About

I’ve spent most of my life training.

It started with martial arts when I was seven. Since then, I’ve trained in Japanese jujitsu, Taijutsu, boxing and Muay Thai, earning my first-degree black belt in Taijutsu in 2011 and my second degree in 2018.

Teaching martial arts was also my first experience of coaching. I loved the process of helping someone learn something they couldn’t do before, work through the inevitable frustration and eventually realise they were rather more capable than they thought.

That eventually led me into personal training.

I qualified with Premier Global in 2008 and spent several years working in some of London’s leading health clubs before establishing my own private practice.

Since then, I’ve worked with hundreds of people, from those starting again after years away from exercise to experienced trainees looking to get stronger, fitter or perform better.

People tend to arrive with different bodies, different histories and different reasons for being there.

That’s one of the things I like about the job.

There isn’t really a standard client.

How I coach

I don’t believe there’s one perfect way to train.

There are good principles, of course. But applying them well means understanding the person in front of you.

What have they done before? What hurts? What do they enjoy? What are they trying to achieve? And, perhaps most importantly, what does the rest of their life look like?

A good programme has to fit somewhere in amongst all of that.

I’m interested in training that has a purpose and produces results without requiring you to reorganise your entire existence around it.

Sometimes that means pushing hard.

Sometimes it means doing considerably less than you might think.

More isn’t automatically better. It just tends to be more.

I’ve learned that through coaching, but also through getting things wrong myself.

I’ve broken wrists competing. I had a serious lower-back injury when I was younger and had to rebuild my training from a very different starting point.

Those experiences taught me that progress isn’t always particularly linear, and that knowing how to adapt is just as important as knowing how to work hard.

That’s stayed with me as a coach.

Beyond physical training

More recently, my work has expanded into performance coaching.

I’m an ICF-certified personal and professional coach, and I’ve found it to be a natural extension of the work I’ve been doing for years.

I’m interested in helping people work out what they actually want, what’s getting in the way and what they’re going to do about it — whether that’s in their lives, careers or businesses.

Sometimes you know exactly what you need to do. You just haven’t quite managed to do it yet.

That’s where having someone to talk things through with, challenge your thinking and provide support and accountability can be useful.

Qualifications

I hold more than 20 qualifications across personal training, nutrition, coaching and martial arts, including:

REPS Level 3 Certified Personal Trainer
HLC2 — CHEK Institute
Precision Nutrition Certified Coach
Certified Personal and Professional Coach — ICF
Certified CBT Practitioner — Achology
2nd Dan Black Belt — Taijutsu (BNMAA)

Let’s talk

If you’d like to explore working together, have a look at the relevant service page and get in touch.

We can have a conversation about what you’re looking for, where you’re starting from and whether I’m the right person to help.