August 27, 2001

Sometimes, the best breaks you get in life are totally unexpected. For David Miller, a chance encounter with a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter at a gas station was just such a break.

“About the time I was about to launch my career as a personal trainer, I was at a gas station when a woman pulled up with a similar car. We started talking a little bit, and I told her that I was a personal trainer,” he recalled. “She told me that she was a reporter for the Inquirer and that only that morning, she had been asked to develop a story on personal trainers.”

Miller’s story hit the Inquirer shortly thereafter, and he followed that up with a monthly fitness program on Power 99 FM called “Dave Miller the Body Thriller.” Since then he has built a successful personal training practice, D.A.M. Good Bodies, and works seven days a week with eight to ten clients most days.

Even though David Miller has always been an athlete, he never gave serious thought to his current career until years after he first entered Penn State. Miller began at Penn State in the fall of 1983 as a business major, in addition to playing for the football team.

“Unfortunately, I focused more on football and got caught up in the hype of being a football player, and didn’t pay enough attention to the books,” said Miller, a strong safety for Paterno’s team who dropped out of Penn State in the spring of 1985.“I was extremely disappointed in myself, because I felt like I wasted all of the hard work I had put into getting to Penn State. I enrolled at Penn State Delaware County that fall, but I only took a few classes, because I was working full-time. I decided that I would wait a year before taking classes again, but one year became five years.”

Miller enrolled again at Penn State and took classes at both Abington and Delaware County in the spring of 1989. He took an introductory course in exercise science, and the course changed his life. In the exercise science major, a student needed to complete three internships, one of them requiring a full semester.  Miller was working at the YMCA in downtown Philadelphia at the time and inquired about personal training.

“The director told me that the YMCA didn’t have any personal training, and it gave me the idea of focusing my internship on this,” said Miller. “The director allowed me to set up and develop the personal training program at the YMCA.  I had a staff of two trainers, and we went from ground zero to making $20,000 in the first year.”

Halfway through Miller’s internship, the director resigned. The YMCA offered him the position after he graduated from Penn State in 1992, and Miller learned a great deal about budgeting, hiring, managing people, and other skills for operating a business.

After a few years at the YMCA, Miller decided to start his own personal training business in 1994.

“I knew that I’d eventually work for myself,” said Miller.“People at the YMCA began to ask me to train them on the side, so I knew I had a good start.”

~ Karl Grieb