Ben Ballinger, Neighbor

Ben Ballinger is president and founder of Ballinger Athletic Performance, Inc. As a certified trainer and performance enhancement specialist with the National Academy of Sports Medicine and owner of the Training Ground OC gym in Orange County California, Ben has almost a decade of experience working with clients of all types to unleash their full potential and achieve optimal health, physique and performance.

Ben earned his Bachelor’s degree from University of California, Davis, having planned to enter the field of corporate business, but after a couple of short years living the cubicle lifestyle, Ben realized that office politics and mindless busy work weren’t his passion. Having been a multi-sport athlete (including football, track-and-field, wrestling, Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) and fitness enthusiast for most of his life, as well as having trained friends, family and coworkers throughout college and afterwards, in 2009 Ben decided it was time to walk away from his corporate life and focus his energy on pursuing his true dream instead–building a fitness and nutrition business based around helping people transform their bodies and unleash their inner athlete.

Ben has undergone extensive fitness and nutrition training, having achieved certifications and taken countless courses in areas of athletic performance training, physique-based training, sports nutrition, corrective exercise and strength and conditioning. He continues to regularly take classes, workshops and continuing education courses in an effort to always stay on the cutting-edge of the fitness industry and to provide the best possible results for his clients.

In 2010, Ben started CORE Condition, Orange County’s first athletic conditioning fitness camp that allowed him to expand his reach to many more people than personal training alone could. In mid-2011, Ben formed Ballinger Athletic Performance, Inc. and began working with clients all over the US as an online fitness and nutrition coach, specializing in fat loss and competition preparation. With hundreds of successful client transformations under his belt, both locally and nation-wide, Ben opened his fitness facility Training Ground OC in mid-2012, where he’s been transforming bodies, helping break barriers and changing lives every day since.

Ben’s ongoing mission is to provide quality, effective training and nutrition advice that stands out in the sea of misinformation and pseudoscience that currently plagues the health and wellness industry as a whole. Ben’s results-driven training methods and his focus on adding maximum value to his clients’ experience with him have proven to be extremely popular with his community and have helped him create a loyal tribe of Inner Athletes who follow his methods as a lifestyle choice on a daily basis. Ben believes that everyone has an athlete within them, waiting to be unleashed, and it’s each person’s responsibility to put themselves in a position to allow that inner athlete to come to the surface. This is the philosophy that Ben lives by and teaches his clients to live by as well.