Welcome to our multi-part storytelling series, revealing the real-life journey behind You’re a Personal What?—a television drama inspired by Sandra Bueckert-Davison’s life.
Follow along each week as we peel back the layers of Sandra’s story—one that proves the path to strength often starts in the darkest places. Join our email series to follow Sandra’s real-life journey. Get exclusive behind-the-scenes content and early previews delivered straight to your inbox.
Thirty-six years ago, I walked into a Calgary gym with a belief that went against what most people told me. Personal training, they said, was a passing idea, a luxury for movie stars and wealthy athletes. It was not a career, and certainly not something that a young Black woman in the 1980s could expect to build a life around.
But I had watched the way people came alive when someone finally gave them the space to be seen and supported in their own bodies. I knew that strength was not just about lifting weights. It was about finding yourself on the other side of fear, or grief, or loneliness. And so, I stayed. I showed up day after day, until the work spoke louder than the skepticism.
Back then, the door I was knocking on was fitness. Today, the door is film and television. I have spent the past few years learning how to write stories for the screen, how to craft characters and arcs, how to take the experiences of a lifetime and shape them into something that others can watch and feel.
And just as it was in the beginning, the same questions circle around me now. Who do you think you are? Do you really belong here? What makes you believe that people will listen?
The truth is, I do not have all the answers. What I do have is the memory of what it felt like to stand in that first studio, when nobody believed personal training could become anything more than a curiosity. Today, it is a forty-one billion dollar industry, and I can say with certainty that it grew because people like me refused to let the vision slip away.
Join our email series to follow Sandra’s real-life journey—the one that inspired You’re a Personal What? Get exclusive behind-the-scenes content and early previews delivered straight to your inbox.
