After years of coaching kickboxers in large groups, I’ve watched some very talented athletes sink and quit while some of the most uncoordinated people I’ve met have thrived and progressed to making jumping, spinning kicks look effortless. Natural ability seemed to be a poor indicator of whether someone would achieve their goals in the sport. Over the years, I found a common thread amongst the most successful – character. Those disciplined, consistent and hardworking individuals, the honest, humble ones open to learning, those are the ones who have done best. What’s more, even if you are naturally few of those things, they are traits that can be trained and worked on. You are totally allowed to develop your mind as well as your body.

As I did more research, gained a better understanding of sports science and completed my personal training qualifications, I focused on achieving the best results for those kickboxers looking to compete. Outside of their scheduled training, I discovered many mad and conflicting ideas from my students had about how they should train, what they should eat, and whether they should rest. From a sports science perspective, some of them were continually self-sabotaging, while adamant that they were doing what they needed to do to make progress.

So I started building towards Rebel Monk Fitness. I wanted to provide a personal service to a small number of people, where I could help them learn to train effectively, support them towards their goals and help them better understand their approach to physical fitness. I knew this service couldn’t just be customised training plans with a bland check-in process and a few guides and recipe books thrown in. It couldn’t be a generic, one size fits all approach – I’ve seen the same training programme produce dramatically different results among a group of people.

Rebel Monk Fitness always had to be about taking a bit of someone’s character, a bit of their lifestyle, and building something a little more personal. Training has to be flexible enough to help people meet their goals in appropriate and sustainable ways. Your training programme is only one piece of your fitness puzzle. Rebel Monk Fitness helps put the other pieces in place along the way.

I am not a natural athlete. I was the kid at school who got picked after the fat kid. I only discovered an enjoyment of sport at 26, and even then, I was the substitute left-back for my university staff team.

I’m a problem solver at heart. It’s something that took me along a journey through a PhD in Acoustics and then into a career in IT, managing millions of pounds worth of high-performance computing and at one point finding myself watching polar bears from a ship in the Arctic.

It’s my problem solving ability that led me to achieve far more as an amateur athlete than I really have any right to. I’m a below-average athlete with a pretty good brain – and that’s helped me to finding advantages in my training and my sports that sometimes get overlooked. I’m a geek who got into sport. I’m completely okay with my tendency to sit and nerd out to sports science research. At the same time, my taste in music – punk, rock and blues – add a little left-field, anti-authoritarian approach to my training, with my love for Ska-punk accounting for some of the chaos. (I admit, I’ve never been cool.) Throw in some of my formative sports training being in a traditional boxing gym, in a disused abattoir with a bucket in the ring to catch the water from the hole in the asbestos roof, and that adds in an appreciation of discipline and work rate. All this is capped off by more proof of my lack of cool, through my practice of Zen Buddhism, something which has provided insight into the mental factors around my training.

All that leads to the Rebel Monk approach: No bullshit. No wasted effort. Everything has it’s purpose. Eat well. Move more. Lift heavy. Be mindful. Keep Learning. Enjoy the little things. And, as they say in Wales, “Araf deg mae mynd ymhell,” – Go slowly and go far.

I’m not just an online coach sat next to a computer with a can of coke and box of doughnuts telling you to work harder (although I do like doughnuts :] ). It’s important to me that I don’t ask any of my clients to do anything that I wouldn’t be willing to do myself. If I’m going to talk the talk, I have to be able to walk the walk. And it’s an approach that has helped keep me honest in my own sporting efforts.

As well as coaching others, I’m dedicated to my own sports and my own training, which involves trying to balance a conflicting set of goals. I train endurance for ultramarathon running and yet need to focus on the anaerobic intensity needed for combat sports. This has left me needing to think carefully about my own training needs and learn how to give myself the biggest possible advantage in both fields.

I started running in 2016, and realising how slow I was, I navigated towards long distance running, where being slow is just what happens. I still don’t consider myself a “proper runner” but someone who likes spending time in the mountains seeing where my feet will take me. Some of my race highlights are listed below.

I’ve been involved with combat sports for a lot longer, but since around 2015 my focus has been on coaching. I have coached at both the Cambridge University Kickboxing Society and Squared Circle Boxing Academy in Cambridge.

Race Highlights

A few of my favourite races so far: