Sdm* Total Therapy Studios

17/01/2026

New flooring weekend at Total Therapy Studios Carfax.

14/01/2026

Good evening all, Dom here with some news. And as ever, I'll explain it using far too many words.

There is a school of thought - usually advanced by people in white coats who say things like “studies suggest” and “the evidence indicates,” and who are therefore almost certainly cleverer than I am - that women produce a very particular hormone during childbirth. This hormone, apparently, exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to wipe the mental slate clean. It doesn’t help with the pain at the time, doesn’t offer tea or sympathy afterwards, but instead quietly creeps in and deletes the worst of the memories, rather like a kindly librarian removing the most traumatic passages from a book and insisting you’ll thank them for it later.

This is, when you think about it, an astonishing piece of biological foresight. Childbirth, by all accounts, is not what you’d call a relaxing afternoon. If human beings retained a perfectly accurate, high-definition memory of the experience, complete with sound effects and a director’s commentary, the species would probably grind to a halt within a generation. No one would ever do it twice. Yet people do. Routinely. Enthusiastically, even. I know several individuals who endured what can only be described as an epic ordeal from start to finish, and who then - astonishingly - announced the impending arrival of Child Number Two with the breezy optimism of someone planning a weekend away.

Something, clearly, has been forgotten.

I myself have always kept a respectful distance from such matters. As god-parent to an improbably large collection of children - some young, some old enough to shave - my involvement has largely consisted of standing in churches, holding candles, and repeatedly renouncing The Devil, who by now must be feeling distinctly singled out. Still, I remain endlessly fascinated by the human body’s capacity to find inventive solutions to otherwise insurmountable problems. Erasing bad memories so that life can continue, and indeed flourish, seems a particularly inspired one.

In 2018, I did something that I swore, quite solemnly and on more than one occasion, that I would never do again. Part charity challenge, part marketing wheeze, and part staggeringly ill-judged idea, I walked from Cambridge to Total Therapy Studios in Horsham. Why? That remains unclear. At the time it all seemed perfectly reasonable, which in retrospect should have been a warning sign. The support I received from the team and clients at Total Therapy Studios, receiving daily encouragement to my hobbles at the roadside was truly one of the things that keeps me going.

It was, without question, the hardest thing I have ever done. Harder than exams, harder than tax returns, harder even than trying to explain to a call centre why the internet was working yesterday. It was a full-scale emotional rollercoaster, complete with dizzying highs, crushing lows, and long stretches where I questioned every decision that had led me to that exact patch of road. There was extraordinary support from friends, moments of unexpected joy, and a level of damage to my lower limbs that I am still, years later, paying for in small daily instalments.

My dear friend Katie, with the casual cruelty that only close friends can muster, suggested that I write a book about the whole thing. I did, which meant that everyone had to hear about my triumphs and disasters all over again. Dom’s Big Fat Walk To Work did not trouble the Sunday Times Best Sellers list, but many of you read it, some of you even enjoyed it, and I still occasionally pick it up to remind myself what the experience was like.

When I look back now, I feel a genuine sense of pride—and, in a pleasing echo of the childbirth hormone with which we began, I have almost certainly forgotten just how much pain I was in at the time. For some people, it would have been little more than a pleasant walking holiday. For me, it was my Olympics, my Everest, and - if I’m being honest - more challenging than installing a new printer without throwing it out of a window.

Naturally, I concluded that this was quite enough personal growth for one lifetime, and resolved never to do anything so ridiculous again.

But now - I've decided - to do something equally silly.

13/01/2026

If we're being honest, we think this picture broadly speaks for itself.

31/12/2025

You’ve heard of Spotify Wrapped, but as we reflect on the year we took a moment to put together *Total Therapy Studios Wrapped* – just to get a sense of the scale of this year.

Our classes continue to go from strength-to-strength, and this year we delivered a total of 3,302 classes, which meant 18,931 individual visits to Denne Parade and Carfax. Wowzers! We also delivered 936 reformer classes too, with 2,722 individual visits. We’ve been doing reformer in Horsham a long time now, and we’re thrilled to be able to provide this. It’s not just reformer classes of course; we’ve provided over 626 hours of reformer one-to-one/two-to-ones too, which means our reformer studio has had 3,348 hours of instruction.! We’ve also gone through just slightly over 1500 litres of water from our water coolers, and 102 ink cartridges in our printers across all three sites!

Also worthy of note are our new Strength and Conditioning classes with Tommy – we’ve already held 135 of these, despite them being a recent addition to the timetable; we look forward to more of these in 2025. Our online classes also remain a significant part of what we do, and we held almost 450 of these, with 2,675 attendees. These were of course a huge part of our pandemic response, but they’re still going strong!

When it comes to therapy, we’ve delivered over 2404 therapy appointments at Denne Parade and Carfax. Our online booking systems too – which we launched only halfway through the year have also been a roaring success, with almost a thousand appointments across Denne Parade and Clockhouse being booked online. We’ve also run the numbers on Clockhouse Podiatry, and we’re thrilled to say we’ve delivered a whopping 3,561 appointments to the good people of Horsham. This means we’ve seen slightly less than 35,610 toes (and no, we’re not going to tell you why it’s less than you’d expect in terms of toes). Clockhouse has also gone through about 12kg of coffee by our calculations, and by our calculations Dom has munched his was through several hundred Tunnocks Caramel wafers.

We’re honoured to be able to support the people of Horsham with their wellbeing, and love being part of the local community. We’re looking forward to another wonderful year in 2026, and are keen to do all that we can to grow the Total Therapy Studios family. So thanks for being along with us on the journey; here’s to the New Year. Sarah x

30/12/2025

We're doing some painting in Clockhouse Podiatry today, although Sarah has basically just covered herself in white gloss paint instead.

28/12/2025

What day is it? We'll just call it 'cheese day'.

24/12/2025

It's the LAST DAY of our Advent Calendar, and - quite simply - here's Sarah singing Silent Night. Happy Christmas everyone, and thanks for being such the community you are; you mean the world to us x

Listen to SilentNight - Sarah Dover-McCarthy by DomshouseStudios2 on

23/12/2025

*Day TWENTY-THREE* of our advent calendar, and we're putting together our '2025 Wrapped' stats which we'll share just before New Year (did you know we delivered over 3300 classes, and had over 19,000 vists to our studio in 2025?) More to follow with the stats, but as we look at where we are now, here's a picture from 2012, three days after we picked up the keys to Denne Parade. Sarah taking a short breather obviously, and probably wondering where this would all end up.. Ddm x

22/12/2025

It's DAY TWENTY-TWO of our advent calendar, and we go back to the Christmas online classes. Naturally you've still got to get in the mood, even if you're not attending the studio. So here's me broadcasting live from my living room - suffice to say the jumper was warmer than I thought it would be x

18/12/2025

Day *Eighteen* of our advent calendar as we reflect at the end of the year. Tonight reflecting on how coming together in the face of challenge is so important, this video goes all the way back to the scary days in April 2020. When it comes to the difficulties and uncertainty of these times, they’re often hard to recollect. And when it comes to how grateful we are for the support and spirit of our team and clients? Well that’s where I run out of words. Sarah x