Falling for Curing

This is the honest story of a personal trainer who just wanted to do the best for his clients — and got it wrong for years before he got it right.

Reluctant beginnings

In 1997 I reluctantly joined the fitness industry. In my head I was a footballer who wasn't good enough, so I'd become a coach instead. My introduction was a new gym in Nottingham with a pool, a shiny gym floor and toning tables. My background was a degree in coaching, a YMCA course and a few small university courses.

The falling

Then I took a course in posture, and I was hooked. Suddenly I could see problems before they caused pain, do funky exercises and solve people's pain. Fantastic. Some clients started to feel better — and I could quietly ignore the ones who didn't. So I began to fall.

The trouble was that all of it rested on me believing the research I was being shown. That came back to bite me later.

The cult of functional 3D movement

I moved out of the clubs and into education, and that's where it really kicked off. As I finished my MSc in Injury Prevention and Performance Enhancement, I could see the industry becoming a mess — and I chose to ignore that and join a cult.

The training helped me help people immediately. I could use my hands, people were talking about me, and as long as I ignored the fact that I was making it up, everything was great. Some results were incredible. Some went spectacularly wrong — I never mentioned those. Safer for my fragile ego.

Around then I started FASTER, genuinely wanting to make the industry better. I was being asked to present everywhere, because the industry liked my newness, my confidence, and — though I didn't know it yet — my complete bullshit confidence in my ability to beat science to an answer.

Scrapey, rubby, pushy

It got tough. Pushing people around, telling them they were great and building symmetry didn't work well enough, and others were starting to copy me. So instead of learning to research again and answering the questions my clients kept throwing at me, I levelled up my guru-ness and got on two fascia courses.

The fascia courses were awesome — all made up, built on bad research, with enough grey area to hide in. They also let me claim fascia was the answer to every other technique I used. When I finally got to the actual research, I was gutted at how completely I'd fallen for it.

Somewhere in the early 2000s I'd earned a name for bringing foam rolls into the UK from a US company. I was a minor celebrity: the foam roll man. Something I'd happily bury — and have now confessed to the ten of you still reading.

The US, and the research

After qualifying in fascia and becoming a guru who fixed people, I still wanted more — powered by the buzz of being the expert and the genuine drive to help. So I listened to the people around me who kept pushing me to read the research and challenge every preconception.

It led to a horrible realisation: I'd been lied to. Hoodwinked by the business requirements and the enormous egos in my industry. People were taping, pressing, rubbing and pushing while making claims about posture they couldn't back up.

Facebook was starting to change that, but not fast enough, so I began writing courses again. My first was on energy systems, which turned my thinking on hypertrophy on its head — because all movement in a positive calorie balance causes hypertrophy, and the "optimum" techniques are easily argued over. Then came speed training, which turned into work on performance and fatigue management. Finding Noakes' research on fatigue as a feed-forward process, and the papers backing it up, lit my fire again.

Brain and body — it's about them, stupid

Reading on fatigue, skill development, energy systems, pain and injury prediction reignited everything. Using my new love of defining a question and answering it with the best available research, I rewrote the lot. It didn't make my skills obsolete — it improved my clients' experience, expectations and results. No wild highs or lows, just proper long-term improvements. It also helped me communicate with the medical world, and gave my trainers a foothold in respectability.

Stop curing, start training

I went back to what I do well: a scientific approach, aiming to be the best at it, and refusing to jump on the bandwagon of whatever cool area is trending (look at the "pain trainers" who were fascia trainers, then 3D instructors, then specialists in everything). Now I'm back training high-end clients and clients with special requirements, and educating a new breed of FASTER trainer.

The moral

Don't get so wrapped up in a technique that you lose your ability to change your mind, or to do the thing you know is best. Read. Challenge everything you think is true, regularly. And if you catch yourself saying "I'm ahead of science, science can't answer everything, it works so who cares how" — take a month off and re-evaluate your career.

The last six years have been the toughest of my professional life. Dumping fascia, posture and symmetry to rely on the research made my company less popular. But after years of work, I'm seeing the fruit of it — and my new breed of trainers are doing far better than the ones who, like me, once craved answers and more techniques.

My only current problem is arguing with people who are just me, years ago.