Chris Peden MSc - Strength & Conditioning Coach

Home
United Kingdom
Portsmouth
Chris Peden MSc - Strength & Conditioning Coach

S&C Coach to Professional and Amateur Endurance Athletes

21/03/2026

It’s taken me a hell of a long time, but I’m finally in a place where I want to plant some roots and build something that lasts.

For a long time I had a never settle mentality, always prioritising my career above everything else.

But the last couple of years have forced me to work on myself. A lot of reflection and a lot of uncomfortable truths, helped more recently under the guidance of who’s helping me become better across all areas of life. Poor man 😂

Things are by no means perfect and there is still a lot I would like to achieve both professionally and personally, but it feels good to be content.

Not because I’ve stopped pushing, but because I finally like where I’m building from.

So whatever the future holds, I’m here for it with an open heart and open arms 🖤

20/03/2026

From now until the Summer, going to the gym as an Endurance Athlete can be challenging but it’s not always impossible.

You just have to change your approach slightly to help you get the most out of the limited time you have.

If you find yourself always struggling to manage it, shoot me a message to see if I can help 🤜🏻🤛🏻

18/03/2026

What a great few days… despite the post race pain 😂

Getting some proper quality time with my Daughter, Sister and Rob, good food, plenty of laughs and enjoying being together meant a lot.

Oh… and my first ever Marathon was thrown in the mix for good measure.

42km around Barcelona on Sunday. What an experience.

So many mixed emotions across the day. Nerves, excitement, enjoyment, pain and a few moments of questioning my life choices.

Especially in the last 10km where it felt less like running and more like a negotiation with my legs to not bloody stop 🤣

But we got round and crossed the finish line with a sense of elation.

Safe to say there’s still some unfinished business with the running side of things… although first I need to get on top of the injuries that keep stopping me from building any real consistency with my training before I commit to another event.

So for now, I’m just grateful for the weekend, the family time, showing them this beautiful city I now call home, ticking off another goal and with it a reminder that you can’t expect to perform at your best on a wing and a prayer 😆

13/03/2026

There are plenty of great guys and girls doing amazing work with athletes at the minute so this post isn’t meant to be directed at anyone in particular and I hope it doesn’t get taken that way.

I certainly don’t think I’ve got all the answers and I’m still trying to learn and improve just like everyone else. This is more of an observation and getting my thoughts out there from what I’ve experienced over the years to try and create healthy debate.

The more we can help each other the better we can move things moving forward in a positive way.

Happy Friday 🖤

11/03/2026

When in doubt… Go all in and find out

On paper, with my physiology, I had no real business ever attacking in bike races.

I mean some would probably say I had no business riding a bike at all… But that was more of an internal joke among friends who were a lot better than me 😂

The smarter approach for someone like me was simple. Sit in, conserve energy and hope it came down to a sprint.

Because my sprint power was always pretty good. My threshold on the other hand… not so much 🥴

But to me that was boring and as I got older, I realised something.

Its much more fun going all in and committing. I got just as much satisfaction from burying myself in a race and coming away having had a good workout as I did from the times I actually placed well.

Cycling teaches you something important. It might only be one rider that crosses the finish line first and gets the glory, but cycling is rarely won by just one rider.

Behind every result there’s a team shaping the outcome. Teammates, coaches, support staff etc all playing their part along the way.

And that’s true in both sport and in life.

Not all effort gets recognised and success doesn’t always come with applause.

But the satisfaction of knowing you went all in and committed fully with your own little support crew of family and friends around you without knowing if it will work out or not?

Well if you do, as scary as it can be, you’ve already won and that’s your own form of glory regardless of the result.

So sometimes the best approach is simple:

When in doubt… Go all in and find out.

Because if you don’t, you can’t say it was never for you. But if you do? Well it just might be the best thing you ever did 😊

If you want to build the strength, power and resilience to compete with that mindset, that’s exactly what we work on inside Combined Athletic Performance. Send me a message if you want help becoming a stronger Endurance Athlete

04/03/2026

The good old days of racing a bike.

Part of me wishes I could go back in time and talk to that guy. Especially with what I know now as I’d definitely grab him by the shoulders and say:

“Mate, wtf are you doing, you’re making this way too hard for yourself”

Because the truth is, I wasn’t doing things properly.

I rode my bike sporadically each week with no real structure to my training

I went to the gym but it was random and poorly planned.

I partied more than a serious athlete probably should have (I was in the Navy and too easily led 😬)

And my nutrition? Well I think you’re starting to get the picture 😂

My ego of being a Navy PTI thought the little bit of natural talent that I had would be enough.

I mean talk to any PTI in the military and they’ll try to convince you that they’re the dogs bo****ks at everything, safeguard (honestly in civvy street) 🤣

But performance at a high level doesn’t come from winging it.

It comes from structure, discipline and doing the basics consistently well for a long time.

Training that actually has a purpose. Strength work that supports performance on the bike. Nutrition that fuels performance and recovery and a lifestyle that matches the goals you say you want.

I certainly wish I fully understood what true high performance behaviours were a lot earlier in my life as it’s no fun taking a kicking most of the time 😂

But the upside is this. I’ve since spent years learning, studying and coaching so others don’t have to make the same mistakes I did.

Now I help cyclists build the strength, structure and resilience that actually translates to better performance on the bike.

So if you want to stop guessing and start training with a proper plan, Send me a DM with the word “UNSTOPPABLE ” and I’ll show you how we can work together 💪🏻

27/02/2026

Strength Training should always be programmed in accordance with your training age and compliment your Endurance Training rather than compete with it.

Trying to do too much or be too advanced too soon will always be detrimental to you as an athlete.

Do as much as necessary, not as much as possible and take your time, enjoy the journey

25/02/2026

If you stay in fitness or sport long enough, injury isn’t a possibility, it’s a part of the game.

Now we can’t 100% predict when injuries will happen or eliminate them completely, but we can shift the odds in our favour.

One of the most robust protective factors we have is being stronger.

A large systematic review and meta analysis by Lauersen et al. (2018) found that structured strength training reduced sports injuries by ~66%, effectively halving overall injury risk with high certainty.

When you build strength through targeted S&C, you’re increasing the capacity of your entire structural system, bones, tendons, ligaments and muscle.

A higher capacity = a greater tolerance to force and a greater tolerance to force = an ability to handle higher training loads.

When you tolerate load better, you get to train more consistently without any problems. More consistent high quality work with fewer missed sessions is what helps build progress with your long term performance.

But yes, funnily enough I’m writing this while managing my own injury at the physio which is the unfortunate reality that I mentioned above.

You can try to do everything right and still pick something up along the way.

Sometimes an injury is the cost of pushing the limits of seeing what you’re capable of.

But the stronger the foundation you build, the more resilient you become and the more likely you are to bounce back faster and stay in the game longer to reach your goals.

This becomes more and more important the older you get as despite what my brain often thinks, I’m no spring chicken anymore 😂

20/02/2026

Improving stability and performance isn’t about trying to balance on unstable surfaces, it’s about understanding how to control better positions and training the muscles responsible for that. First in a low key setting before loading up over time.

The bosu ball or other unstable surfaces are amazing tools within rehabilitation but are often mis/over used within a performance setting where their use is favoured over traditional lifting on a hard and stable surfaces.

Don’t confuse feeling harder with being beneficial. If your body is unstable, it down-regulates the power output generated by the muscle every time you go to produce force as a protective mechanism. So you lose the ability to get stronger and more powerful, therefore losing the ability to have a transfer of sports performance.

The kinetic chain from your foot to your hip is your locomotor to propel you forward at speed and the more stability that you have and can create up this chain of command will allow you to produce more power and perform better as an athlete.

Address

Portsmouth

Website

https://linktr.ee/CPeden

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Chris Peden MSc - Strength & Conditioning Coach posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Practice

Send a message to Chris Peden MSc - Strength & Conditioning Coach:

Shortcuts

Want your practice to be the top-listed Clinic in Portsmouth?