Fix Body Group: San Diego’s premier rehab and training center

I smoke. I hate working out. I eat cheese. So if there were someone less ill-suited to write an article on Fix Body Group in Hillcrest, I, and only I, was it. But I agreed and there I was, on my one day off, trekking down to the Hillcrest Uptown District shopping center – soon to be renamed the Hillcrest Uptown Block (HUB) once the ongoing $3 million renovation is completed this fall – to meet with Ron Smith, director of operations at Fix Body Group, San Diego’s premier rehab and training center.

Smith, who also goes by the name Ron Kerr, is an approximately 68 inch brick of muscle, charm and movie-star good looks punctuated by a boyish grin that belies his 40 years. When I arrive at the facility, if that even begins to approximate what the Fix Body Group is, Ron is already there, waiting patiently in the lobby of this expansive second-story business situated in the southwest corner above, ironically, Fiji Yogurt and Einstein Bagels, across from Ralphs.

Using a powerful blend of chiropractic, sports therapy, strength training, acupuncture, nutrition and manual therapies such as active release technique (ART), myofascial release and structural integration Fix Body Group offer the necessary therapies to get their clients back performing at peak levels.

“We have ten treatment rooms [and] one of the biggest differences here is that in a lot of chiropractic offices you get treated in a main room. But, here, we have people come into private rooms that are a little bit bigger and a little bit nicer,” explains my host as I’m already racing mentally ahead, drawing conclusions about overpriced bodywork that would quickly be shattered. (Deep muscle stimulation with a vibrating hammer anyone?)

Next, Ron takes me into a small room that houses a saline-based, self-cleaning cold tub – of course – that maintains a brisk temperature of 51 degrees but, the perpetually sunny Smith explains, “It can go as low as 41 degrees and it can go as high as 161 degrees. It really speeds up the recovery process.” (The tub is open to anyone, especially athletes, who might not have access to one.)

As we continue our tour, and my body’s self-consciousness mounts, I repeatedly hear talk of integration. It’s a concept that is as integral to Fix Body Group as it is to any holistic approach to our physical, mental and, some would argue, spiritual health. “You’ll meet the clinic director, Dr. Shawn Robeck, and he will assess you and then he’ll write your prescription for you, meaning you specifically need to get an adjustment, some active release technique, acupuncture and some strength work and you get to see that all in the same day. Everyone works for us at Fix Body Group. There are no independent contractors so we don’t have to outsource anyone.”

I am then introduced to such foreign-sounding concepts as non-surgical spinal decompression, myofascial releasing, kinesis tape and running gait analysis. And through it all, I’m reminded of what I once saw in L.A.’s Frontiers magazine for one of the scores of plastic surgery advertisements that appear to keep that magazine in business: “You. Only better.”

At the end of our tour, we sit back down in the lobby where we began and I pepper Ron with questions about his past, his, and to some degree Fix Body Group’s, future and, naturally, cost. “Our price point is higher. But, it’s like all things in life. You can drive a Toyota, which I personally drive, or you can drive a Mercedes. They are both going to get you there but one’s a much nicer ride. The difference here is when you pay your price point, it covers everything that you’re doing so you might get ‘touched’ by five different people. You’re not here for a seven-minute appointment. You’re here for the better part of an hour. Everything is about the experience here.”

I asked Ron, given the fixation we Americans have on results, if they have ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures to inspire potential customers. “We don’t. This is a medical practice and we don’t fixate on that. We respect the care and privacy of the people who come here. Besides, if you reach out to the athletic community, I think what you’ll find speaks volumes about the work we’re doing here.”

Finally, I asked Ron what he would do with me, a middle-aged, cheese-loving loaf whose only workout consists of raising a can of tall, cold Tecate to his parched lips. “So the first thing we’re going to do is find out about your past (God help me!), the different styles of training you’ve done in the past to see what motivates you, work with you to define some goals. So when you say, ‘Hey, I’m (insert my age) and I want to be in better shape,’ that can mean a whole spectrum of things. It could mean you want to lose six percent body fat. It could mean you want to run a 5K. Maybe you have a husband or wife that’s more active and you want to keep up with them. Then we put you through a battery of assessments. We do the typical height, weight and circumference measurements on your body. But then we get into some really cool fancy stuff. We do body fat using ultrasound. Then we do two-dimensional scans of limbs. So we’ll actually do a whole scan of the limb which will show millimeters of fat, millimeters of muscle down to the bone.”

As Ron goes into a further explanation of how these scans and ultrasounds help direct his team into coming up with strategies to combat whatever roadblocks emerge in one’s transformation, my mind wanders off to something I said to Ron earlier in the tour: This ain’t your father’s gym.

For more information, visit Fix Body Group at FixBodyGroup.com or call them at 619-295-9791.

Fix Body Group, 1010 University Ave. C203, San Diego, CA 92103