Personal Trainer & Mobility Specialist
In 2020, I severely sprained my ankle in rehearsal. Then lockdown happened. Without access to in-person physical therapy, I went looking for answers and found a YouTube video of Dr. Andreo Spina talking about ankle mobility.
Down the rabbit hole I went.
Suddenly, joint health, mobility, and updated movement science were answering questions I’d carried through my entire career as a professional dancer.
Functional Range Conditioning gave me a framework for understanding what was actually happening inside a joint: how it moves, how it adapts, and how we can build strength and control in the places our bodies need it most. It wasn’t about reinventing movement. It was about understanding the machinery a little better.
And it completely changed the way I thought about pain, mobility, strength, and training.
I realized I had spent most of my life moving too quickly to really understand how I moved. There was never time. As a dancer, my job was to step to the beat, hit the choreography, and make it happen—whether my body was happy about it or not.
Funny enough, I’d already fallen in love with moving slowly years earlier at Colorado College, in a class called Naked and Delicious—because of course it was. Japanese performance artists Eiko and Koma Otake introduced me to “the art of hesitation”: a glacially slow, deeply attentive way of moving.
Turns out, slowing down gives you time to notice things.
After certifications in Functional Range Conditioning and Kinstretch—and years of putting the work into practice—I’ve only become more interested in what happens when we give our bodies that time. Time to explore. Time to build strength. Time to understand what a joint can do instead of only noticing it when something hurts.
Dance began as a way to express my love of movement and build a life around my body. But dance didn't love my body back. Up&Adam grew from figuring out how to heal my joints—and realizing I could help other people understand and strengthen their bodies, too.
My greatest education came from being an injured dancer. Call me Humpty, but none of the king’s horses or the king’s men were putting me back together for good.
Eventually, I realized I wasn’t something that needed to be put back together. I needed to understand the body I already had—and learn how to make it more capable.
Adam Dickerson is a Colorado native and Colorado College alum (Art Studio, ‘13). After graduating, Adam moved to NYC to perform with Graham 2, H.T. Chen & Dancers, Amy Marshall Dance Company, and Paul Taylor Dance Company. While performing and touring as a dancer, Adam turned to the world of group fitness for additional strength and conditioning training. In 2015 he began teaching at Physique 57 and in 2018 at Obé Fitness, which would lead to his certifications: Personal Trainer (NASM), Barre Alliance, and Mobility Specialist (FRC). Group fitness instruction opportunities led Adam to teach in boutique fitness studios in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Beverly Hills, the Hamptons, and highlighting self-care and motivation techniques on ABC News. In 2024, Adam moved back to Colorado Springs to combine his passion for dance, music, and healthy movement with a mobility joint-training class called Up&Adam. In the Spring of 2026, Adam began teaching Mobility and Conditioning and Contemporary Dance classes at CC, as well as Ballet and Contemporary Dance classes at UCCS. He now also teaches at Life Time in COS and Castle Pines. Adam is one of three COS '26-'28 lululemon Ambassadors, and aims to use his platforms to guide his students and clients towards a healthy relationship with movement.
