How Dana Rebuilt Her Movement & Capability After MS Took It Away

Body control is a learned skill. It can be trained, improved, and rebuilt — even when your own nervous system is working against you.

Dana Moffitt’s story is the most extreme version of that principle I can share with you. She has Multiple Sclerosis. She spent years unable to walk reliably. Doctors told her the trajectory was one-way: progressive decline.

She proved them wrong. And the way she did it illustrates exactly how skill-based movement training works, and why it scales to anyone — including you, with your functioning nervous system and your “bad hip.”

Here’s what happened.

“Long story short, I have Multiple Sclerosis.”

Dana was always athletic. Daughter of a high school athletics coach, she swam, ran track, played basketball, and danced as a kid. So when her body started failing her in her early 30s — weakness setting in, movements getting unreliable — she knew something was seriously wrong.

It took five years and a parade of doctors to get her diagnosis: Multiple Sclerosis, formally confirmed in 2006.

MS is a disease where your immune system attacks the insulation around your nerves. Everyone experiences it differently depending on which nerves are affected. For Dana, it meant jerky, uncontrolled movements, progressive weakness, and unreliable balance. At her worst, she rarely left her house and crawled between rooms.

She had two young kids at the time — her son was eight and her daughter was six.

“It was a devastating moment,” Dana told us. “And I just buckled up for the worst and then started trying to dig my way out.”

Living with MS is a constant negotiation. Dana’s nervous system damage means her motions can become jerky and uncontrolled, and building strength is a grind. She structures her entire day around her condition — she prepares breakfast for the kids in the morning because that’s when she’s strongest. The rest of the day is more uncertain, and she has to choose when to spend her limited energy wisely.

“I decided that I wanted to be the little kid.”

Before Dana even had her diagnosis, she had a moment in a gym that set the course for everything that followed.

“One time I was in a gym and I saw an older gentleman with an oxygen tank heading to a treadmill. I walked over and there was a window into the kids care where my children were, and there was a one-year-old in there with them just learning to walk. This one-year-old got up and fell and got up and fell. I kind of sat down and said which one of those do I want to be? The one-year-old that’s going to try and try and try, or the other one that’s just going to make due because time shall pass and this shall end.

I decided that I wanted to be the little kid. That’s what I am. A grown-up little kid.”

Her daughter, six years old at the time of diagnosis, literally taught her how to stand up again and catch a ball.

For Dana, relearning the basics was the whole game. Standing longer. Taking one extra step. Picking something up off the floor. The stuff most people do without a second thought was the frontier.

Building Back, One Step at a Time

She started with a TENS unit — just electrical stimulation to get her muscles activating, to help her stand a little longer. Then she hired a personal trainer. At first, she couldn’t lift a gallon of milk.

Gradually she built enough strength to incorporate TRX training, which helped. But supported strength — the kind where an anchor or a band handles half the stabilization work for you — doesn’t build independent motor control. Dana could get stronger on the TRX. She still couldn’t control her own body in open space.

That’s when she found GMB, started reading our articles and watching our videos, and eventually started training with our programs.

“The next step became obvious,” Dana told us. “I’m going to go with GMB. They can get me off my leash.”

Training With Progressive Movement Patterns

What drew Dana to our approach was the emphasis on control and range of motion — the two things MS attacks directly.

General tightness and lack of coordination are part of the territory with MS, and Dana knew she needed training that specifically addressed those gaps. She needed to practice moving in different directions, through different positions, with her full attention — building the neural connections that her disease was degrading.

That’s what locomotor movement training does. When your body encounters a new position or movement pattern, your brain creates neural pathways to handle it. Practice that pattern daily with focused attention, and those pathways get stronger. Introduce progressive complexity — new directions, less support, more demanding positions — and you build coordination and control systematically.

“I need to just stop throwing myself around and get control. I realized that GMB can help me do just that, that they are what I’m looking for to gain the control and poise and grace that I need.”

We tell everyone who goes through our programs to work at their own level and make adjustments as needed. Easy to say. Harder to actually do when you’re watching demonstration videos of movements that look effortless and you’re struggling with the most basic version.

Dana faced challenges most people never encounter, but she knew her limits and modified everything as needed. Even the most regressed introductory levels were sometimes beyond her skill set and balance. She didn’t let that stop her.

“I had to listen to myself. Why don’t you want to? Well, you’re afraid. Okay, what are you afraid of? Falling. Okay, go to the kitchen counter and keep one hand on the counter. Then work to lift your hands, and then maybe next time you do it you won’t be in the kitchen.”

A vital part of Dana’s experience: she felt permission to make the training suit her goals rather than forcing herself to fit the program. “I’ve had to regress a few things back even further,” she said, “but it seemed like it would be acceptable with the GMB family.”

It is. That’s how this is supposed to work.

Results That Changed Everything

The results sound small if you’ve never lost basic movement capability. They were enormous for Dana.

During training, she placed her foot behind her — taking a step backwards — for the first time since her symptoms began. Just stepped back without planning it. “I was like, ‘Wait. Did that just happen? Did I seriously just do that?'”

She found she could reach down for something and balance on one foot, where before that meant falling.

“I now have enough control that I’m not afraid to reach for it. It made me realize that yeah, I’ve been training for a decade but I’m nowhere near what I can continue to learn in another decade working with GMB. I can be that much more free and that much less restricted in my movements. I’m excited.”

For about 15 minutes following each daily practice session, she could walk freely — “as everything was loose.” Fifteen minutes may sound trivial. For someone who couldn’t stand for two minutes during the national anthem a few years earlier, it was a window of freedom that proved what was possible.

And that opened her eyes to what the next decade of training could look like.

How Skill-Based Movement Training Builds Motor Control

Most fitness programs focus on strength and endurance — load the muscles, stress the cardiovascular system, repeat. That training has its place, and Dana did plenty of it. But it didn’t give her what she needed most: independent motor control in unstructured space.

Skill-based movement training works on a different mechanism. You practice locomotor patterns — crawling, reaching, rotating, shifting weight through unfamiliar positions — with focused attention and gradual progression. The purpose of any given session is to build a habit of movement and awareness that translates into better control of your body in daily life.

Every new position your body encounters creates a neural adaptation. Your brain maps the pathway, and with repeated practice, access to that position becomes faster and more reliable. Stack enough of these adaptations together — new directions, combined movements, increasing complexity over weeks and months — and the cumulative effect is a body that responds more precisely to what you ask it to do.

For Dana, this meant her brain was building new connections to work around the damaged ones. For someone without a neurological condition, the same mechanism builds the coordination, balance, and body awareness that make you more capable in everything physical — from sport to yard work to catching yourself on ice.

Where Dana Is Now

Since her initial training, Dana has continued working through multiple GMB programs — Elements, Integral Strength, and Mobility. She’s built enough of a base that she now picks the training that fits her current needs rather than following a single program start-to-finish. That’s the progression we want for every client: learn the method, build the foundation, then train with the autonomy to choose what serves you.

She’s also an active member of our Alpha Posse coaching group, where she gets ongoing guidance from our team and works alongside other practitioners who take their training seriously.

Managing MS will be a lifelong process for Dana. She knows that. But consistent practice with progressively challenging movement has built real capability — even under the hardest circumstances imaginable.

“I probably consider myself more of an athlete now than I did back then. I may improve slower than the average person, but I do think I will improve and I do think that I’ll get there. That has been a big burden off my shoulders — to understand that it might be slow, but you’re going to progress.”

When we asked Dana what she’d tell someone without MS — someone reading this who is probably far more physically capable than she is — here’s what she said:

“You can do so much better than you think you can. Literally, I am trusting GMB with so much more than you realize. No matter what kind of athlete you are, you can trust them that they’re going to guide you through this and they’re not going to push you in a way that gets you hurt.”

If this approach can rebuild movement capability for someone managing a degenerative neurological disease, imagine what consistent practice does for you.