“At 35, I was in the throes of a brutal divorce and my health was hanging by a thread. The gym started as a refuge for me, a distraction. But soon, it morphed into something more profound – a lifeline. With each workout, I found another little piece of myself. Today, as I push my limits, I want to help inspire others on their own path of self-improvement and confidence in their own fitness journey. So, as I forge ahead, I’m on a mission to share the lessons I’ve learned, to empower others to reclaim their strength and rewrite their own stories.”
- COACH DAN
A LICENCE TO LIVE
You know that time when you renew your license? It’s that time when you stand in line, get your picture taken again because it was a good decade since the last mugshot of you that the government likes to hold on file. I thought nothing of mine until it arrived in the mail and I took out my old license and replaced it with my new one.
The picture on the left was 2012. I was 33 years old, 265lbs and I couldn’t do a sit-up without help. I was going through a devastating divorce, the result of an abusive relationship that had stripped me of my self-confidence and of my health. I was fighting for access to my kids, I had lost the business I had taken a lifetime to build to the divorce and I was struggling to find any reason at all to keep going.
The picture on the right was 2019 and I turned 40, had lost 65lbs, was competing in my first CrossFit® competition and had just PR’d my deadlift at 405lbs. A few years earlier I had got back on my feet, found a great trainer who had helped me loose the weight and regain my mobility and I had turned my nutrition around overnight. This was part of the fight to discover myself again. My daughters gave me the strength I needed to start and, as the layers of abuse and shame were peeled away, I found inside myself the will to keep going.
It was not until these 2 photos passed one another, as one left my wallet to be replaced by the other, that it really hit me as how bad I had let things get and how far I had come in the fight to find myself again. It was right then that I knew I had to help others make the change that gave me back a life that was so nearly taken from me.
I GET IT! I REALLY DO!
I know what you are going through and I know how fucking hard it is to get started.
I didn’t know how to train. I didn’t know what to eat. Every day I thought about what I needed to do it all felt a bit too much and I put it off until tomorrow. The world is swimming with conflicting advice from “fitness influencers” and fad diets. We all want a shortcut, a quick fix, a way out and, I hate to break it to you, but there simply isn’t one. Not one without a hell of a lot of hard work anyway.
I was lucky and I stumbled across an amazing trainer who introduced me to the world of functional fitness and strength training. As we get older we want to move freely and without restriction and that gets harder when you are in your forties, trust me! Sure, bench pressing and machine work at a globo gym is great, you’re moving which is awesome and probably getting stronger too but it’s rarely anything like the way we move in real life and when you’re running around keeping up with your kids or fixing up the cottage wouldn’t it be great to move freely and without pain?
After training for a while I joined a local CrossFit® gym and immersed myself in the incredible community that I found there. It’s probably the most supportive and inclusive space I have ever found myself a part of and this impacted not only my passion for fitness but the way in which I conducted myself in all aspects of my life. I had to know more. I wanted to understand better about why we trained in multiple modalities, how the programming was designed and considered and how it impacted me personally as an athlete. After 5 years of training as a CrossFit® Athlete I signed up for my Coaching Certification purely for the purposes of educating myself more in the sport I had grown to love. I had absolutely no expectation that this course would introduce me to the idea of training others and helping people change their lives as I had done my own.
Newly certified CF-L1 I have now been working with private clients for the last 3 years. In the course of enjoying this incredible process I found more and more questions coming in regarding nutrition as part of the transformational journey that so many of my clients have taken. I already knew a lot but not enough so again went “back-to-school” and retrained with the incredible team over at Precision Nutrition to support my athletes as a Certified PN1-NC Nutritionist.
I WANT TO HELP
So why am I here? I’m assuming you’re here on this site because you are looking to take that first step in changing your health. Well I am here because I have been there and am cheering you on from the other side. It feels great, it truly does and I have spent the last few years training and educating myself in ways that I can help anyone who was just like me and who are struggling to take that first step on the health & fitness journey.
So whether you want help with a training program, figuring out what to eat or perhaps you need help dialling in your nutrition to better support your existing training - drop me a line. I would absolutely love yo be a part of your journey!
