My Story

I the road to having my own busines was definitely the scenic route.

Hello, I am Scott Kolasinski. I am from Toledo, Ohio and I have lived in the Bay Area since 2000. After high school, I went to Miami University wanting to become a pathologist. I majored in Microbiology and worked in a hospital as a patient transporter in Radiology after my freshman year of college.

After receiving my undergraduate degree in Microbiology from Miami University in Oxford, OH, I worked in Sunnyvale at a biotech company called Hyseq while finishing my Masters Degree in Exercise Science, with an emphasis on Exercise Immunology. I quickly learned that I did not want to work in a lab. I began studying for the Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) test and volunteered at San Jose State as an Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach under Coach Kim Sword. At the time, I thought working as a professional CSCS with a pro football team would be the "dream job", but it was at San Jose State that I learned the opposite: in the pros, you have to deal with the egos, in college, the players still have something to prove and they are more likely to listen to you. Also, a professional coaching job of any sorts, is very unstable - you need to be able to move around the country if necessary to find the next CSCS job until you find stability, but that is more dependent on the head sport's coach's winning record than your performance as a strength coach. As one of my collegues once said, "You have the most responsibility to get the athletes in shape to win with the least amount of credit."

Under the advice of a former coaching collegue, I began working as a personal trainer at F. I. T. in Los Altos, CA. It was/is a great place. It was there that I honed my skills and learned how little I knew as a personal trainer coming out of getting my Masters degree. The clients asked great, challenging questions, and my collegues asked greater questions and we challenged each other on various strength and conditioning topics. It was there that I became certified as a Sports Nutritionist (ISSN) and I earned a number of other certifications in various specialties of fitness, such as Oylmpic Weightlifting, kettlebells and CrossFit.

After working at F. I. T. for 13 years, wanting to bring to my clients attention more of a preventative health practice instead of just exercise performance, I started my own business in 2015, SK Vitality, in Menlo Park, CA.

For some years, I had an interest in autoimmune diseases and perhaps decreasing or delaying their severity. I have a family history of autoimmune diseases from my mother's side of my family and I was seeing air and fruit allergies in my own children. For me, when I was 14 years old, I had my appendix removed. When I was 38 years old, I was diagnosed with osteoroarthritis in my right hip. At age 46, I was diagnosed with osteoathritis in my left shoulder. The basics of autoimmune diseases are the body attacks itself. We do not seem to know why exactly. Nowadays, we are finding SOME correlations in the research to autoimmune diseases and food. However, I am only SPECULATING, it seems to be a multifactorial event in which there may be some gut disturbances from food we eat that may create allergic reactions over time.

For example, eczema: I have seen various clients who follow strick anti-inflammatory diets have a lower eczema outbreak. I have also seen those same individuals benefit from redlight therapy and/or tanning. Do you find this in the literature, yes, but very little. I realize that I am a single "researcher" with a very small sample size with little experience. However, if I can publish my personal experience, and others might find a similar (or dissimilar experience), then lets talk about it, and perhaps this might ignite a larger experiment with a larger sample size.

Because of my clinical lab and gym experience, while meeting a vast assortment of individuals with various maladies, I have learned what may work and how to advise others on how to circumvent their maladies while progressing in improving their fitness level. It is why I am a firm believer in bi-annual testing of various markers of health in order to see what may or may not be working for each individual.