The sounds of moans and groans fill the weight room. She walks between the players looking intently at her watch and shouts, “one minute.” The moans and groans grow louder as the football players try to hold their plank during off-season training.

The weight room is where 5’3″ Kimberly Jones works on enhancing the performance of student athletes at El Camino College.

Jones, is the Strength and Conditioning coach at El Camino, mainly working with the football team. When she’s not training athletes on campus, you can find her at the fitness center running day to day operations. She’s a performance coach and International Federation of Body Building (IFBB) figure professional.

“I train most of the sports teams on campus,” Jones said. “Sports performance is a different style of training than bodybuilding.”

After trying Psychology for three months, Jones knew it wasn’t for her. She got certified as a personal trainer and began training athletes while she coached basketball at Notre Dame Academy High School in 2004. Jones went on to work with athletes at UCLA and CSUN. Before coming to EC in 2012, she worked with the United States Tennis Association.

“I did the four years of Psychology, I felt like I owed to myself to try,” Jones said. “I didn’t like it. I knew I wanted to get into personal training.”

EC’s football team has benefited immensely from Jones and her strength and conditioning program. Her job is to make them bigger and faster. Coach John Featherstone has raved about her impact on the football program.

“She’s one of the greatest things to happen to this school,” Featherstone said. “She made it perfectly clear what she was going to be here for, and her job was to make our kids bigger, faster and better. She’s done that.”

The football players can see and feel the difference of Jones strength and conditioning program. She’s hands on and teaches the players proper ways to lift weights and how to improve.

“She changed a lot of athletes,” sophomore fullback Esera Iosefa said. “She helped them build muscle but not only that, she helped with their individual aspects on what they need to do in life. Her workouts are intense, don’t be fooled by the way she looks. She’ll work you.”

Jones has been participating in fitness competitions since 2012. She placed 4th in her first amateur competition. In her second competition at the National Physique Competition (NPC) West Coast Classic she won first place. She was able to turn pro in July of 2014 after placing first in the NPC USA Championships.

“Back in 2012, somebody from Metro Flex in Long Beach called me when it just opened and said we got some Olympic lifting and power lifting type of equipment here you can train your athletes with,” Jones said. “I started training some people and just started meeting competitors. They kind of told me they could see me doing a figure competition and at the time I didn’t know it was a division.”

Jones said sports performance training is different than body building training. It’s different type of muscle fibers you’re trying to activate.

“Sports performance is broken down differently,” Jones said. “It’s about explosiveness, it’s about power for some sports. It’s also about injury prevention. My job is to make them stronger and faster.”