It’s a mixed bag of experience, education, best practice from science, and trial and error.
Technically I’m a trainer with education in traditional Pilates, weight lifting, and running. I have special interest in locomotion biomechanics (how we move our bodies from place A to place B), and by extension the workings of the feet. I also work with physical rehab and pain management and work closely with the therapists here to pick up where they leave off and help create training that compliments their treatments.

What do I actually try to do? Give you control of your body, and hopefully the mental and emotional parts related to movement. I love taking things apart and putting them back together and trying to fix things, you can ask anyone here at THK, and I’m usually pretty successful at it. I truly love applying this thought to movement and when people come in with problems to solve, be it getting rid of pain or moving better. I have been heavily influenced by people that take an approach that tries to take evolutionary biology into account, and what we were actually made for. Some of the awesome people I have been taught by, trained with, or been inspired by are:
Petra Karlsson – The Pilates Standard, Ido Portal – Movement Culture, Dr. Andreo Spina – Functional Range Conditioning, Anders Nordström – Löpspecialist, Lee Saxby – Born to Run, Katy Bowman – Nutritious Movement, Gold Medal Bodies, Fighting Monkey, and many others. The common thread between all of them is one simple question, what are we designed for, and how do we do more of that?

In our modern lifestyles, we are very detached from our hunter gatherer evolution. Now we sit and stare at a screen or do repetitive tasks over and over. Trying to fix this movement deficit with 3x60mins training a week in very prescribed patternised movements is probably not the best answer for the vast majority of us if we want to make any healthy lasting change.

There are loads of amazing trainers out there that can do fitness, strength, and sports specific training, but that isn’t my interest or specialty. I am a generalist to a large extent. I focus more on what a human needs than any specific task. I try to prepare my clients so that they are capable of doing anything that their life, other coaches, or sports demand from them. I try and go back and teach control of each joint of the body, creating more range of motion with strength and control, and when we have that, add in chaos to the mix to challenge the system, so that it has more capacity to react to new situations with less risk of injury and a greater tolerance for the unknown.
I try and use Ido’s way of thinking ”Isolate, Integrate, Improvise”.
Isolate, if there is something wrong or something that nots working how it is supposed to, work on just that. Then Integrate, add that part that we improved into something bigger so that it’s working with the body as a whole, then finally Improvise, do something that doesn’t have a strict pattern of fixed solution so that we challenge it.
Creating a strong and stable foundation, and by extension a more capable and confident person in every aspect of physicality, is most important to me.

Pilates brought me into this concept of being able to control yourself, after years of abusing my body and getting injury after injury from sports and weight lifting. My educations and courses and research up to my most recent education with FRC has further focused this. I work with a lot of sports clubs and athletes, but I also do this for a lot of people recovering from pain who just want to be able to walk or pick up their grandchildren. We are all human and I try and broaden the skillset of the person to help them do whatever it is they want to do, or may want to do in the future. I’ll leave you with two more of my favourite movement quotes –

or put more concisely:

If any of this sounds interesting, you’re more than welcome to come try out a taster of this with my mobility class, or for more in-depth approach you can always try personal training with me.

//Anthony