I care deeply about the person, not just the body

Where I started

I hold a degree in Kinesiology from McMaster University. While I was there I was the lead volunteer running the cardiac rehabilitation centre, working with adults roughly fifty to eighty years old. That was my first proper education in the thing this whole practice now rests on: that two people the same age can be in completely different bodies, and that the useful question is never "what should someone your age be doing?"

After McMaster I worked in several gyms. I learned a great deal and I also learned what I did not want — a floor full of people being handed the same programme, and a business model that quietly depends on most of them not turning up. Eighteen years ago I started my own practice so I could work with people properly, one at a time.

What I actually trained in

Strength training is the backbone of what I do, because it is what changes the most for people over fifty and it is what most of them have done the least of. But it is not the only thing in the room.

My training and education also run through yoga and restorative yoga, Pilates, mobility work, nervous-system regulation, and holistic nutrition — I'm a Certified Holistic Nutritionist as well as a coach. That mix matters more than it sounds like it should. A stiff hip is sometimes a strength problem, sometimes a mobility problem, and sometimes a person who has not properly exhaled since Tuesday. Being able to tell those apart is most of the job.

Why I work with adults over fifty

Partly because it is where I am useful. A body at fifty-five responds differently to loading, to recovery and to a bad night's sleep than a body at twenty-five, and twenty-five years of paying attention to that is not something you can shortcut.

But mostly because of what people want at this stage, which is almost never what the fitness industry assumes. Nobody comes to me wanting to look like they did at thirty. They come because they want to carry their own luggage, or get down onto the floor with a grandchild and back up again without making a noise, or do the Juan de Fuca in one piece next summer. Those are much better goals and they respond beautifully to training.

How I coach

Privately, one to one, live over video, twice a week. Never a group, never a video you follow along to while I do something else.

I watch how you move and I adjust while you are moving. I ask a lot of questions early on and I keep asking them. And I change the plan constantly, because a plan that survives contact with a real life is a plan that gets edited most weeks.

I will challenge you. I won't punish you. Those are different things, and the fitness industry has spent thirty years pretending they are the same.

What tends to happen

Most people start with a block of about twelve weeks. What usually happens next is that we simply keep going — a good number of the people I work with have been with me five years, several ten, and one or two longer than that.

I don't think that is because I am irreplaceable. I think it is because the value compounds. By year three I know which shoulder is the awkward one, what your week looks like in February, and what you are quietly hoping to still be doing at seventy-five. You cannot download that.

Who I'm not the right person for

If you want to be pushed until you are on the floor, I am not your coach. If you want a meal plan that tells you exactly what to eat at 3pm on a Thursday for the next six weeks, I am not that either.

And if you are dealing with something that needs actual treatment — acute pain, something undiagnosed, an injury still being managed — see your doctor or physiotherapist first. I will happily train alongside them, and often do. I just won't pretend to be them.