Living with chronic back pain? Got an old injury that holds you back when hiking or tooling around in the garden?  Maybe you just want to boost your energy level or kick your current exercise regimen up a notch or two. Kelvin deWolfe has some advice for you: ease up on your attachment to medications, try something you’ve never done before and start thinking about healing yourself from the inside out.

“We get ourselves sick and we have the power to make ourselves well,” said deWolfe, 47, founder of 1stDefense Mind & Body Medicine Studio, a comprehensive wellness center on 5577 N. Figueroa St. offering yoga, mat Pilates, martial arts, dance, cardio kickboxing and other health and fitness classes for adults and children. 1st Defense also provides acupuncture and massage therapy treatments on an appointment basis, and has a small store offering Chinese herbal remedies, teas and other natural health products.

Highland Park resident deWolfe, a Nova Scotia-born, half Native American fireball who can still do the splits and single hand stands, launched the business in spring of 2010 along with his wife, Erica Sapp. deWolfe received his formal training in Chinese medicine at Emperor’s College and completed his doctoral fellowship at Good Samaritan Hospital's Acute Rehabilitation Department.  Oh, and he’s also got a few black belts and has mastered nearly a dozen forms of martial arts, including Qigong, Tae Kwon Do, Aikido, Gung Fu and Tai Chi, all of which he now teaches at the studio.

The driving force behind his business concept, deWolfe said, is to provide a local fitness and wellness studio with affordable exercise and martial arts classes, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to extend a new form of hope and healing to those who believe they must spend the rest of their lives in pain or battling chronic health issues. 

“I’m trying to help people who have been told they have chronic conditions they’ll never be able to get rid of,” said deWolfe.  “I want to say to them: ‘This is the Emperor's medicine. It works. Come here first. Don’t wait until you have a shopping bag full of doctor's prescriptons and are physically incapacitated.”’

deWolfe certainly knows pain, and he also knows all about getting a life sentence to it.  At 15, a horrendous car accident left him with a badly mangled knee and he was facing the possibility of never being able to walk again. He began reading up on Chinese forms of medicine and martial arts as an option to standard, Western forms of physical therapy and life in a wheelchair.

“I turned to Chinese medicine and the martial arts for alternatives and for real healing,” deWolfe said. “I knew instinctively that I had the power to heal myself, and here I am all these years later as living proof. I’m doing things that people I know haven’t done since they were a kid.”

deWolfe said he had other options when it came to choosing a location for his new business and got plenty of feedback about it, once he’d announced plans to put it in his own back yard.

“Everyone would say to me ‘this business should be in Santa Monica or Pasadena,'” said deWolfe. “But I say why not right here in Highland Park, where we have so much going on around us and there is a need for holistic based healing, and oriental-infused mind and body balance and practice?”

Tujunga resident Dr. Candace Young, a licensed psychologist, has been taking Qigong and other martial arts classes with deWolfe since he opened the studio. She’s interested in weight loss, like everyone else, but she’s hooked into the core philosophy behind Chinese medicine and martial arts, which is simply this: strengthen your connection between your body and your mind, and health and fitness will follow.

“I wanted a new body,” said Young. “But as someone who works in mental health, I also got very interested in the mind/body relationships that were available in the martial arts and practice. I can tell you, this stuff takes fitness to another level.”

1stDefense is making it easy for anyone interested in exploring yoga, martial arts or other classes on offer with a flat $100 fee, which gives you full access to unlimited classes for one full month.  That includes the upcoming launch of new Zumba dance classes, set to begin the week of Jan. 25.  

“We make wellness affordable so that everyone can explore this,” deWolfe said. “If we out-price the community we aren’t serving anyone.”