People often assume personal training was always the plan. It wasn't — not directly. For fifteen years, I was a professional dancer. Fitness, in the way I teach it now, grew directly out of that life, long before it was ever a job title.
Fifteen years of a different kind of training
Dance doesn't look like personal training from the outside, but the discipline underneath it is identical. Daily training, careful attention to recovery, nutrition that actually supports what your body is being asked to do, and a level of body awareness most people never have to develop. Fifteen years of that teaches you things no qualification alone can.
What it actually taught me
It taught me how easy it is to push a body too far, and how much further you can actually go when you don't. It taught me that consistency, not intensity, is what lets you keep performing — on stage or anywhere else — year after year. And it taught me to really listen to what a body is telling you, rather than overriding it because a session, a show, or a goal feels too important to skip.
Why I moved into coaching
Eventually I wanted to take everything those years had taught me about training a body properly and use it to help other people feel strong, rather than keeping it for myself. So I trained formally — Level 3 personal training, Level 4 nutrition, pre- and postnatal qualifications — because I didn't want to coach on instinct alone. I wanted to actually know, not just sense, what I was doing before I asked anyone to trust me with their training.
Why I coach the way I do
Everything about how I train clients now comes directly from those fifteen years. I don't programme extreme, unsustainable training, because I know exactly what overtraining costs a body long-term. I care about recovery as much as effort, because a dancer who can't perform tomorrow isn't much use today, and the same is true for anyone training around a demanding life. And I build training into a life that already has a lot going on, because that's the only version that was ever sustainable for me either.
Where I am now
These days I'm a Master Trainer at BXR and Sweat, I run my own training business, and I'm still an athlete myself — I race, and I'm as particular about my own programming as I am about my clients'. I'm not coaching from the sidelines of something I used to do. I'm still in it, just differently than I was for those fifteen years.
If you want training built by someone who has actually lived the discipline it takes to look after a body properly, that's exactly who I am. Get in touch and let's talk.