Who we are
Train Unique was built in Louisiana across more than a decade. California is the next floor. Here are the two people responsible for it.
Numbers from the Louisiana floors: close to five hundred athletes have trained with Train Unique since 2014 — and once a family finds the floor, they tend to keep it. The average athlete has been there four and a half years.
Founder & Owner
Damon's connection to this work started long before Train Unique.
He was diagnosed at age three with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, a rare genetic condition affecting the body's ability to produce certain hormones. Growing up meant medication, medical appointments, lab work, physical limitations, and learning very early that there were parts of his body he could not control.
Fitness changed that.
Sports gave Damon something his medical condition often took away from him: a sense of control over what his body could become. That eventually led him into strength and conditioning, coaching, and professional MMA.
Years later, when Damon began working with athletes with disabilities, he recognized something familiar in them. He understood what it felt like to have people see the diagnosis before they saw the person. And he understood that being challenged, coached, and expected to improve could be empowering instead of cruel.
In 2014, Damon started a small fitness class called DREAMS. Six athletes showed up.
Those six became the beginning of something much bigger.
DREAMS became Unique Fitness. Unique Fitness became Train Unique. The program grew to more than 180 athletes, multiple training locations, a full-time coaching staff, and a coaching certification recognized for continuing education by NASM and AFAA.
The work has been noticed outside the gym, too — a Mayor-President's award in Lafayette, and a seat on the Governor's Advisory Council on Disability Affairs.
But the philosophy never changed.
Train Unique is built around the belief that athletes with disabilities do not need to be handled like they are fragile. They need coaches willing to understand how they move, adapt when necessary, expect effort, and keep raising the standard.
Damon built Train Unique because he knows firsthand that a diagnosis can shape someone's life.
It does not have to define what they are capable of.
A diagnosis can explain the challenge.
It doesn't define the ceiling.
In his own words
What changed the day they stopped saying clients or special needs and started saying athletes — the limiting beliefs it broke, and how it shifted the whole culture of the gym.
Managing Operator · California
Jose's daughter Mia was born in 2011. His wife and mother-in-law noticed first that something in how Mia moved through the world didn't match her sisters. Jose didn't see it at first. But they pushed, the appointment got made, and a pediatrician's screening came back saying she was behind on her milestones and that the word for it might be autism.
His wife found the internet before she found a specialist. She typed in autism and it handed her the worst of everything it had: the bleakest version of the child, the bleakest version of the parent, the life it said they were now going to live. It nearly put her under. That is how this family walked into the world they now work in: frightened, in the dark, and given the worst case first.
Mia was diagnosed in 2013, the same year her sister Destiny was born. Destiny was diagnosed in 2015, as soon as she was old enough to be.
Their youngest has since been diagnosed with White-Sutton syndrome and autism. Whatever Jose has learned through fifteen years of living this, he is still learning it inside his own home in real time.
Somewhere along the way, someone mentioned that a special-needs school in Buena Park was looking for people. Neither Jose nor his wife came from special education. Their first qualification wasn't a degree or certificate. It was years of learning beside their daughter.
They were both hired and spent three years working one-to-one as paraprofessionals, carrying out students' IEP goals every day under a teacher.
Jose eventually left and trained as a personal trainer. Years later, his brother-in-law, an RBT, called about a family in Venice Beach he couldn't serve. They wanted their son training in a gym and learning to eat better. Jose took the work.
He hasn't left the work since.
Eventually, those two parts of his life came back together. The father who learned disability at home and the trainer who learned how to build strength became the same person. Today, Jose is building Train Unique California around both.
He is a certified personal trainer, and before that spent three years running IEP goals one-to-one inside a special-needs classroom. The paper is real. It just isn’t where the understanding came from.
The paper made him a trainer.
Living it made him useful.
