Long-term health requires enjoyment, individuality, inclusivity, being challenged, support and honesty….. Everything you will find at Custom Fitness.
The WHY of Custom Fitness....
I was a fat kid who comfort ate. Plus when I was younger, eating (and eating a lot), was what I was good at! It’s what people made positive comments about to me…
That most definitely changed when I went to boarding school.
What I was once positively talked to about became a negative
Sport was seen as a HUGE positive and when I went I did VERY little
However with 3 afternoons a week plus 1 hour of PE and 1 hour of swimming a week, things MASSIVELY changed
In the first term, it seems almost every other week I went to the sewing office as I needed smaller trousers. I went from an 11 year old with a 34inch waist to a 11 year old with 28inch waist.
I found that I enjoyed sport and physical activity...a lot
By being exposed to a wide variety of sports/activities, I represented the school in rugby, swimming, water polo, athletics and found sports and activities that I still love today.
The change in me at this age meant that I started to get positive comments about other things instead of how much I could eat, and that soured me on to do more sport. A massive memory I have was winning a swimming event in the interpose competition and looking up and loads of the house members were all cheering me!
When you add to that the limited/controlled food intake (so technically my total calorie intake reduced a lot) I was onto a winning formula to getting leaner, stronger, more athletic, more powerful, and it helped with me feeling better on every level.
Now I appreciate that I am very lucky to have gone to boarding school, and being able to develop a love of physical activity and sport. I am also lucky to have made that passion into a career that I love - being a coach in health and performance.
I’ve never been that interested in the vanity of this industry - Ive always been about movement, physical capabilities and training for a goal (often performance related). The ‘aesthetics’ that people want is a byproduct of training for performance and using training methods that have stood the test of time, and not the fads that come and go.
The advantage is though, as opposed to simply talking the talk, being able to walk the walk as well makes things even better.
I dislike the way commercial gyms run - I worked for them/in them for 11 years and they treated people like s**t. The entire business model is a simple numbers game. They don’t care at all about the people, just their money. I appreciate this was in the past AND from my own individual perspective, but it’s a big part of my WHY.
With all the negative s**t in today’s society, the last thing a gym should be is a negative, cold and anti-social place, where people go because they feel like it instead of it being a positive thing. You put the news on - its all negative. You go on Facebook and it won’t take long for someone to be moaning…
CF is a place where people can come and enjoy, socialise, enrich their lives, and not just be miserable, walking on a treadmill, looking dejected, thinking they are doing good so they can justify the glass of wine or ‘balance the books’ on the weekend just gone.
The pressure on people can make them a slave to their job, with the list of perceived things they ‘have to do’ every growing. I want people to want to come to CF as it’s the best thing or in their top 3 in their life (I’ll accept home life and work as the other 2!).
The down side to the industry is that there are too many people who just want to make a quick ££ and don’t give a s**t. Then there is all the BS about who’s right, the correct way to train - the BS about how to get ripped compared to the actual reality of it. We work on PRINCIPLES. These don’t really change and enable everyone to find a way that works for them.
I just wanted to create somewhere that isn’t full of s**t, doesn’t judge people, supports them, and helps ordinary people achieve extraordinary things.
