First off, thank you for visiting my website! My name is AJ De Melo and I am currently a certified GOATA Coach, a certified Oxygen Advantage Restorative Breathing Instructor and proficient in The FlowOps Movement System. I am engaged and a lucky father of 2. I live in northern Ontario, Canada where it snows 5 months of the year.

I have been playing team sports my entire life, mainly football, from youth until high school and still pickup games now and then. Exercise and fitness have been a huge part of my life as long as I can remember. I got addicted to lifting at a young age. Coaching and teaching have always been a passion of mine as well, and fatherhood has brought it out of me in a huge way. I’m the kind of person that feels the intense need to spread knowledge when I come across something significantly interesting or beneficial to the well being of others. My leadership, enthusiasm and positivity have always made strong impacts on the people that I coach and teach.

I practiced conventional health and fitness (lifting weights and prioritizing hypertrophy) religiously until about 2019, right before my daughter was born. The adjustment of taking care of my pregnant fiancé and preparing for fatherhood was stressful, exciting and challenging. In this process, I lost complete sight of myself as I dove head first into being a father. For the first time in my life, I completely neglected my health and wellness. I gained more weight than I ever have and got into the worst shape of my life. As I began to adjust to my new wonderful lifestyle of fatherhood, I had an epiphany, I couldn’t stay on the path I was on. I felt a strong need to become the best version of myself, to be a good role model for my daughter.

I immediately began researching and developed a passion for holistic health and wellness. I learned and incorporated cold therapy, fasting, urine therapy, meditation and breathwork to completely transform my health in a single year. Along my journey I began studying and practicing yoga twice a day. Yoga became an intrinsic part of my life. It taught me the power of mediation and self reflection, connected me to my breath, deepened my awareness and cultivated discipline. As I jumped from job to job, I discovered that teaching yoga and holistic health was something I truly wanted to do for a living.

Along my yoga journey, I stumbled upon GOATA. At first I never quite understood what the essence of GOATA was, but was intrigued nonetheless. As I continued to learn and understand GOATA concepts, I began to incorporate them into my yoga/calisthenics practice. I hit a plateau with yoga and started developing repetitive injuries that I could not shake. The whole point of diving into yoga was that I believed that it was the ultimate movement practice that would optimize my strength, mobility and flexibility, while cultivating health and longevity. Although it did help me become the most flexible I ever have been, there was something missing.

After several months, I put my ego aside and came to the realization that yoga was not the answer I was looking for when it came to physical optimization of movement and mobility. GOATA seemed to be the answer. But just like everything else, I hit a wall with GOATA. The theory and philosophy seemed legitimate, but again, it wasn’t quite complete.

I reached out to, in my opinion, the best and highest regarded coach in the community, Eric Tessi (@_FlowOps) who now runs a very successful coaching/education platform incorporating breathing, movement, craniofacial development, posture, the neurological developmental phases, nervous system training and much, much more. Eric has helped hundreds, if not thousands of people eliminate decades of bodily pain, tightness, nagging injuries, sore joints, breathing dysfunction, fatigue, emotional stress and nervous system imbalances. I asked for some guidance with furthering my understanding of the nuances of what he teaches and coaches. Eric took me under his wing and taught me an enhanced, refined system and explained how the application and theory of GOATA is incomplete. I completely agreed with Eric and I understood that he was on to something much bigger and more powerful than GOATA. So I joined Eric’c unique community of like minded, intelligent, enthusiastic healers, coaches, teachers, breath work instructors and PTs where I have learned an enormous amount and continue to learn to this very day.

During this journey on Eric’s platform, I came across some very knowledgable breath work coaches, one of whom was named Kalman Lulek and he was very proficient in the Oxygen Advantage system. I began working with him on a monthly basis and began to see and feel some very drastic improvements in my breathing mechanics and CO2 tolerance. Over a period on a couple months, I had significantly more energy, a severely reduced onset of breathlessness, a much calmer demeanour and a better ability to handle emotion. I made more improvement with the Oxygen Advantage system in a couple months than I made in a year of yogic breathing. This sparked a passion that led to me getting certified in Oxygen Advantage and became a certified restorative breathing instructor.

The system that I coach and teach is essentially the same powerful system that Eric teaches and coaches, with a deeper detail, nuance and education about the biomechanics, biochemical and psychological aspects of breathing. The whole point of the work I do is to neurologically rewire the reflexive, baseline behaviours of our nervous system that control our breathing and movement patterns. This is done through co2 tolerance training, restorative breathing exercises, diaphragmatic activation, tongue/jaw training, isometrics in specific positions/joint angles, slow controlled movements that pertain to innate movement patterns, loading the nervous system with stressors and down regulating, breathing into an aligned structure, breathing into baby/childhood developmental positions and more.