28 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JANUARY 22-28, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com Health& Fitness Join the Resistance The verdict is in: Strength training is a critical component of healthy bones and overall wellness. By Sara RubinWilliam Perlstein retired at age 50 from a career that concluded with 17 years of doing admin work, sitting at a desk. Like (let’s be honest) most of us, he had let himself go. He was generally healthy, so there was no obvious sign he needed an intervention. “It was subtle,” he says. “I was losing my breath walking up a flight of steps. I was like, this is ridiculous. It hit me: I am not in shape, and I am feeling it.” He went to the Monterey Sports Center and signed up for personal training. He was matched with Valerie Valdez (and later followed her when she opened her own gym, Strength), who instructed him through exercises. He’d dabbled before in training, but it never quite clicked. With Valdez, he says it was different. She would use medical terms and describe anatomy, and why it made a difference to tuck his elbow an inch this way or that—the most minor adjustment could resolve a tug on a tendon that transformed a movement from painful to effective. Perlstein, now 58, has since started a business and continues strength training three times a week. He’s incorporated no other exercise into his routine, but he’s noticed a transformation. It’s not something he can measure—he doesn’t know how much he can lift, for example—but he feels different. He and his wife went to Paris for a 30th-anniversary trip and walked 284 steps up the Arc de Triomphe. “When we got to the top, standing there overlooking the city of Paris, I thought, ‘God, a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to do this. Just being stronger—being healthier is probably a better way to say it—just makes such a difference in life.” Valdez is a trainer, an academic, an athlete and an entrepreneur. She was still a teen in Southern California who started reading about strength training to improve her athletic performance. She attended CSU Monterey Bay to play softball, and majored in exercise physiology, thinking she would pursue a career in physical therapy. Meanwhile, she was training on the side to earn money. In 2018, she enrolled in a doctorate PT program at Duke University, but felt called to return from the classroom to her clients. “I decided that’s where my passion lies,” Valdez says. “I said, I am going to bridge this gap between health care and wellness.” That led her to open Strength, first in a 600-square-foot space in downtown Monterey for personal training in 2020. She later expanded to a larger gym—which is in the process of expanding again—that accommodates small group classes for up to eight people at four shared weight stations. Classes draw mostly women, including many older women, some of whom have been referred by doctors when test results show bone density loss. This is part of what Valdez means about bridging the gap to health. Extensive research shows that resistance training—that is, using weight to challenge the movement, building muscle and that muscle then pulling on our skeletons—can help strengthen bone. “A variety of muscular loads are applied on the bone during resistance exercise, which generate stimuli and promote an osteogenic response of the bone,” according to a 2018 study published in the journal Endocrinology and Metabolism. (Other studies show benefits for everything from diabetes risk to metabolism to brain health.) Weight training was once a male-dominated sport, but Valdez says many doctors and their patients now see it as preventive medicine, so all body types, ages and genders are lifting weights. “None of us are competing,” Valdez says. “We’re just training for life, and the things we want to do in life.” Training for life through resistance exercises involves increasing the resistance load, whether through bands or weights, progressively challenging the body to work harder. “There is no other way for the human body to get stronger unless you progress,” Valdez says. “The body likes to adapt.” She works with clients who spent years working with the same set of 10-pound dumbbells stored under their bed for years; that doesn’t build strength, Valdez explains. “We’re saying, your body can handle five more pounds this week or three more reps,” she says. “You need to constantly increase or give your body another stimulus.” Part of her philosophy is that it goes beyond increasing the load, but also informing a person about their movement mechanics, understanding alignment. That’s where she says education comes in, helping people do more than just pump more iron. She talks about proprioception, the understanding of our bodies in space. “Some people don’t have it,” Valdez says. “It’s not something you can’t build but it’s something that needs to be taught.” As an example, she describes guiding someone through squats. There is the simple way to do the motion—just squat then get back up—but understanding and adjusting the details changes the quality of the movement. “We teach you what it’s like to use your hips or push them back,” she says, “or what it’s like to have your knees in line with your toes. “People start to feel how well their body can move. I just want everyone to feel what it’s like to be strong.” “My love for strength training is that it has endless benefits,” says Valerie Valdez (above). Below: Valdez works with client Rose Valdez (also her mom) on a cable row. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS
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