It is not easy to turn around your life and find purpose after encountering multiple life-threatening tragedies.
Most would give up and resign to fate. Yet others take the difficult path of rebuilding and finding meaning in the chaos to inspire others with hope and a lesson that there’s more to life.
Christa Camarillo’s journey is one of great transformation from sports to health matters; from soccer fields to impacting those seeking to reshape their lives. She is a clinical exercise physiologist and health coach, but she started her path as a soccer player.
Over the years, Christa has duly served her patients, helping them deal with the difficult recovery after having heart conditions. Today, she harnesses her skills to attend even to the non-patients, guiding them through the maze of stress, heart health, and alcohol struggles toward a life of purpose and fulfilment.
It has been a fulfilling journey that has seen her mission go beyond physical rehabilitation to encompass mental wellness and the revival of purpose. Through her company Retrain, she empowers many others to rewrite their narratives and reclaim their health and well-being.
Recognizing the surge in alcohol use and stress-induced health issues in the wake of the pandemic, she uses her empathy and expertise to help others to reshape their relationship with alcohol.
So, how did Christa Camarillo transform from sports to wellness and fitness?
Trials and Broken Dreams
From her childhood days, Christa was talented in sports and academics. Her love for soccer and determination for excellence led her to the prestigious North Carolina State University.
There, she would go on to play on a superb team, boasting of Olympic and world champion stars representing USA, Norway, and Canada. In fact, she was the only one who hadn’t yet made a name for herself.
But it wasn’t a smooth ride. It was a journey that was to be challenged by hard trials. As a freshman, she was brutally attacked by a serial rapist who subjected her to a torturous ordeal. She overcame the trauma and managed to stamp her authority on the field in readiness to go pro after graduation.
Sadly, she was involved in a life-threatening accident in which a car hit her while she was training on her road bike, leaving her for dead. Recovery was rough and took several months to years, but she was no longer fit to play soccer.
Health Professional and Coach
However, these tragedies transformed her path from athlete to health professional. She went to grad school and, upon graduation, found work at a local hospital as a clinical exercise physiologist rehabilitating people’s hearts. Her empathy towards the patients, cultivated through her own adversities, drew her more towards the path of caring for others.
Her deep connection with heartbroken patients, formed from the shared experiences of pain and healing, inspired her to later create her company, “Retrain,” a platform to guide people through trauma, stress, and alcohol struggles.
Her life experiences taught her to become a better version of herself. Her mission is to empower her clients to focus on their needs, goals, and challenges and help them retrain, rebuild, and renew themselves. To Retrain is to use movement and lifestyle change to look and feel better.
Christa Camarilla hosts forums and workshops to coach people on stress and the heart, managing the risk factors, and ways to change habits and mindsets and live fulfilling lives.
She also collaborates with Reframe, an alcohol reduction app, to help those on the path to changing their relationship with alcohol.
Christa Camarillo’s journey from the soccer field to caregiver and health coach is an inspiring testament to how far one can go with resilience and the unwavering desire to rebuild their life to serve a bigger purpose.