There is always a way to move. No matter your history or where you are starting from.
Twenty years of showing up for the women the fitness industry overlooked.
BPhEd (Honours), Modified and Adapted Exercise, Brock University.
Certified Personal Trainer since 2002. Specializing in strength and movement coaching for retired professional women.
If you have arrived at this stage of life feeling like your body is less familiar than it used to be, a little less predictable, a little less your own, you are not imagining it. Maybe fitness has never quite worked for you. The classes moved too fast. The programs assumed a baseline you did not have. You modified, sat things out, pushed through and paid for it later. Or maybe you were active for years, and then life shifted. A health challenge. A season of caring for someone else. And over time, without ever making a conscious decision to stop, movement became something that quietly moved further away. Whatever the path, the result is often the same: a body that feels less familiar, and no clear guide for what comes next. That is exactly what this work is for.
Adapt movement to the person. Never force the person to fit the program.
Most exercise programs begin with a template and ask the person to adjust. This work starts the other way around. It begins with the woman in front of me: her movement patterns, her health history, her confidence level, and the life she wants to keep living. That difference matters most when a body carries real history. And most bodies do.
Twenty years of coaching women with complex health histories.
This is not just what I do. It is what I have always been drawn toward.
I did not stumble into this work. I have been building toward it since I was eight years old standing on a playground wondering why some kids never got to play.
If you want to understand what working together actually looks like, the Work With Me page walks through it in full.At around age eight, I noticed that the less active kids would rarely participate at recess. By middle school I was encountering people who used wheelchairs, had cerebral palsy, and other physical disabilities, and they were constantly left out. It made me curious about why activities could not simply be adapted so that everyone could participate. That question stayed with me all the way to Brock University, where I built my degree around exactly that specialization: physical education for individuals with disabilities. My favourite professor ran a community program for children with physical disabilities, and I was part of the small team that built and delivered it. Those children came back every week. And I kept showing up too, because I knew this was exactly the work I was meant to do.
Since 2002 I have been building and adapting movement programs for hundreds of women: complete beginners, women recovering from hip and knee replacements, women navigating frozen shoulders, osteoporosis, hernias, cancer, heart conditions, and nerve damage.
The women I work with today remind me of those children every single time. They want to carry their groceries without calculating the trips. They want to get down on the floor to play with their grandchildren and get back up without struggling. They arrive sometimes uncertain, sometimes convinced their body has already made its decision. And that is the moment I have always been most drawn to: not the ones who have everything figured out, but the ones who are still reaching.
Many coaches step back from clients with complex health histories. Heidi has always stepped toward them.
Credentials and specialized training.
Heidi Lootsma is an online personal trainer based in Waterloo, Ontario, specializing in strength and movement coaching for women over 60. She holds a Bachelor of Physical and Health Education (Honours) from Brock University with a specialization in physical education for individuals with disabilities, and has been a certified personal trainer since 2002. She has a career-long specialization in modified and adapted movement. Over more than twenty years she has built and adapted movement programs for women navigating osteoporosis, joint replacements, cardiac conditions, neurological challenges, and complex health histories. Her coaching is delivered virtually via live sessions and is designed specifically for retired professional women who want to move safely, build functional strength, and maintain independence.
Bachelor of Physical and Health Education (Honours), Brock University
Specialization in Physical Education for Individuals with Disabilities
Career-long specialization in modified and adapted movement
Certified Personal Trainer, since 2002
Certified in Strength Training for Seniors
CPR and First Aid certified
Additional training across adapted movement, post-surgical rehabilitation, osteoporosis, cardiac conditions, and complex health histories
Highly educated. And a chronic learner. Which means whatever your situation, I have either seen it before or I will find the answer.
Why women often feel safe here when they have not felt safe anywhere else.
My clients are not expected to hide the complicated parts of their history. They are encouraged to bring them into the conversation. Injuries, surgeries, diagnoses, confidence issues, long gaps in movement, fear. All of it is relevant. All of it helps shape the coaching. Because the sessions are live, attentive, and adapted in real time, women often find themselves feeling more supported and more capable than they expected. That combination, of being genuinely seen and genuinely challenged at the right level, is what keeps clients here for years rather than months.
Who Is Heidi
What my own experience with injury and fear taught me about coaching.
The career gave me the professional understanding. What came next gave me the personal one.
I spent most of my life identifying myself through movement. Being athletic was simply part of who I was. In my mid-thirties that started to change.
I began experiencing symptoms that eventually led to a diagnosis of exercise-induced migraines and neurological changes that, for a period, had doctors considering MS. It was not MS. But what followed was a growing fear around the one thing that had always made me feel like myself: movement. I stopped exercising. Not because I did not care about my health, but because I was genuinely afraid of what might happen if I pushed too hard.
As a self-employed trainer, a migraine was not just a painful day. It meant I could not show up for my clients or run my business. And the other losses came alongside it. Shovelling the driveway. Raking leaves. The ordinary physical things that had always been mine to do became things I had to plan around.
I know what it feels like when the body you depend on starts behaving in ways you did not expect. I know what it feels like to wonder whether the version of you that moved freely has already come and gone.
I still navigate spinal degeneration and nerve issues today. Losing that version of myself was something I had to grieve. But grief eventually made room for something else: the understanding that my body was not done with me, and that my job was to work with it rather than wait for a version of it that was not coming back.
And I know there is a way forward. Because I have had to find mine. That is what I bring into this work.
What I believe about movement, after more than twenty years of this work.
I do not believe in one-size-fits-all fitness. I never have. What I believe is that movement is not a fixed destination. It meets you where you are, works with what your body has today, and builds from there. Not from a version of you that existed ten years ago. Not from a body a program assumed. From you, as you actually are right now. That means progress does not have to look the way it used to in order to still be progress. I also believe that the goal is not looking a certain way or hitting a number on a scale. It is building a body you can rely on. One that carries you to the places you want to go. That is what I have been working toward with every client for more than twenty years. And it is what I am here to work toward with you.
Personalized online strength and movement coaching, designed specifically for the woman you are right now, with the history your body actually carries.
Stronger. More confident. Moving through the things that matter without having to plan around your body first.
A little more about me.
I grew up in Cambridge Ontario and have lived in Waterloo since 2002. I am the eldest of three and the proudest auntie to five girls, every single one of them with a personality so fully her own that I genuinely never know what is coming next. I love that about them. My best days involve fresh air and quiet time. I like having a plan because it gives the day direction, but I hold it loosely.
I am a vegetarian who does not love cooking. Pizza and a beer is always my answer. I have been watching Coronation Street since 2002. It is part of my daily routine. My heart has always belonged to strong female musicians. Jann Arden, Brandi Carlile, Melissa Etheridge, Sarah McLachlan. I was at Lilith Fair in the mid-nineties and I have never quite left. I have seen the Dave Matthews Band more times than most people think is reasonable, and I have never once regretted it. I foster cats, which has been one of the more quietly meaningful things I do with my time. I also have a cat of my own: Rupert. He has strong opinions about being heard. If we ever work together on Zoom, there is a very good chance you will meet him. I have lived in 650 square feet since 2004. I do not believe life needs to be big or complicated to be full. I just want it to be real.
Five consecutive years of Readers' Choice recognition from the Waterloo Region Record, voted by the community Heidi served in person before taking her practice online.
The same coaching. Available now to women across Canada, the US, and beyond.
If any of this feels familiar, I would love to talk.
The goal is simple: to help you move through your days trusting your body to show up for you. It is not a sales call. It is a conversation about where you are, what you are working with, and whether what I do is genuinely the right fit for you. You do not need to have it all figured out before we speak.
Book My Discovery Call30 minutes. No commitment. The decision is always yours.