I’m Jennifer Higgins — a certified personal trainer and integrative mental health counselor in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. I train people whose goal isn’t only a stronger body, but a steadier mind to go with it.
Some of the people I train come to me for strength, stamina, or to feel at home in their body again. Others come because their mood, their sleep, or their anxiety has them looking for something that actually helps — and they have heard that movement might. Both are the right reason to start.
You do not need to be fit to begin, and you do not need to love exercise yet. We start from your current fitness level and from what you genuinely enjoy, because a plan you resent is a plan you will quietly abandon.
It started when I was a teenager. I noticed that exercise lifted my mood and my confidence, and I fell in love with it. The physical changes were a gift — but what really hooked me was something deeper: when I was struggling with anxiety, depression and the weight of post-traumatic stress, movement could lift me out of a place that felt impossible to climb out of any other way.
As an undergraduate studying psychology I chased down every chance to research the science behind how physical movement shapes mental health, and soon after earning my degree I became a certified personal trainer. Something remarkable happened almost immediately: my training clients found it easy to open up about the hardest parts of their lives while we moved, and they left each session with clearer minds and lighter moods.
More than twenty years later I am still doing both. I am also an ultra runner and an ultra-running coach, which is its own long education in patience, pacing and what a body will do for you if you look after it.
Training here is built on the same principle as everything else at this practice: the mind and the body are one system, and treating them together works better than treating either alone.
I fell in love with exercise as a teenager because of what it did for my mood, not for the mirror. That is still the centre of how I train people — strength and conditioning that lift anxiety, depression and low energy just as surely as they build muscle.
Your plan is shaped by the fitness you have today, the things you actually like doing, and the realities of your week. The goal is never to add one more pressure to your life. It is to give you something that makes the rest of it easier.
Sustainable, realistic changes rather than rules to break. Food is one of the most powerful tools we have for steadying mood and energy, so it is part of the conversation from the first session rather than an afterthought.
In-person sessions at my private studio in Old Saybrook — or, for clients further afield and anyone who prefers to train independently, a guided exercise plan that I write and update each week as you progress.
Book a free, no-pressure consultation. We will talk through where you are, what you want back, and whether training together is the right fit.
In-person in Old Saybrook, CT · Virtual across Connecticut & beyond