From 30 Years at a Desk to Martial Arts at 50: Kamomi’s Story

Kamomi spent nearly 30 years as a graphic designer hunched over a computer. Her body kept the receipt.

Aching shoulders. Tight back. Stiff neck. The slow accumulation of decades of desk work, compounding year after year until it was just how her body felt all the time. She went to the gym for a few months, but it didn’t stick. “It’s too intimidating,” she said. “I had to amp myself up just to get there.”

Then COVID hit, the gyms shut down, and Kamomi — 17 years into a design career in New York City — started searching for something she could do at home that might undo some of the damage.

“I just wanted to find a way to not be in pain and to move better than I was.”

She found a video of our Head Coach Ryan teaching L-sits, and eventually discovered Elements. She watched the testimonials, saw people moving and tumbling, and her first thought was that she’d never be able to do any of it. Then she saw a video of a woman training at home with her kids and thought, “Okay, well, if she can do it, I can do it.”

She was 48. She’d bowled as a teenager. That was the extent of her athletic background.

Here’s what happened.

Starting From Zero in a One-Bedroom Apartment

When Kamomi started Elements, everything about it was foreign. Getting down on the floor, hands and knees, trying to do an A-frame. “It was really difficult at first, I must admit.”

Her wrists got sore because she wasn’t used to loading her hands. Our coaches shared our wrist routine and told her to slow down and give her body time to adapt. Elements includes a Gradual Track specifically for people without much training background or coming back from a long break — a slower on-ramp that builds the baseline strength and mobility you need before the movements get more complex.

That pacing turned out to be the thing that made everything else possible.

“I think that was the most important part, learning how to slow down and accept the fact that I may not be way up here, but I am here. That was the challenge. To see what I can do, see what I can’t do. Then, I guess the word is, to autoregulate. That was a new thing for me.”

“It was really easy to follow,” she said. “I could do it as long as I wanted or as little as I wanted. I always got something out of it and I felt good after. Even just 15 minutes a day helped.”

Fifteen minutes a day, in a one-bedroom New York apartment, with a cat supervising. That’s all it took to start.

The Pain Started Leaving

Each Elements session walks you through targeted mobility work before the main training — consistently working on the hips, shoulders, back, and wrists that take the most abuse from desk life. Then you practice locomotor movement patterns that build strength, flexibility, and control through your whole body.

A little over a month in, Kamomi wrote this in her training log:

“Ever since I started training with Elements my perennial shoulder and lower back pain have subsided. My jaw and neck are also noticeably better. I never thought I’d be able to get rid of all of that pain. I wake up feeling relaxed and ready to face the day. I feel like I can get out of bed each day by jumping out of bed.”

Decades of accumulated tightness and pain, meaningfully reduced in weeks. By someone who’d barely trained before, working out of a small apartment, fifteen minutes at a time.

Then the Capability Started Building

Pain relief was the goal Kamomi came in with. What she didn’t expect was what happened after the pain cleared.

“I was able to go into a deep squat more comfortably for the first time,” she wrote after session 12. “Never in my life could I have imagined doing that and now I constantly do it.”

As her body got stronger and less restricted, movements she’d assumed were permanently out of reach started becoming available. Sitting on the floor comfortably. L-sits. Things she’d watched other people do and filed under “not for me.”

“Looking at Ryan in that pose that he’s in, the Spiderman, I never imagined myself trying to do that,” she said.

By the end of the program, she was doing Spiderman with Knee Float and Monkey 180s. “It didn’t matter that my workday was busy and stressful,” she wrote. “I kept returning to that feeling I have of making slow and steady progress with Elements.”

This is the part that matters for anyone reading this who isn’t a graphic designer in a New York apartment. The mechanism is the same regardless of where you start. Progressive movement practice — new patterns, increasing complexity, focused attention — builds neural pathways and physical capability that compounds session after session. Kamomi started further back than most of our clients. The approach scaled to meet her there and kept scaling as she grew.

What Happened After Elements

The confidence Kamomi built in her body didn’t stay contained to her living room floor.

“I just started doing Filipino martial arts. I am amazed that I felt so much at ease that I started Filipino martial arts at the age of 50. I’ve never done martial arts my entire life. I was always in awe of gymnasts and martial artists. I didn’t think I could move and transition into different kinds of foot work and striking patterns. It took Elements to do that, really.”

From bowling teenager to martial artist at 50. That’s a trajectory nobody — including Kamomi — saw coming.

“I am more at ease in my body and can move without pain. I can also do things that were once challenging more easily and gracefully. My energy has changed — I am more positive, open, and free.”

She still uses what she learned in Elements every day to keep her body feeling good and continuing to improve. And the way she describes where she’s landed is the clearest version of what we want for every client:

“I’ve never felt more at ease in my body than I do now. This is how I want to feel for the rest of my life.”