Charles Oakes


About PerfectingWellnessSM, Inc.


We are personal fitness trainers; more importantly and significantly,
We are wellness professionals.


PerfectingWellnessSM, stands in contrast to personal fitness training and has roots in ancient wisdom. Across traditional cultures everywhere, the ancients considered their members as unified wholes. “Body, soul, and spirit” joined intimately, each part influencing and influenced by each other part, arriving at what it means to experience wellness.

Dr. Charles Oakes has inquired of these roots over much of his life and applied them through his national scope company Health Care Solutions, Inc. These efforts now have unveiled a more perfect wellness, based on a systems approach to wellness training. A system that includes consideration of:
The modern era of personal fitness training began in the 1960s with the advent of aerobics as defined and developed by Dr. Kenneth Cooper. In the 1970s, Jane Fonda brought aerobics to popular television programming. In the 1980s weight training, by now no longer the sole stuff of Olympians and body builders, moved into gyms everywhere.

“Mind-body” practitioners appeared in the 1990s. These included complementary and alternative medicine (Yoga, Tai Chi, meditation, acupuncture, herbal remedies, others). They collaborated with progressive strength trainers and aerobics instructors to shape the early modern expressions of “wellness.” The concept today has many variations. The writer of Ecclesiastes was right: “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Humankind is systemic in its essence and deserving of consideration according to wholeness rather than as a collection of parts each responding in isolation to single focus exercise protocols. So, what comes first?

It is one thing to fit people to existing exercise routines and protocols. It matters not how complex, cute, and comprehensive the parts of a routine might be. There is questionable worth in how clever, creative or highly certified fitness trainers have become. The ancients cry out from the past:

We should not fit people to exercise routines.
We instead fit exercise routines to people in terms of their wholeness.
In practice, the difference is radical.


PerfectingWellnessSM is fully aware of the difference. We ask how our clients want physical fitness to contribute to and be sensitive to all aspects of their lives? Their answer is that exercise training should see them across a broad range of considerations and concerns. We do, and that’s who we are.

I asked Will, age 85, why he was so urgent to lose weight and build upper body strength. Why, with multiple chronic disabilities and risk factors for exercise did he insist on a tailored and focused program of exercise? “It’s simple,” he said. “I love to make furniture for my family, and I can’t get up to the work bench with this big belly, and I can’t hold the heavy power tools with my weak arms and shoulders.”


Hundreds of clients have talked to us about issues similar to those of Will whose commitment was to family and reaching personal purpose and not primarily to pumping lead.


On the surface these concerns are unrelated to exercise. Some prospective clients bring their personal purposes up even before they have decided to contract with us. PerfectingWellnessSM addresses and encourages these and serves the whole person on a one-to-one as-needed and as-requested basis. Our seven dimensions of wellness include:

•Physical and functional training—our starting point:

This addresses physical limitations (including numerous chronic diseases) preventing a fuller life. We follow the accepted protocols established by the American College of Sports Medicine and the National Strength Conditioning Association. These are the international gold standards for personal fitness training. Our independent contracting trainers are market-tested along all seven aspects of our program. We use a proprietary software program containing 2500-pictured exercises with instructions. Where indicated, we use whole body vibration to accelerate training for strength, endurance, balance, gait, and flexibility.
•Wellness without borders:

We serve our clients in one of four facilities in mid-Tennessee; in their homes anywhere within 25 miles of any of our cooperating facilities; and by computer/webcam/phone mentoring anywhere in the continental United States. In most cases, we prescribe a wide range of exercises for in-home use at minimal cost.
• Intellectual/knowledge base building:

We want our clients to know why we train them the way we do, to increase their knowledge base. We do this through face-to-face counsel, providing relevant literature, and supporting our hands-on efforts with industry-accepted pictures of exercises.
arrow3Psychological and emotional strengthening:
Here, we address the linkage between neurological and motor issues to show how exercise becomes a gateway to lessening emotions such as anxiety and depression.
• Social and environmental barriers and supports:
It’s important to identify interpersonal barriers to and social supports for a comprehensive wellness program. Often counsel is sufficient. Sometimes we enlist the help of outside parties (e.g., family members) to strengthen the program’s efforts.
• Spiritual and philosophical issues:

Often, clients seek answers to questions on root and surface causes and problems, e.g., wanting insight as to “why me?” And just as often, we point out how issues such as resentment, bitterness, or lack of forgiveness can weaken the immune system’s response to exercise.
• Individualized goals and life-purposes:
Exercise and fitness, while important in their own rights, are merely pathways or means to life changing goals and purposes of more enduring and all-encompassing value. We discuss these early in our relationship with the client, for they lie at the heart of the PerfectingWellnessSM experience.