Who am I
I’m Gio, a mover, a coach and a student of embodied practices. I help people to navigate the complex landscape of movement and its overlaps with life.
Through personalized coaching, I support you in building a practice that serves your life, not a life that revolves around your practice.
Use the links below to navigate this page!
My story
I started swimming when I was six years old and soon began competing. Swimming shaped my body and taught me discipline, commitment and grit— it was my first encounter with physical training.
At 18, I discovered freediving and quite literally immersed myself in it. I was no longer satisfied staying on the surface. I wanted to go deep.
Freediving opened a multidimensional world. It wove together yoga, breathwork, resistance training, swimming, flexibility, and mental regulation into one integrated frame. It became one of my greatest passions — and still is today.
I’m now a certified AIDA Assistant Freediving Instructor. My personal bests are a 5:34 minute static breath hold and 37 meters deep in constant weight freediving. But what I value most are not the numbers.
It’s not how deep you go, but how you go deep.
Not how long you hold your breath, but how you hold your breath for long.
That realization gave me a new relationship to effort, presence, and pressure. It gave me a deeper connection to my body and mind — and opened a world of quiet, focused joy.
From Performance to Presence
While freediving was unfolding in episodes, due to living far from the sea, I was also deep in fitness culture. At the time, I was primarily concerned with how I looked and how big my muscles were. I spent years immersed in training, eventually becoming a EREPS certified Personal Trainer.
Alongside that, I became fascinated (some might say obsessed) with longevity. I followed extreme protocols. I tracked everything. For three years, I ate just one vegetarian meal a day and took several supplements.
At some point, I realized I was building a life in service of a practice, rather than the other way around.
I asked myself: Even if I could live longer, would this actually make life more meaningful, more alive, more joyful?
That shift was foundational:
My practice had to serve my life — not the other way around.
From “How I Look” to “How I Move”
As that shift took place, something else began to move in me.
In 2016, I encountered Contact Improvisation for the first time. Years later, I reconnected with it in Brno, Czech Republic, where I lived for six years. There, I found a small but powerful community of contact practitioners. That group changed the course of my path.
Contact reoriented my entire perspective. I began to care less about how I looked and more about how I moved, how I listened, responded, adapted, fell and rose again. It pulled me out of control and into conversation.
Then, Covid hit. And, as if that was not enough, I broke my arm.
The injury was minor but the rehabilitation was very traumatic. After removing the cast my elbow was blocked! For eight months, I couldn’t touch my nose or fully extend my arm. Doctors told me I would never recover full range of motion. But I refused to accept that.
I rehabbed three times a day for months — over 360 hours I counted. Today, my arm is 100% functional. That recovery became a profound part of my movement education.
From “How I Move” to “How I Look When I Move”
As I continued practicing Contact, got involved into Movement Culture through several coaches and then Fighting Monkey, a new thread emerged.
I started to fall in love with dance.
Not as performance or technique, but as something alive, open, and deeply expressive. I was drawn to its complexity, freedom and to the beauty of movement itself.
That led me to move to Freiburg im Breisgau, where I currently live, to immerse myself further in movement, dance and its surrounding community.
A new question began to shape my practice:
Not just how I move, but how I look when I move.
This wasn’t about returning to vanity, it was about exploring expression, aesthetics, presence, and identity through movement. It added a new dimension to my inquiry. And like every stage before, it brought both limitations and new opportunities.
A Landscape of Questions
All these experiences brought me here, not to a final answer, but to a more integrated and curious place.
My journey opened a wide field of questions:
What is movement?
What makes a practice meaningful?
How do different systems (physical, emotional, mental) affect and shape each other?
What does it mean to plan and to improvise?
What does it mean to commit?
What does it mean to let go and be open to the new?
How do we integrate movement with life, not separate from it?
What is the role of a movement coach in this complex landscape?
I’ve been lucky to meet incredible coaches, teachers, and practitioners along the way. They didn’t hand me answers. They helped me ask better questions.
That’s what I hope to offer to the people I work with:
a space to inquire, explore and grow, where movement becomes a way of meeting life more fully.
Hey, but do you have any questions?
For any curiosities, remarks or reflections, feel free to send me a line in the form below ;)
My philosophy in 9 statements
The best practice is the one you actually do
Sustainability beats perfection. If something feels meaningful and doable, it has power. If not, it stays theoretical.
Form follows function
Movement should be led by purpose, not aesthetics. The form of your body is a consequence, not the end goal, of your practice.
Your practice should serve your life, not the other way around
Movement is not a separate domain. It’s part of your daily life, your responsibilities, your challenges, your dreams. Practice should support you, not demand your obedience.
Sets and reps are good servants but bad masters
Progress can be measured, but it should also be felt. Sensation, feedback, and presence matter more than numbers. A mindful single rep can be worth more than ten thoughtless ones.
Practice is alive
Repetition builds depth, but practice must also evolve. Your needs, interests, and body change over time. So should your training.
Practice is personal
What works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. There are no universal formulas, only individual paths.
How you show up matters more than what you do
Presence, intention, honesty: these shape your experience more than any specific technique or drill. The how always colors the what.
There’s nothing you must do
There’s no perfect movement, no ideal checklist. What you choose to practice depends on what you care about and who you meet. And I’m glad we’re meeting now ;)
Integrity over identity
Your practice is not meant to prove who you are. It’s meant to support you in moving with honesty, curiosity and coherence. You don’t need to earn your identity through your training, you just need to live in alignment with it.
What a movement coach does (as I see it)
1. Disrupt Rigidity
One of my aspirations is to disrupt rigidity: in the body, in the mind, and in the environment around the client.
Rigidity creates fragility. A routine might work, until life shifts, until your context changes or until you’re asked to respond differently. In these moments, what doesn’t adapt breaks down.
My aim is to support clients in moving from fragility to anti-fragility by intentionally introducing a variety of stimuli, perspectives, and experiences.
This happens across multiple levels:
Contextual and social: I aim to counteract the echo chamber effect — that comfortable but limiting place where we’re only exposed to confirming voices and familiar situations. I create conditions that invite contrast and friction, not just repetition.
Physical and neurological: I work to expand capacity and adaptability by challenging predictable movement patterns and helping clients develop new skills and motor solutions.
Personal and narrative: many limits don’t live in the body, but in the stories we believe about who we are and what we can do. Part of my job is to challenge fixed self-concepts and invite more flexible identities.
This process often means working with fear, hesitation and psychological resistance, not to eliminate them, but to create space around them. While I’m not a therapist, I support clients in working through blocks that limit their movement and expression.
At a foundational level, I help clients re-pattern dysfunctional strategies and rediscover ways of moving that are more integrated, adaptable and alive.
2. Support Commitment
While I help clients break out of rigid patterns, I also support them in committing to what matters.
Commitment is not the opposite of adaptability — it’s what gives a practice depth, momentum, and meaning over time.
The role of a movement coach is to hold space for both:
To know when to challenge repetition, and when to help someone stay the course.
To prevent collapse into chaos, but also stagnation into habit.
I support clients define what they're truly committed to and stay with it long enough to let transformation happen.
That might mean repeating a movement, a process or a mindset long enough to extract its real value without becoming trapped by it.
It’s a living discipline.
One that honors both consistency and change.
3. Expand Perception
We live in a world that trains us to look outward. But movement begins with the ability to feel.
A core part of my work is to cultivate somatic awareness: the capacity to sense, perceive, and relate to what’s happening inside.
This is where we shift from doing to feeling.
It’s not just about efficiency or performance, it’s about reconnecting movement to meaning and joy.
Movement is more than biomechanics. It can be expression, exploration, communication, healing, play. It doesn’t need to be productive to be valuable.
4. Foster Movement Autonomy
Ultimately, my role is to support clients in building movement autonomy: a sense of agency in their practice.
That means:
Encouraging curiosity and exploration beyond structured sessions
Helping people design their own training systems
Supporting them to take ownership of their journey
Over time, the practice becomes something more than training. It becomes a relationship; with your body, your environment, your life.
The goal is not just to move better, but to relate to movement differently.
To see it not only as a path to a goal, but as a way of being in the world.
Ready to explore this further?
Book a free 20-minute call to see if working together feels like the right step for you.
What is it like to work with me
Every person is different and so is every process.
In a one-to-one coaching context, I don’t follow standardized plans or templates. Instead, we shape the work based on your physical condition, lifestyle, current responsibilities, available time, interests, aspirations, and existing practices. No two journeys are the same.
We start with where you are. From there, we build something together.
Over time, our work might touch on a variety of areas. Here’s how I currently categorize the territories we may explore:
Strength
Mobility
Coordination
Balance
Inversions
Ground Movement
Improvisation
Object Play
Somatic Awareness
Some days the work will feel playful and energizing. Other times, it may be more technical or confronting. I aim to strike a balance between making the practice engaging and gently pushing you into new territory.
Most importantly, this is a relational process. We’ll build a close working relationship rooted in trust, care, and shared curiosity.
In Online Coaching, we stay connected through regular video calls and message support.
In In-Person Training, we meet regularly to move, reflect and expand your capacity physically, mentally and creatively.
My role as a coach is not to give you all the answers, but to walk beside you, point out perspectives you may not see, and challenge you when needed.
You’ll always remain the one walking the path, but you won’t walk it alone.
Before we begin, I’ll ask you to fill out a short form and we’ll schedule a free introductory call. This helps us both understand whether we’re a good fit. And if I believe another coach would serve you better, I’ll tell you openly and point you in that direction.
If you made it this far I suspect we might be capable of great things together!
For a free 20-Minute Call click the button below
Let’s talk about where you’re at, what you’re stuck on, and whether this approach is what you need right now.
If you want just to say hi or just have a chat send me an email message here , DM here or subscribe to my newsletter in the footer below.
May the force be with you ;)