. From that point on, he says, everything went uphill.
What he took from the worst stretch is the sentence he now organizes his week around. He needed direction, structure, and a plan, and no one was going to hand him any of the three. The two-on, two-off schedule is the container. The certifications are the ladder. The clients are the reason.
The influences he lists are specific. Dr. Jerry Alexander. Thomas Kraus and Coach Shaw and Kourtney Lamb from West Aurora. Captain Anderson at the Sheriff's Office. His grandfather Leroy Robinson, Popeye. On the shelf: The Four Agreements, Can't Hurt Me, Million Dollar Leads, Leaders Eat Last.
Next up is the NASM CPT, then the CNC, the CES, and the PES. Four certifications, one at a time, on the off-days between shifts.
