Karen Falkenberg

Co-Founder · Tigers Eye Life

Ph.D.

Education

1,250+

live Workouts Led

35+

Years Coaching

Karen has lived one life in a lot of chapters.
Research chemical engineer with a patent to her name. High school science teacher and cross-country coach who built a team from too few runners to second in the state. Psychology professor and researcher at Emory University. Director of Teaching Excellence at Colorado State University. Leadership coach and consultant for more than three decades. Two marathons, many half marathons, 500+ mile bicycling trips, and a black belt along the way. The titles changed. What held them together never did. Her North Star to guide everything: creating, serving community, collaborating, and contributing. Every few years she's gone deep on something hard she was curious about, solving problems and finding one more way to help other people grow. Tigers Eye Life is where all of it comes together,

Strength, nutrition, and metabolism started as a necessity. At 61, a car accident left her with a concussion serious enough that she had to relearn how to walk, a decade into menopause with almost no good information about what her body was doing.

Ryan MacQueen

Co-Founder · Tigers Eye Life

Hundreds

People Trained

100%

OF OUR PROGRAMS DESIGNED

20+

Years Coaching

Ryan's whole life runs on one engine: he wants to be great at whatever's in front of him, and he'll do the unglamorous work to get there.

For Ryan, movement has always been life. His talent showed young: a baseball prodigy who, by high school, drew interest from top college recruiters while training under a renowned boxing coach at the same time. Then his path took a hard turn.

By his early 20s he was an alcoholic and a meth addict, and eventually homeless. He won't pretend the drugs and the drink didn't deliver. They made him feel incredible, but they were destroying his life. Getting sober wasn't about killing the part of him that wanted that feeling. It was about pointing that same total focus at a healthy way of living that builds a life instead of dismantling one. "I redirected my actions toward the life I actually wanted," he says, "and felt myself moving in the right direction."

Well over a decade sober, a loving husband and a father to his wonderful young daughter, he didn't get here by becoming someone else. He aimed the person he already was at something better.

Three months into her physical therapy, she walked into a local gym with one goal: a single pull-up that felt impossibly far off.

She met Ryan there, and he became her trainer. Strength training gave her back more than her balance. It opened an entirely new way to age. She found it almost by luck, and she decided no one else should have to rely on a stroke of good fortune. Putting great health over 45 within reach for people who'd otherwise never find it is her work and passion now.

She brings the whole stack to coaching: mindset, psychology, nutrition, metabolism, energy, and sleep. Master Health Coach (Level 2), Functional Nutrition and Metabolism Specialist, with a PhD underneath it all. More than 1,250 live group strength workouts led on Zoom, training right alongside members in real time.

The determination isn't just talk: she ran two of her half marathons in the stretch between surgery for cancer and radiation.

"My first name is Show Up and my middle name is Determined."

Sobriety gave his intensity back to movement, and he never kept it in one lane again: yoga, barre, dance, even the splits, simply because his body should be able to do them.

He's trained hundreds of people, from young athletes to adults in their 90s. He coaches the whole picture: strength, nutrition, metabolism, mindset, energy, and sleep, and he's gone deeper into each field of study than most coaches go into one.

Ryan's a master of his craft, and still its most relentless student. He does the one thing at TEL that only he can: he designs every strength program, creative and progressively engineered, never off a template. Clients love that their brains have to show up too: always something new to learn, never reps on autopilot. Other trainers call him their go-to, and more than a few have named him the best coach in Colorado. He'd never say it himself.

His philosophy came from his boxing mentor: a great coach's job is to discover and uncover the potential already inside someone.

"The client is the miracle. I'm just illuminating a path for you to walk forward on."