Balance Fitness and Wellbeing

Balance Fitness and Wellbeing Helping you to be fitter, healthier, and happier, for life. Hi, I'm Paul Waters, owner of balance, and personal trainer and lifestyle coach for 20 years.

Based in Wells, we’re a fitness & wellbeing studio offering a unique blend of personal training, yoga, massage, health checks, and nutrition & lifestyle coaching - to help you find your balance.. These days, I'm an author, coach, and speaker, specialising in helping people to improve their health, fitness, and wellbeing in a sustainable way. On this page, I share with you how my partner Lou and I try to live a simple, balanced lifestyle, and how you can do it too. You’ll find hints and tips on everything from mindset and behaviour change to nutrition, sleep, stress reduction and improving mental health, boosting energy levels, cardio, weights, stretching, and much, much more! And every piece of advice I give is about moving away from gimmicks and quick fixes to find simple, natural, lasting solutions. You don’t find any supplements or meal replacements here, there’ll be no rapid weight loss or fitness plans that you can’t maintain, and everything will be as much about looking after our beautiful planet too.

Lou’s latest bake…A delicious wholemeal seeded loaf. 🍞 ❤️Another little step in our quest to reduce our ultra-processed ...
14/10/2025

Lou’s latest bake…

A delicious wholemeal seeded loaf. 🍞 ❤️

Another little step in our quest to reduce our ultra-processed choices and oh my word, it’s delicious!!! 😋

Anyone else love that feeling after outdoor exercise?Lungs open, mind open, completely alive!!! ❤️❤️❤️
14/10/2025

Anyone else love that feeling after outdoor exercise?

Lungs open, mind open, completely alive!!! ❤️❤️❤️

Small changes is the way to lasting balance.Pasta with pesto, roasted veg, chicken sausages, and a bit of cheese.There’s...
13/10/2025

Small changes is the way to lasting balance.

Pasta with pesto, roasted veg, chicken sausages, and a bit of cheese.

There’s only one thing different from this meal than the version we usually have. Normally, we use the pre-made spinach and ricotta stuffed pasta with it. It’s marked as fresh after all.

But our recent read of Chris van Tulleken’s book on ultra-processed foods (UPFs) got us taking a little look at what we’re eating and if any tweaks might help. The result here - a simple switch to wholewheat pasta instead. That’s it, not big or fancy, just a minor tweak. Easy to do, easy to stick to.

Not perfect (but what is with food?) but probably better. And better is a great word to focus on when it comes to nutrition. 🙌

Running goals 🏃🏻‍♀️ Ultimately to run an ultramarathon by this time next year. It’s been a goal for a number of years, b...
12/10/2025

Running goals 🏃🏻‍♀️

Ultimately to run an ultramarathon by this time next year.

It’s been a goal for a number of years, but what with life, injuries, two young children and all the other bits and pieces that make up our time, I’ve never found the consistency to train for one.

So being realistic, a year to train for an Ultra (I have my heart set on a 50miler 😁) seems sensible. To make it fun and tick a few other running goals off along the way I’ll enter as many race distances as I can.

🏃🏻‍♀️ 5k - still never done a parkrun 😳
🏃🏻‍♀️ 10k
🏃🏻‍♀️ Half marathon
🏃🏻‍♀️ Marathon- see picture 2 😁
🏃🏻‍♀️ Ultra 🤩

Edinburgh marathon has a double whammy goal - the aim to run it in 3:30 to qualify for a ‘good for age’ place at the London marathon 👌

Let the running goals commence 🤸🏻‍♂️ 🏃🏻‍♀️ 😁

Hello Blaise Castle my old friend,I’ve come to run round you again. 🏃🏻‍♂️ 🏰 🌳 ❤️ It’s been a long time and I’ve really m...
10/10/2025

Hello Blaise Castle my old friend,
I’ve come to run round you again. 🏃🏻‍♂️ 🏰 🌳 ❤️

It’s been a long time and I’ve really missed this place. I had a beautiful 7-mile jog around this afternoon after finishing my PT sessions.

Is there somewhere you love to visit, somewhere that’s food for your soul that maybe you haven’t visited for a while? Could this be the weekend to go visit that old friend?

We’ve visited a number of these peachy places on walks over the years! 🍑 Some are literally in our backyard so to speak!...
09/10/2025

We’ve visited a number of these peachy places on walks over the years! 🍑 Some are literally in our backyard so to speak! 🤣

I finished reading this a few days ago, strangely just as the Joe Wickes and Chris van Tulleken documentary aired.It’s a...
09/10/2025

I finished reading this a few days ago, strangely just as the Joe Wickes and Chris van Tulleken documentary aired.

It’s a powerful book containing plenty of useful info and shocking facts. And it’s not afraid to hit hard and name industry names.

What I was less keen on in it was what you often see in books of this nature - namely the wording is sometimes overly sensationalist. Chapters titled along the lines of, ‘It’s not about exercise’ and ‘It’s not about sugar either’ give the impression these things play no role in weight management and health, but they do. There’s no one magic solution to our current health and wellbeing issues, we face multiple challenges (which wonderfully means there are multiple solutions to being healthier too).

What I do like is that he doesn’t try to persuade you to never eat this stuff again. He looks for a balanced approach and pushes for governments to take a firmer role in regulation.

Read it. It’s good knowledge to ingest, digest, and act on. 🍏

It’s looking set to be a cracking autumn!! 🍃 🍁 🍂
09/10/2025

It’s looking set to be a cracking autumn!! 🍃 🍁 🍂

What a corker of a day!A beautiful morning drive through Cranborne Chase, the North Wessex Downs, and the Chilterns, pas...
08/10/2025

What a corker of a day!

A beautiful morning drive through Cranborne Chase, the North Wessex Downs, and the Chilterns, past Stonehenge, seeing large brown hares stood alert in the fields and deer grazing in peaceful corners well away from us pesky humans.

Then I got to deliver a really fun session on change, the physiology and psychology of it, and some tools for keeping us well and thriving through change for the fabulous team at Guardsman.

And then it was home for an early finish and a lovely 5-mile run up into the hills towards Wookey Hole with Lou. Both little ones are still in nursery so it’s nice to get some time together.

Now we’re off to pick them up and time for evening playtime before bed.

That’s what I call a balanced day! ❤️❤️❤️

Who can guess what I thought when I saw the title of this article? 🧐
07/10/2025

Who can guess what I thought when I saw the title of this article? 🧐

There are loads of nutritional posts I could do related to today’s lunch - roasted sweet potato, spinach, tomatoes, chic...
06/10/2025

There are loads of nutritional posts I could do related to today’s lunch - roasted sweet potato, spinach, tomatoes, chicken sausages, and boiled eggs with sourdough toast with garlic oil.

But I wanted to focus on two simple things that can make all the difference when it comes to long-term success for your fitness and wellbeing goals:

1. Preparation - it sounds obvious and it is. If you’ve planned ahead, it’s much more likely you’ll go with the healthier option that you’ve invested time in.

2. Never be afraid to ask for help - I didn’t make this, my ever-wonderful super-partner Lou did. I had the kids this morning whilst she did our first two PT sessions of the day early doors. It was a bit chaotic with the little ones and I just didn’t get chance to make my food before I had to head into the studio.

Luckily, I asked Lou if she’d mind helping and her and the kids delivered my lunch after I’d finished my first few sessions. (If you’re thinking women are just better at organising things, especially when it comes to simultaneously managing children, I completely agree!)

Here’s to a balanced week for you all. Take some time to plan what it looks like and remember to ask for help where you need it. 🙏 📝 🤝

A short autumn stroll today and some fabulous foraging from Lennie. 🌰 🫐 🌳 He can identify and name a wide variety of edi...
05/10/2025

A short autumn stroll today and some fabulous foraging from Lennie. 🌰 🫐 🌳

He can identify and name a wide variety of edible plants already, and today he was excited to see some hazel trees and go searching for the fallen nuts. We also found what must surely be the last of this year’s bumper crop of blackberries!

On top of this, we saw some beautiful autumn leaves turning, did some top stick collecting, found some oak wasp larvae, butterflies, and some humongous conkers!!!

A very balanced bimble indeed. 🥰🥰🥰

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Our Story

Balance is all about helping you get fit, healthy, happy and stay that way. Ultimately, our aim is to help you find a better balance in your physical and mental wellbeing.

We use our ‘think, eat, live, move’ pillars for a truly holistic approach to get you there: think - discover tools to help you develop a mindset for success. eat - learn the key behaviours that underpin a balanced diet; the things you should do more often and those you should do a little less. live - find out how to improve your sleep, reduce stress, and get the perfect life balance move - follow our balanced approach for all-round health and fitness

We embed all of the pillars into everything we do; books, online challenges and our events - balanced days out and weekends walking, cycling or running. We look forward to helping you find your balance.

Paul