Long-Form Writing
Field notes from two decades of working with real people. Articles grouped by the four services so you can read into whichever conversation is most relevant to where you are right now.
Form & Technique
The lifts that build durable strength — how to set up, brace, and execute them without leaking force or earning injuries you spend your forties paying for.
Field Note · 6 min read
Most stalls in the deadlift are not strength problems. They are bracing problems disguised as strength problems. The bar leaves the floor with intent, then drifts forward, the hips shoot back, and the bar stops near the knees. What looks like a weak posterior chain is almost always a hip hinge that has lost its line of force.
Continue reading →Field Note · 5 min read
There are heavier benchers in your gym than there should be. Not because they train more, not because they recover better. Because they brace. The bench press is sold as a chest movement and trained as one, but the strongest pressers in the room understand it as a whole-body event.
Continue reading →Field Note · 7 min read
If you cannot hit depth in a back squat, the answer is rarely “try harder”. The squat is the most honest movement in the gym: it reflects your ankle mobility, your hip mobility, your thoracic position, and your bracing capacity all at once. Forcing depth without the underlying mechanics is how you accumulate the injuries you spend your forties paying for.
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Training Programmes
What separates a programme that compounds from one that wastes a year. Periodisation, progression, and the small decisions that shape a decade of lifting.
Field Note · 4 min read
Beginner training does not fail because the programme is wrong. It fails in week three because the programme is too interesting. The trainee starts adding variety, swapping exercises they have seen online, chasing the next stimulus before they have extracted the value from the first one.
Continue reading →Field Note · 8 min read
Periodisation gets dressed up in language that obscures what it is: a way of sequencing training stress so adaptation outpaces fatigue. You do not need a Russian textbook to do this well. You need three blocks: an accumulation block, an intensification block, and a deload.
Continue reading →Field Note · 9 min read
The first year of training shapes the next ten. What you skip you will pay for later; what you over-emphasise you will have to unlearn. Most of what matters in year one is decisions, not workouts — the small choices about which lifts to commit to, how often to train, what to track, and when to stop chasing personal records and start chasing technical mastery.
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Nutrition
Beyond macros and meal-prep marketing. What actually moves body composition, performance, and the way you live with food long-term.
Field Note · 6 min read
If your plan for nutrition begins and ends with hitting your protein, you are working with a half-truth. Macros matter — protein for repair, carbs for performance, fat for hormonal function — but they are the easiest variable to track and the easiest to over-index on. The deeper conversations are about timing, food quality, micronutrient density, and the gut.
Continue reading →Field Note · 5 min read
The “anabolic window” was useful as a marketing story and not much else. If your daily protein intake is sufficient, distributed across three or four meals, and your training is structured, the precise minute you consume protein post-workout is largely irrelevant. What actually matters is consistency, total volume, and source quality.
Continue reading →Field Note · 6 min read
Eight glasses of water is the wellness equivalent of one-size-fits-all socks. It works as a baseline and fails everyone at the edges. Real hydration is read from the body, not from a counter on your phone. There are three signals worth paying attention to: urine colour first thing in the morning, performance during your highest-intensity training set, and how your skin behaves.
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The 1-on-1 Practice
The texture of long-form coaching — what changes inside a year of dedicated 1-on-1 work, and the patterns I see again and again with high-performing clients.
Field Note · 8 min read
Most people picture personal training as workouts on a calendar. After two decades of coaching, I can tell you that view misses the work. A year of 1-on-1 coaching is a year of small decisions, daily check-ins, monthly recalibrations, and the slow assembly of a body and a routine that hold under pressure.
Continue reading →Field Note · 5 min read
Before any programme is written, before any session is booked, there are five questions I need answered. Not “what are your goals” — that one is rarely useful at intake. The questions that matter are about your last six months of training and how you live the 23 hours outside the gym.
Continue reading →Field Note · 6 min read
An hour of coached training is not where transformation happens. Transformation happens in the 23 hours that follow: the meals you choose, the sleep you protect, the stress you fail to manage, the supplements you remember to take. The hour I am with a client is the smallest window in their day, and it is the easiest one. The harder work is what I send them home to.
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