Honest Gabe

When you look at a person, what do you see?

One of Titles veteran trainers, Gabe Redel is a stalwart fixture in the club on weeknights. If he isn’t teaching he is at his usual bag with his headphones on throwing powerhouse kicks until he’s drenched in sweat.  A skilled fighter who has trained with Israel Gomez and a former member of the American Killer Bees (UFC champion Anderson Silva’s Team), he keeps to himself when he can, radiating a quiet intensity and delivering consistently good, technique-heavy classes. But what he truly excels in is his personal training.

There was a near cult-following surrounding Gabe it seemed, most of his clients had trained with him for years--long-time members like Keeley Bowman and Ernie Wickham. He isn’t the loudest trainer by any means, he won’t yell at you to push through and he certainly won’t shower you with praise--and yet he has some of the most remarkable success stories in the club.

Jennifer Malotte is an advanced kickboxer has trained with him now for almost three years. He taught her from the ground up and helped her develop herself as an athlete. “At the first trainer showcase I was deciding who I wanted to do PT with,” she explained. “I did mitts with Gabe and learned more in 10 minutes than I had for three hours with someone else.”

I asked him what the secret to his success was. “Introverted people get along with me,” he stated-matter-of-factly in his homey Midwest accent. “Introverted people like to have a plan and move forward.”

When Kristin Hedges walked into the doors of Title she had a lot of frustration, severely overweight, she felt trapped in her own body. Shedding the weight didn’t even seem a possibility to her--she had no plan--she just knew that she had a lot of anger and wanted to hit a bag. But after losing fifty pounds in her first three months, she decided to start doing personal training. “I’m a people watcher and I watched all of the trainers carefully for weeks before I decided,” she explained. “I wanted someone who would be honest with me.”

She did her research on Gabe, re-reading his Title bio and social media and she said that “It seemed like we had enough in common that I would feel safe enough to at least open the door.” Now almost one year later and over 200 pounds lost, she says that training with him was the best decision she ever made.

“From the very first session I felt like he read me like a book--I couldn't believe how someone I had only had a few conversations with seemed to have such a good read on me,” she told me post-workout-glow sitting in the weight room at the club. “Things that I felt were so deeply hidden and I never showed to anyone seemed to be so obvious to him. He called me out on things like lack of patience, temper, frustration. Those things were and still are so much who I am. I have never had someone in my life who was so honest with me.”

“That began to build the foundation of trust,” she said smiling knowingly. “I wanted honesty. I wanted something I could trust and believe--I wanted something that would make me face the reality and make me better.”

To anyone looking in, Kristin Hedges seemed to all the world like the sweetest, most easy-going person imaginable--but Gabe saw through her and saw the battle that was raging within. Gabe never looked at fitness unilaterally, to him there were three components to overall well-being that had to be in alignment: the body, mind, and spirit.

“Some people need to progress mentally because they come in here with bad attitudes and a strange view on the world,” he explained. “With exercise and your body you only get truth, you either get results or you don’t, you either get led the wrong way or you get led the right way and see results.”

“It’s as simple as that?” I asked. He nodded.

Gabe initially seemed like a very straight and narrow kind of guy--left brained, analytical, A+B=C--but that couldn’t be further from his true nature. When I asked him why he felt motivated to learn martial arts, he claimed an intangible benefit--he could finally fight back in his nightmares. He drew a sense of deep-seeded confidence from his physical training that manifested itself in his subconscious.

This dreamer’s quiet exterior hid a deeply powerful creative side, little did I know he was a prolific writer having published several books and a collection of poems and short stories. His work was predominantly the sci-fi, fantasy genre--with off-the-wall subjects on anything from monsters to a futuristic cloud skier caught in another world.

When I read some of his poetry online, I was shocked at how emotionally astute he was. He observed the world through a lens of intrigue, and placed the most difficult human conditions at the readers feet in a deeply profound way--aspiration, self-awareness, weakness, love. The human bonds in his life were precious--the all-American boy from a small Wisconsin farming town, he was very close with his family.

At the beginning of last year, his mother was diagnosed with Non Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. “She would have died within weeks but since the treatment was successful, she has been given a timeline,” he said. “It hasn't been easy. We treated it like a mission to help her beat the cancer. She has beat it at this point and continues to fight to increase the years she has left to live--her life expectancy is at a 10 year maximum.” It is now a matter of watching and waiting for Gabe and his family, but they continue to stay strong and he makes the pilgrimage back home as often as he can.

He was very humble about his writing. Kristin said she re-reads some of his poetry on a daily basis. “I really relate his poem, ‘Rise to Weakness’ to our training,” she explained. “It kinda came about when we doing that whole ‘Rise to Greatness’ thing and you feel like you’re weak and you haven’t met that goal--that’s where that strength comes from, it’s coming back from that.”

When Kristin first began training with Gabe, she was unable to do even the most basic exercises and couldn’t do the core workout because she couldn’t get up and down off of the ground. He slowly began to introduce her to things that she never thought possible, even mitt-work, weight-lifting and kickboxing. “He asked me to jump one day and I couldn’t, my legs just wouldn’t do it,” she laughed. “Now I can hop slowly back and forth across the gym, I never thought I could do that.”

His creativity influences his training greatly, with carefully designed workouts suited for each individual client with a specific goal in mind. “You learn to toughen up in here and plow through it,” he explained. “When you’re put through physical stress, physical strain and knocking out hard workouts and learning how to enjoy that feeling of getting through something tough, you can apply it to other areas in your life.”

“In May I will have been training with Gabe for four years,” Jennifer Malotte told me as we chatted at the front desk. “It’s a real credit to him as a trainer that all this time we’ve been together and I haven’t gotten bored yet.”

Now, Kristin Hedges delights in the anticipation of each new butt-kicking workout with Gabe, “It’s like Christmas morning every time” she grinned. “The only way I can describe it is ‘unlocking boxes’  I still struggle to put into words what this really feels like, but it happens like magic. All of those things I couldn't and still can’t do all of a sudden spring open like a jack in the box and I think ‘Oh, box unlocked’  Once we unlock a box that new ability never goes away, but now that it’s unlocked we can work on it and make it better.”

“Gabe listens patiently to me ramble about the magical unlocking of the boxes,” she laughed. “I get emotional and he listens then we get back to work….I leave every session feeling challenged but not frustrated."

“I can't see where we are headed. I can't visualize where we are going to be 3, 6, 12 months from now but I know Gabe knows,” Kristin explained. “He not only sees where we are going but he knows what we need to do in each and every workout to get there. Sometimes I wish I could get a glimpse of where we will be this time next year, but that would ruin the magic of all that we will discover.”

“Truth, honesty and respect--that’s what I have in Gabe,” she told me with tears in her eyes. “I often tell him that there is no way I would ever be where I am today without him, and he is quick to turn it back on me and say that he just puts together some exercises and I am the one that comes in there and works....But the truth is, it is both of us....every session, every workout....giving 100% to each other in this process. It's strong and its powerful and something that I am so grateful for every day.”

Article by Kirsten Hall