David Lloyd, and a decade of the same pattern
I’ve worked as a personal trainer at David Lloyd Royal Berkshire for years. In that time, I’ve trained hundreds of people with completely different goals, strength, fat loss, general fitness, sports performance. But one pattern kept repeating that had nothing to do with any of those goals.
Capable women, motivated women, would join, get a programme, and quietly stop showing up within weeks. The programmes were fine. Something about being on the gym floor itself, specifically the weights area, made the whole thing impossible to sustain. Nobody was addressing that directly, because it isn’t really a fitness problem to begin with.
Tennis, and learning what real coaching actually looks like
Before personal training, I competed in tennis at a reasonably serious level. That sport teaches you something most gym-based fitness coaching never touches, the difference between a technical fault and a mental one. A tennis coach who only ever corrects your grip while your actual problem is what happens in your head before a big point is not doing their job properly. The technical fix without the psychological one rarely holds under real pressure.
I’ve carried that directly into how I coach now. Teaching someone to use a leg press properly is the easy part. It was never the part that determined whether someone actually kept coming back.
Why MindFirst exists
MindFirst is built around addressing the actual block first, properly, rather than motivating someone to push through a fear that’s never been named. The Walk In Method, the four-stage process at the centre of how I coach, came directly out of watching this pattern for years at David Lloyd and finally building something that starts in the right place.
If you want to read exactly how that process works, the four stages are explained here, or message me directly if you’d rather just talk it through.