In August 2006, I left the Army at 22. I'd joined at 16, so I'd never really experienced 'Civvy Street' as an adult. No proper job, no office and certainly no clue how to behave in the normal working world. I'd come from a place where you were told where to go, what to do and when to do it, and you did it, Shit-bust.
If you didn't, you'd either get beasted, drilled till your eyes bled, chucked in jail, charged...or, take one to the ribs. Life was simple, then suddenly I was leaving and I needed a career.
Fortunately, I loved 'Phyz', even better, apparently there was a profession where people would actually pay me to beast them, sweet.
£20 an Hour. Easy Money.
I used my Army resettlement package to qualify as a Personal Trainer and landed my first job at Fitness First in Chatham. I got the job after one interview, I thought I must've smashed it. Turns out the PT manager got a bonus for recruiting numpty PTs who would then pay rent to work there. Ah-ha.
Still, £20 an hour sounded decent. "You only need to do 20 sessions a week and you're on two grand a month," my manager told me. Easy. Was it fuck! This was Chatham, not Monaco.
I spent most of my day prowling the gym floor like some desperate fitness salesman, trying to make eye contact with people who were doing everything possible not to make eye contact with me.
"Want a free PT session?" No.
"Need any help?" Definitely fucking not.
Walking the gym floor was hell on earth. On the plus side however, I had loads of time to train and access to the sunbeds. By January I was skint, ridiculously fit and approximately the colour of a mahogany dining table.
There were some highlights.
One involved a local reflexologist called 'Johno', who I was considering working with to build my referral network. I later discovered he'd developed something of an interest in my feet in the men's changing room. He eventually confessed to having a foot fetish and asked if he could suck my toes.
Each to their own, I guess.
Another day I was waiting at reception when a bloke came sprinting out of the changing room wearing nothing but a towel, his head covered in shampoo, absolutely screaming. He dragged us back into the showers and pointed at the shampoo dispenser on the wall. Someone had taken a shit in it, and a pretty impressive one, actually. Then they'd put the dispenser back on the wall. I absolutely pissed myself laughing. Funnily enough, the bloke with shit in his hair didn't find it quite as funny.
Ahhh, memories.
From Sunbeds to the NHS
After about five years of freelancing, the novelty of constantly being skint started to wear off. I wanted a regular salary. So I joined Public Health, working alongside the NHS and local council on a childhood obesity programme called MEND 7–13, for which I was employed as the programme 'co-ordinator'.
My job essentially involved going into schools, weighing kids and then telling their parents: "Your child is a fat little bastard. Come to our programme, and we'll teach you what a vegetable is."
Not quite how the official script went, but close. While the parents learned about food and healthier habits, I'd take the kids for games and exercise, and despite my piss-taking, I genuinely felt for them. I'd been a fat kid myself; it was actually one of the reasons I joined the Army. I knew what it felt like to get grief at school and to feel uncomfortable in your own skin.
The frustrating part was the system. If families attended enough of the programme, it was considered a successful intervention. Whether their health actually changed was a different conversation. But the box was ticked, funding secured, success...Apparently.
As the coordinator, it meant I had to spend a lot of time in the office, my first ever office job. Fuck me, I hated it! I would take unnecessarily long routes to the printer just to kill time. In the Army, I'd only ever gone sick when I'd genuinely snapped my leg. In the office, I discovered the wonderful concept of a 'sickie'. "Sneezed this morning. Better stay home."
My boss's boss eventually realised that sticking me behind a desk probably wasn't going to end well and offered me a job running exercise sessions in the GP referral programme. Same salary, back in the gym and one afternoon a week in the office. I nearly kissed him.
The Heart Attack Crew
Now I was working with adults referred by their GPs. Diabetes; cancer; COPD; heart disease; stroke survivors; amputees; people recovering from heart attacks; and plenty of patients trying to qualify for bariatric surgery.
It was probably the first time I really understood how broad Personal Training could be. Not everyone wants abs; some people just want to walk upstairs without stopping. The most motivated clients were normally the people who'd had heart attacks. They'd had the shit scared out of them. One of the youngest was a 37-year-old copper. Once somebody tells you, "Change your lifestyle, or there's a very good chance this happens again," suddenly going to the gym becomes considerably more appealing.
The COPD guys were different. Some would arrive at the gym, put out a cigarette, climb onto a treadmill at less than 1kph, survive a couple of minutes, sit down to recover...then go straight back outside and set themselves on fire. These fuckers were literally dragging oxygen tanks around with them, with tubes up their noses and still fucking smoking; you couldn't make it up. It was most likely because it's progressive, rather than an 'all of a sudden', like the heart attack guys.
But while all this was going on, I was still doing private PT on the side, and that was where things started getting interesting.
The Garage
I started training people from my garage at home and running little bootcamps in the park with my mate Ross, and for the first time, I was making decent money. More importantly, I started thinking bigger; I wanted my own Personal Training studio.
CrossFit was still pretty new back then, but I could see these rough-and-ready gyms, 'boxes', appearing in industrial units: minimal kit, loads of space, and nothing fancy. I thought, 'Why can't we do that?'
I found a unit I wanted. It fell through. Then, Ross was about to lose his job, so suddenly we had a bit more urgency. One day I was walking down the road texting him when, I passed an old dance studio with a 'To Let' sign outside. I called the agent, viewed it, got a great deal, and signed.
We ripped the place apart, painted it, cleaned up the old wooden floor and dragged all my garage equipment in and that was it, we had a gym.
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| Ripping out the old dance studio |
Move. Eat. Think. Achieve.
META Personal Training was probably the first thing of its kind in our town, and it worked.
Ross had energy for days and could talk to absolutely anyone, whereas I was the more serious one; systems & processes, programming and education. I was always disappearing off to get another qualification or reading something about how the body worked. Ross seemed to wing half of it, and annoyingly, he was fucking brilliant. We were complete opposites, which, for a while, made us a really good team.
We started networking, and we had absolutely no idea how to behave at business networking events. Instead of doing polished little corporate pitches, we'd basically stand up and take the piss for two minutes. People loved it. Eventually, we ended up working with a business coach from the meetings, and joined his business 'Growth Mindset' programme. It was fantastic, for a while....
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| Ross and I at the start of a wild ride |
It's Not What You Know. It's Who You Train.
One of the best things about META was the people we met, one of them was Andy. The agent who found our studio recommended that Andy come and see us. By his own admission, he only signed up to prove Personal Training wouldn't work, and for quite a while, he did a very good job of proving his point.
I was training him three times a week. Then somehow twice a day, five days a week and we ended have a few adventures together. I was seeing him more than he saw his own kids. He was, and still is, fucking hilarious.
One day he jumped up to a chin-up bar wearing metal lifting hooks, somehow got himself stuck and ended up dangling from one arm. I can still picture it now, Fuuuck-ing ell! Ha ha ha.
But despite all the training, he wasn't getting leaner, mainly because he was eating and drinking like an absolute muppet. Andy was ultra-competitive, so I knew I could get into his head and so, we made a bet. I would deliberately get as fat as him, then lose the weight and get back to my original body-fat percentage before he could reach it.
He shook on it. Game on.
Getting Fat on Purpose
For about five weeks, I lived like the stereotypical client who "doesn't understand why they're gaining weight". I cut my training from more than ten hours a week to about three. If somebody offered me food, I had to eat it, social pressure. Seconds? Yep. Thirds? Go on then. Leftovers on the table? Mine. Low-fat 'healthy' snacks, regular drinks in the evening. Basically every little behaviour people convince themselves doesn't count, and do you know what? Getting fat was fucking miserable. I felt bloated, sluggish, constipated, farty, self-conscious, Everything was tight and obviously, I refused to buy bigger clothes, because I knew I'd be losing the weight again. So I basically walked around looking like 'that guy' who's clearly put on two stone but refuses to acknowledge it. Every button on my shirt became a potential projectile.
Eventually we both dieted down, and credit where it's due, Andy beat me by about 1% body fat. Bastard. But it was still one of the most useful experiments I've ever done. For a few weeks, I actually understood what it felt like to live like some of my clients. How quickly little habits stack up. How horrible you can feel and, how easily you can end up trapped in that cycle. It gave me a lot more empathy.
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| We even made the local rag |
Then It All Got Bigger
META was growing. We moved into a second studio; it was fucking massive compared to the first. Unfortunately, so was the bill. The renovation dragged on, the costs climbed, and the interior designer appeared to have never heard of the word 'budget'.
My mates were helping with the building work, then we got to the point where we couldn't pay them. Our business coach's advice? "Fuck 'em. If you can't pay 'em, you can't pay 'em. That's business." Nah! These weren't random dinny contractors, these were my mates, my groomsmen for fuck's sake! That just didn't sit right with me at all. From then on, I started questioning a lot of the advice we were getting. Ross didn't, and that was the beginning of a pretty big crack between us.
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| The rip out of the second studio |
META Education
At the same time, we started a Personal Training education business with one of our coaches, Adam. The idea was actually pretty cool, somebody could walk into META as an overweight, unfit client, we'd help them completely transform their life. They might then decide fitness was something they wanted to pursue professionally. They'd join our education programme, qualify as a PT, then potentially come back and work for us.
Client → transformation → coach → career.
And it actually happened, more than once. That was probably one of the coolest things we did, people weren't just losing weight, they were changing their entire direction in life. I loved teaching and selling the courses because I genuinely believed in what we were doing. For a little while, it felt like everything was starting to come together.
And then...
Oh Dear. Oh Dear-Oh Dear.
It all went to shit. After one thing and another, we all fell out, big time. Everybody involved would probably tell you a slightly different version of what happened, and I absolutely had my part to play in it, but the short version is, we fucked it. Adam left, Ross negotiated an exit, and I ended up carrying the debt.
At one point, I couldn't pay the coaches, and most of them walked. I was down to two, and they hated me. The landlord wanted to chain the doors shut, then we discovered that some client payments hadn't been reaching us for up to eight months (through faults of our own).
Excellent.
A few years earlier, META had been my baby, I'd gone from training people in a garage to building a proper business, creating jobs and opening an education company. Now I was homeless, sleeping on the floor in the office, in fucking pieces every night, thinking: 'How the fuck have I managed to break all of this?' I spent the next year trying to drag the business back from the dead, and eventually I did. Sort of. But I was absolutely cooked, so I made the obvious sensible business decision...I fucked off to Singapore for six months.
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| Homeless and skint: The studio office is where I ended up living for a six months |
Like a Virgin
Somehow, I blagged myself a management job with Virgin Active in Singapore. I loved it, completely different world, new country, new people, new energy. After my first weekend, Virgin sent me to Bangkok for a week of training. A couple of weeks later, I got to meet the 'big man', Sir Richard Branson. I remember thinking 'This isn't bad', and bizarrely, while I was away, META started performing better, maybe I had been the problem all along. Ha ha.
Eventually, though, my six-month sabbatical ended, and I needed to go back to the UK. Virgin was brilliant and gave me a month to decide whether I wanted to stay there or return to Singapore. I landed back in England, wet, cold, dark and miserable. I hadn't even left the plane, and I was already thinking, 'Fuuuck this.' Then I arrived at META. I stood outside, and I couldn't make myself walk through the door. That was the moment I knew I didn't love it anymore. For five years, META had been everything. My business, my identity, my baby. I'd nearly lost it, saved it, rebuilt it, and somewhere along the way, I'd stopped wanting it.
I had 30 days before Virgin gave my job away, so I started calling everyone I knew, trying to find a buyer. My mate Andy, who by this point had been there through most of the carnage, pushed me not to just shut the doors.
Eventually, we found someone, she'd actually come through the education system and later became a coach. Alongside Andy, she took the business on.
In a weird roundabout way, the system we'd built actually worked. I sold META, packed my bags and went back to Singapore.
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| Me and Sir 'Big Ric' |
The Avengers
I went back to Virgin, but this time they moved me to another club and gave me a promotion. 'Sweet. Let's 'ave it.'...I hated it; the location, the gym, the vibe, everything.
I wanted to be back in the middle of Singapore's CBD. Then a management job came up at UFIT. The money was about three times better; I applied. but didn't get it, they promoted someone internally, but they offered me a PT role instead. "Fuck it. I'll take it."
During the interview, over a beer, one of the directors described UFIT to me as: "It's like joining the Avengers." Sipping my beer, I thought: 'Yep. My kind of place'. And then I walked through the doors, fuck me, he wasn't exaggerating. The clients were units, the coaches were beasts. The girls, the guys, everyone looked fit, strong, professional and every coach seemed to have something I could learn from.
I'd never worked around a team like it, I loved it, and seven years later...
I still do.
Twenty Years of Fitness Fads
One thing you realise after spending this long in fitness is that the industry loves reinventing itself.
Every few years, something new becomes the thing. When I started, functional training looked completely different. Everything was three planes of motion, Movement-Based Flexibility and Resistance-Movement-Training, People like Gary Gray, Paul Chek and Thomas Myers were huge influences. Some of it was brilliant, and some of the exercises looked like you'd escaped from Cirque du Soleil.
Nutrition was the same: Paleo, organic everything, free-range everything, eat according to your ancestry, eat for your blood type, metabolic typing, juicing, Atkins, raw, higher fat, lower fat, don't eat carbs, definitely eat carbs.
Twenty years later, I think one of the most useful skills you can develop as a coach is being prepared to say, "Actually, I was wrong about that" or, "I don't know."
CrossFit
When CrossFit started becoming popular, loads of trainers from my background hated it. "It's not periodised." "Someone's going to get injured." "It's completely unstructured." Blah blah blah.
It took me years before I actually tried it properly. Now? I love it. I like chucking weights around, I like training hard, I like taking my top off, dripping sweat everywhere. I like the atmosphere in a good box, but the biggest thing CrossFit did wasn't invent a new exercise, it built communities, It made everyday people excited about learning skills, lifting weights and competing.
That's huge.
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| Having a dabble at CrossFit competition |
HYROX
And now we've got HYROX, the latest fad, and I think it's fucking brilliant. Tickets disappear almost instantly. People who would never previously have entered a fitness competition are training for one. People are running more and run clubs are starting everywhere. Friends are organising weekends away around races instead of going somewhere purely to get absolutely smashed for three days.
That's progress.
If a 'fad' gets thousands of people fitter and gives them something to train for...I'm all for it.
Apparently, We All Need to Recover Now
Then there's recovery: ice baths, saunas, infrared, electrolytes, nasal strips, WHOOP, Oura rings, Garmins, sleep scores, readiness scores, and stress scores, everything has a score. Don't get me wrong, I think the new focus on recovery and longevity is brilliant.
But sometimes I do laugh when somebody shows me their watch and says: "My recovery score is terrible today." Mate, you've been pissed for three nights. You've flown halfway across the world. Your kid's been sick. You slept four hours; what exactly were you expecting? Did you really need a $1000 watch to tell you you're fucking tired?
And Then There's Social Media...
Social media has been brilliant for the fitness industry. Education is easier to access. Coaches can build businesses without massive marketing budgets. Clients have thousands of great professionals available at their fingertips, but...
It has also created some absolute cunts. One trend I particularly hate is coaches building content by publicly shitting on other coaches, take somebody else's video, point out everything they're supposedly doing wrong, call them an idiot, get angry. get engagement, repeat. Rage sells apparently.
Then there's the sudden rise of the fitness life coach. Someone gets abs, buys a microphone and six weeks later they're telling you how to fix your marriage, build a seven-figure business and discover your purpose.
Behave you cunt.
Fortunately, I don't spend much time in commercial gyms anymore, because the thought of navigating 47 tripods while somebody films their eighth attempt at walking dramatically towards a cable machine makes me want to launch myself through a window.
So, What Have I Learned?
Twenty years, (fucking hell that's mad to write) I started as a 22-year-old ex-squaddie walking around Fitness First Chatham desperately trying to sell £20 PT sessions. Since then I've worked in public health, trained heart-attack patients, trained a gold medal Olympian, run bootcamps in parks, built gyms, built an education business, got deliberately fat, nearly went broke, lost business partners and friends, sold a company, moved halfway around the world, become a Virgin and ended up at UFIT...and even managed to fit in an MBA. What, you didn't know?
I Watched functional training, Paleo, CrossFit, HYROX, wearables, recovery and about 400 other trends become 'the next big thing'. I've changed my mind about plenty, I've fucked loads of things up. and I definitely don't coach the way I did in 2006. Thank fuck.
The thing I love about Personal Training hasn't really changed, for one hour, somebody gets to forget about everything else going on in their life, they train, they laugh, they vent, and they call their boss a cunt. They get stronger, they feel better, then they go back into the real world slightly better equipped to deal with whatever shit is waiting for them.
Twenty years later...making a positive impact on people's hour/day/life (as wishy-washy as it sounds) still makes me feel that it's a pretty fucking good job.
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| Having an impact: 'Capt. GB' his first tattoo at 70, was of the META logo, as he was so grateful for what it had done for him |