Daisy Garcia started her senior year at UC Berkeley in a relatable spot. She was stressed about due dates for her sociology honors thesis, and sleep was secondary to project deadlines and club obligations. She ordered takeout meals at obscure hours. Her physical health suffered. Her mental health did, too.
Garcia’s physician at University Health Services (UHS) noticed she was slipping and encouraged her to take proactive steps to get her health back on track. To ease crippling stomach pains, Garcia’s doctor recommended she minimize fast food and find ways to reduce her stress. Physical activity was important to ease anxiety, she was told.
The doctor also told Garcia about a program called Exercise is Medicine On Campus (EIM-OC), which offers prepaid consultations with a health coach or personal trainer to qualifying students who fall below a weekly physical activity threshold.
But stress was just part of the college experience, Garcia reasoned. She’d get through it. And even if she wanted to hit up the gym, she didn’t think she had time to go anyway.
The stress and pain intensified for months until one visit last spring when her doctor put it to her bluntly: “Are you avoiding dealing with this?” Garcia realized she needed to stop her spiral.
So she enlisted the help of a health coach and personal trainer at the campus’s Recreational Sports Facility (RSF). After overcoming anxieties about stepping foot in the gym, she forged a new path that led her to join a weightlifting club and commit to an exercise routine that has lasted well past her graduation last spring.
Garcia credits Berkeley’s little-known EIM-OC program for helping her break the inertia and equipping her to take back her life.
“It was almost like a weight was lifted off of me,” Garcia said.
‘Something that we needed at Berkeley’
A collaboration among staff and faculty at UHS, RecWell and the School of Public Health, EIM-OC connects qualifying students to health coaches and personal trainers who support them in learning healthier habits and fitness routines. Students who aren’t meeting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s baseline activity levels of at least 150 minutes of aerobic activity and two days of muscle-strengthening workouts each week are provided up to three personal training sessions. The hope is those sessions will be the start of a longer-term fitness journey that brings with it reductions in chronic disease and improvements to mood, sleep and mental health — especially on a college campus where stress levels run high.
More than 200 students used these personal training and health coaching options in 2024. That shows a clear and ongoing demand for the program, said Dr. Marlon Maus, an adjunct professor in the School of Public Health and the faculty and medical sponsor of EIM-OC.
“I really believe in the program,” Maus said. “I’ve seen how it’s made a difference for students. I’ve seen how it’s something that we needed at Berkeley.”
Maus co-founded Berkeley’s program five years ago, when similar initiatives were being developed across the country under the American College of Sports Medicine’s Exercise Is Medicine umbrella. He saw a need to provide hands-on resources for Berkeley students who would benefit from guidance in the health and wellness space, an arena often dominated by pseudoscience and social media influencers.
Increasingly, medical practitioners like Maus have embraced the idea that health is shaped by a variety of factors throughout a person’s life. Using public health strategies to intervene during formative years can be more effective than responding when chronic illness arises later in life.
“Don’t wait until the problems start appearing,” Maus said. “Behavior modification is easier if you do it early.”
Besides co-leading the program, Maus oversees its research arm. Where other universities administer their EIM-OC programs through kinesiology departments, Berkeley’s is handled in coordination with the School of Public Health. That allows students to apply public health principles to evaluate exercise’s effectiveness as a scalable intervention. The effort has earned the program national recognition.
The biggest benefit comes from breaking down silos between doctors and health educators and personal trainers. Much like someone who is referred to a specialist for an X-ray for a broken bone, qualifying students are referred to professionals who can provide training tips and nutrition and wellness counseling.
Mary Popylisen manages the physical therapy department at UHS and has seen many students over the years who aren’t active. While working with Maus, she helped create a referral pathway for clinicians to refer students into the program, especially students not meeting the CDC’s activity recommendations and those with anxiety, depression, high blood pressure or diabetes.
Making discussions about activity levels a routine part of students’ doctor visits helped normalize the program, she said. And increased activity levels can lead to lifelong change.
“If it’s not in a routine,” she said, “you usually don’t do it.”
How lifting weights actually helps
Garcia was uneasy before she was referred to Exercise is Medicine On Campus, and even more anxious walking into the gym for the first time. She didn’t feel she belonged there and didn’t know how to use the equipment or lift heavy weights safely.
Enter Christian Chhom, a certified personal trainer with a background in kinesiology who works with many students in the program. After students are referred by a physician, they sign up for a fitness consultation with Chhom or someone else with the health promotion team for wellness coaching.
After an initial assessment with EIM-OC students, Chhom helps them build a training routine they can stick to beyond their three funded sessions.
(Photo: Stanley Luo)
Chhom then gets an understanding of their fitness baselines and where they want to go with their activity and health goals. From there, he helps them build a training routine they can stick to beyond their three funded sessions, including existing training options through RecWell.
“I’m giving them valuable information on exercise that will help them down the right path,” Chhom said. “They don’t have to get lost in all the social media or Google posts on how to be fit and active.”
In Garcia’s first meetings with Chhom, she learned proper form and breathing techniques for several dumbbell presses, deadlifts and squats. Week after week, she began to feel more confident.
And then, one day while walking out of class, Garcia noticed a table from the Women in Weightlifting club at Berkeley. She was intrigued. In hindsight, it was a moment she realized she’d changed for the better.
“I was like, ‘Screw it. Why not? What do I have left to lose?’” Garcia said. “‘If I don’t want to, I can leave. If I do, it’ll be great.’ And it ended up being great.”
Chhom said that’s the best kind of result a personal trainer could ask for.
“When they start coming [to the gym] by themselves and they don’t need you anymore, that’s what your actual job should be. Not so that they keep wanting more sessions, but that they don’t need you anymore,” Chhom said.
“The mission is to make physical activity and exercise a vital part of health care.”
Student research is part of the program
Making exercise part of overall health is particularly meaningful to Maus. A trauma surgeon who treated patients with severe facial wounds, Maus over the years has shifted his focus to public health and preventative medicine in order to proactively help people instead of exclusively reacting to the day’s emergencies.
As EIM-OC has grown, it’s also become more organized. That, in turn, has earned it funding from the UC Equity in Mental Health initiative, which offsets the costs of the training sessions. UC Berkeley administrators over the years have likewise supported the program.
Increasingly, Maus is partnering with students interested in pursuing public health research on interventions rooted in EIM-OC, studying how the program could be implemented more broadly. Beyond improving its offerings, the program can create an environment where student researchers take their work beyond the classroom.
Brian Wylie sees the potential. A student pursuing his doctor of public health degree at Berkeley, Wylie studies how a specific form of resistance training, Olympic-style weightlifting, could be used as a public health intervention. Encouraging people to take up lifting in the gym or at home could lead to broader positive effects, he said.
He has led three classes connected to the EIM-OC program, teaching students the fundamentals of weightlifting and the ways they can use it in their daily lives. He credits the program with making his course possible and hopes to develop a toolkit that other universities could use as a model for their own version of the course.
“When people start to feel stronger in their bodies — physically stronger — that translates to psychological and emotional strength,” Wylie said. “And then that kind of strength leads people to be more willing to engage with life.”
That’s what happened to Garcia, who completed her sociology honors thesis last spring and took a job as a transfer admissions counselor at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
With a gym membership of her own, she now rises multiple mornings each week, drives to the nearby LA Fitness and heads toward the dumbbells and squat rack. She’s a far cry from the anxious senior who’d never done a squat or deadlift in her life.
“When I think about the person I was a year ago,” she said, “it’s not who I am today.”