TL;DR: Franklin Pierce is PEAKFIT Studio’s NASM Certified Personal Trainer and corrective exercise specialist, co-leading the training team in Arden, NC alongside head trainer Alex Zierhut. His approach starts with how you move, not how much you can lift. He fixes the compensations and restrictions first, then builds real strength on top of a body that works correctly. If you’ve been told to “just work around” a bad shoulder, knee, or back, this is what working through it actually looks like.
Table of Contents
- Meet Franklin Pierce
- What a Corrective Exercise Specialist Actually Does
- Franklin’s Approach to Training
- Who Franklin Works Best With
- How to Train With Franklin
- Frequently Asked Questions
Meet Franklin Pierce
Franklin Pierce is one of the two trainers leading the floor at PEAKFIT Studio in Arden, NC, working alongside head trainer Alex Zierhut to run the day-to-day coaching for the studio’s private, appointment-based clientele. He holds his NASM Certified Personal Trainer credential and has gone further into the discipline that shapes most of his coaching: corrective exercise.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A lot of trainers can hand you a workout. Far fewer are trained to look at how you actually move. Where a hip doesn’t fire, where a shoulder compensates, where years of sitting or an old injury rewired the way your body solves a simple squat. They build a program that fixes the cause instead of just working around the symptom.
What a Corrective Exercise Specialist Actually Does
Corrective exercise is a structured process for identifying movement dysfunction. Tight hips, a winging shoulder blade, a knee that caves on every squat. It corrects these issues through targeted programming rather than guesswork. NASM’s Corrective Exercise Specialization, the credential Franklin has pursued, trains coaches to assess posture and movement patterns first, then sequence a plan that releases overactive tissue, lengthens what’s tight, and strengthens what’s gone quiet before loading the pattern back up.
This isn’t a niche concern. CDC survey data from 2023 puts chronic pain at just over 24% of U.S. adults in any given three-month window, and that number climbs sharply with age, reaching roughly 36% among adults 65 and older. Most of those people aren’t being told to stop moving. They’re being told to move differently. That’s exactly the gap a corrective exercise specialist is trained to close.
At a typical commercial gym, a stiff shoulder or a cranky lower back usually gets one of two responses: avoid the movement entirely, or push through it and hope. Neither actually solves anything. Franklin’s training is built specifically to do the third thing: find out why the movement is breaking down and rebuild it.
Franklin’s Approach to Training
Franklin describes his own philosophy simply: movement is more than a workout, it’s a form of self-care. In practice, that means sessions built around two things happening in sequence. First, the body learns to move correctly through the positions life already demands of it. Then, real strength gets layered on top of that foundation. He’s candid that he sees building lean muscle not just as a fitness goal, but as a visible marker of the discipline that goes into earning it.
For clients, that translates to programming that doesn’t skip steps. Before Franklin loads a heavier deadlift or progresses a shoulder press, he wants to know the joint can handle the range of motion and the stabilizing muscles are actually doing their job. It’s a slower start for some clients and a much shorter path to results for almost all of them, because strength built on a faulty pattern tends to break down, usually right when it matters most.
Who Franklin Works Best With
Franklin’s listed specialties at PEAKFIT cover strength training, athletic performance, body transformation, and corrective exercise. The through-line in his coaching is movement quality. He tends to be the right fit for:
- Clients managing a stiff shoulder, cranky knee, or recurring low-back tightness who’ve been told to “just work around it”
- Anyone returning to training after an injury, surgery, or a long layoff who wants a body-readiness check before loading up
- Adults over 40 who want to build real strength without the joint wear-and-tear of generic gym programming
- Athletes and active adults who want their performance training to start with a movement assessment, not just a workout plan