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The Exercise Educator, Cologne (2026)

28/12/2025

🤫 The world’s best “Shrug Machine” isn’t even one!

Ever tried these converging chest press pieces?

If I’m not mistaken, can take credit for creating them 👨🏻‍🔬 and they’re a fun tool to have in the gym so you can do a “Smith Machine Press” without having too much elbow extensors involved due to the converging lines of resistance ↗️↖️
(Most people with shorter humerus lengths butcher the range though unfortunately)

This is a piece that’s been copied from them, with the same adjustability in terms of bench position and incline angle, which means it’s possible to create the perfect seat for people of various heights to do shrugs on, barefoot in a jungle gym on a remote island! 🏝️

Seriously, these are glorious. You’ll never have felt your traps get as short under such a stable setup unless you’ve got a savvy way of locking someone into a pair of cables - no doubt involving some faff 😒 I’ve been doing them almost every day for the last week!

If you have this machine in your gym, give this setup a try and tag me in it - I’d love to know what you think! 🤩
(And no, I haven’t named them after myself. They don’t even need a name. They’re just Scapula Elevation with an appropriate application of resistance.)

Note: this is the worst set I’ve done in a long time 😂 zero consistency or control in transitions - a testament to why clients should S**U while they’re doing their set! It’s bloody impossible to concentrate on talking + ex*****on.

08/08/2025

A client I consult on exercise design and progression for just sent me their meal plan for the next week.

I had nothing to do with it.

Perplexity has generated them everything about what they should eat for their goals.

I’ve warned about basic online nutrition coaching being a doomed profession for a while because of how it’s effectively a feedback loop system that is so easily replicated by technology.

I know this because before AI became mainstream I tried and very nearly succeeded in this realm. It was only a matter of time and people more intelligent than me trying.

He’s going to tell it how much he weighs each day and it will calibrate his calories and protein allocation accordingly.

If he didn’t know his body and diet that well he’d also tell it every time he had a stomach issue and it would figure out which were the contributing ingredients.

It’s $20 a month.

Business coaches will tell you to build systems to handle clients for you using templates and spreadsheets. I’m not so sure. It feels like the few years of being able to use socials to flog a low value product are numbered - tech is coming for the $200 a month “lifestyle coaches” slapping people on calorie deficits and telling them to sleep an extra hour to “transform their lives”.

Have I got it twisted? What am I missing that means business coaches continue to shill this lifestyle of attempting to “scale your business” and “create freedom” by automating what they need from us?

Because if it barely needs our input… it won’t need us at all soon.

Surely we’ve got to be focused on what Perplexity or a fully-clothed Grok can’t possibly do?

12/04/2025

2 cracking days at FIBO with .markslavin down, 2 to go. Had a tremendous time talking to operators looking to lead their markets and brands looking to elevate the value they can offer clients with .global .

If we’ve not caught up yet, we’re around until Sunday - drop us a note!

28/02/2025

Had another eventful week with Dr. Mark Slavin in Riyadh at the Beyond Activ for the second time, representing RTS Global 🦾🌏

Day 1 involved landing that morning and heading straight to tour one of the city’s luxury facilities (we saw the other two last year) and meet their Directors of Fitness who were great to hang out and share all sorts of stories with.

Then straight to the facility where Saudi’s top athletes get their fitness tests and tuneups. An elite multi-storey venue with over 25 physical therapists who work with resistance equipment 💪🏽

The first evening was the launch networking event where we said hello to many of our friends old and new - with the standard “Dr Slavin, do you remember me?? I took your course 20 years ago in [insert Gulf Country here]!” 🤩 taking place within 10 minutes of arrival!

2 days of circling the expo room looking for those who are serious about setting the standards of their Personal Trainers apart, as well as checking in with those we met last year 🤝 occasionally popping into the main lecture hall to hear those whom we look to for insight speak 🎤

You won’t have been anywhere in the world with such ambitious plans for its fitness market, which is impressive because there are also already plenty of decent gyms!

We’ve been patient with our approach, making sure that whatever we do aligns with the local accreditation and involves working with the right partners, but the week in Riyadh was extremely encouraging as we met and furthered our understanding with so many people with wonderful visions for the space 🚀

Hopefully this will mean it’s much less than a year before one of us is back.

Until then, thank you Riyadh 🙏🏽

19/01/2025

Woah there - with an important update for its American users! 😱

This tells us that the security concerns cited were probably just a front, and the real reason the USA has banned the platform is to protect its citizens from nonsense health and fitness advice 💪🏽

Here’s to more regulated information so people can stop attempting to get deep stretches in their 37 sets of explosive-concentric scoop-method single-leg hip-thrusts 🤨

🙏🏽 Thank you America 🇺🇸

P.s. shout out to the fitness meme king for the post inspo.
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07/01/2025

I was recently asked what my highlight of 2025 was 🤔

There were a few good bits in there but this “full circle” moment has just struck me 😳

In 2021, stuck in the UK thanks to covid, I figured I might as well make the most of it and convinced and to attend the IFS in London with me (thanks guys! 🙌🏽)

I was pretty excited; it’s quite rare that there are decent industry events to attend and there were some “big names” as the presenters.

I was rather disappointed to see what our industry viewed as delivering value. There was, however, one standout presenter:
I’d never heard of him before, but he combined having extremely well educated and qualified thoughts with a balanced and nuanced manner of presenting them. I queued up afterwards to tell him quite how dramatically he stood out. I thought to myself at the time: I know all these people have tonnes of followers, but this is the person I’d be most chuffed to share a stage with.

Fast forward to Singapore 3 years later and we’re both presenting at the 😱 getting to hang out with someone you’d only recently thought “I’d like to get to where you are” about is always a cool moment.

Mike is an almost unbelievably genuine guy. He started off by saying “have we met?” and if he didn’t actually remember the occasion he did a bloody good job of pretending! I also admired how calmly later that day he dealt with someone quite rudely butting in with an attempt to answer a question I’d specifically asked him in one of his talks.

If you like people taking thoughtful approaches to the fitness industry and particularly the impacts it’s extremity can have on one’s mental health, give Mike a follow 👍🏽

See you at another event elsewhere on the planet mate! 🌍

05/01/2025

Perth, for the second time in 2024, you were fabulous 🫶

were kind enough to have us back - less than 12 months after we came into train their team - and this time their doors were open.

We spread the word wide across Perth 🇦🇺 and a group of trainers that wanted to be truly exceptional at serving their clients customised exercise took the plunge and signed up for a course that none of them had ever heard of before.

Some thought it was going to be too simple for them, others concerned they’d be lost as it was too complex. We had everything from a women’s physique coach, to a trainee PE teacher to a Financial Advisor.

Paul said “moment arm” 78 times, Elle discovered RPE 13, Julie fell in love with a Hamstring Curl, Harry dropped hourly accidental innuendos & Candice danced out the doors further tormented by how she’ll ever leave Personal Training for PE now strategic variations are so exciting 🥴

Oh, and we somehow managed to make a basketball a crucial tool for every gym 🏀

It was the variety of perspectives and everyone’s desire to learn that kept the room buzzing and made the 3 days fly by 🐝

And what a perfect room it was ☀️ Blazing sunshine and a breeze running through the warehouse doors of our own private space, we had free roam with focused silence.

Massive thanks to & for hosting us once again 🙏🏽

Tag a friend who should attend our next WA course! 🔖

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31/12/2024

😱 My Most Influential Exercise Studies of 2024! 🏆

… oh, whoops 🤷🏻‍♂️

If you’re a Personal Trainer looking to be brilliant at what you do, let 2025 be the year we stop getting distracted by Exercise Studies that don’t tell us how to most appropriately and effectively train our clients.

🗑️ Studies tell us nothing about how to set them up in an exercise.  🗑️ Studies tell us nothing about how to cue them when they then perform the exercise.  🗑️ Studies tell us about as good as nothing about how intensely to train our client.

🗑️ Studies barely even give an indication of how much volume our client can tolerate or requires.

Studies tell us what happened when a group of people that aren’t our client did something in a different way from our client, with a different volume and intensity from our client.

And that’s the good ones. We won’t even get into how rare it is that they even control half of the variables necessary to draw any sort of conclusion 🤦🏻‍♂️

(P.s. feel free to pay close attention to Nutrition Studies. They seem to tell us a lot that we wouldn’t necessarily know from theoretical biology! 🔬)

09/12/2024

I spent 3 days last week representing .global solo at the Beyond Activ - Sydney 🇦🇺

Most of my network on IG are fellow trainers, very few of whom are ever in attendance at events like these, that are primarily focused on industry businesses looking to work together… so I thought I’d share some candid insight into an honest estimation of what these events entail for me:

30% catching up with people who are quickly becoming mates having seen them at 2-3 of these a year! 🍻

10% hunting down known attendees who we think would appreciate having their trainers taken to the next level 👀

15% standing on the sidelines waiting for people to finish their conversation so I can politely introduce myself once I’ve found them 🤝

15% chatting to said people 💬

20% watching people on stage whose thoughts and topics of conversation I value 💭

10% on my phone taking notes about who I’ve spoken to and need to follow up with, and making sure the ops at RTS Global run smoothly while I’m away 📱

I’ve now attended both of the Australia editions and I’m finally getting a decent understanding of the local Personal Training market, primarily thanks to so many people being willing to share their insights on it 🧠 there’s no denying it’s a bloody tough nut to crack, this one.

We easily spend 5 figures a year on attending such events but it feels necessary if we’re going to take the world’s most advanced and reputable exercise education syllabus and have it more widely regarded as being so 🚀

Next stop: Riyadh in February 🇸🇦

20/11/2024

Day 2 with Technogym Australia - Glute Gains for Stronger, Smoother Hips 🍑

I’m September, Rhys (Head of Education for Technogym Australia) called me in and asked me to run a Clinic for them. I was very flattered - I’ve seen enough slick Technogym presentations to these guys mean business 🥶

My only concern was what it would be about! When we decided to go trendy with The Glutes, I don’t think Rhys was expecting his own to take centre stage during it 😂

As I tried to figure out how to best deliver as much value as possible to the room in under 1hr, I said to Rhys that I thought I’d need a skeleton showing the relationship between the lumbar, the pelvis & the femur 🦴 The intention was to give those in attendance some trademark RTS positional perspectives on anatomy and how re-orientating a joint affects the role that certain muscles provide at it 🧐

RTS is The Inside View of Exercise 🩻 and so I figured we’d give a taste of that to the students.

Alas, such skeletal assemblies proved hard to come by in Perth and so up stepped Rhys. I used a collection of party balloons (also something associated with - borderline proprietary to! - RTS) to show how the relationships & functions between the various hip muscles change depending on the position of the joint.

We added into this some considerations of the forces involved in exercises + how to design exercise to improve its efficiency 👌

I must apologise to the group of 3 ladies who looked quite upset to hear that putting a cable behind your leg often doesn’t make much sense, and that while it has plenty of beneficial elements the Hip Thrust isn’t a particularly efficient exercise! 😬

It was unusual for me to teach this stuff without hours of context provided through theory modules and exploring other joints first, so I really enjoyed the challenge of making it all make sense despite that! 🤓

It was a pleasure working with the Technogym Australia team who ran a really slick operation with two areas on the day. Thanks for having me lads .94
+ for setting the stage
And a huge shoutout to fellow presenter for capturing these shots! 📸

14/11/2024

Presenting on Day 1 of the was such fun! 🥳
I was privileged enough to be invited to share the stage with and on the subject of hypertrophy.

It’s a funny one, because it’s technically not something we study 🤔

Exercise Mechanics provides us with the world’s most in-depth understanding of stimulus, but hypertrophy is an adaptation 💪🏽

We don’t study adaptations, because the type, intensity and volume of stimulus that any individual might require or tolerate varies so much that it’s hard to apply what you’d learn from that to Personal Training - which is our primary focus .global 👨🏻‍🏫

So I used Exercise Mechanics to highlight the questions professionals should be asking of exercise studies before they blindly follow their conclusions and use them to understand what to do for hypertrophy goals with their clients 🧐

Eric looked at what the research has shown us about the necessary nutrition protocols for gaining muscle, and how “bulking” might not need to be as dramatic as we may believe 🍔

Martin presented his own meta analysis on relative abilities to gain muscle between Men & Women showing that there’s little relative difference, we merely start from different points so an 8% gain in muscle mass for a male seems much more significant! 🚻

Both were really interesting presentations that I thoroughly enjoyed 👏🏽

The highlight for me though was the stroke of genius by to have us all convene for a panel discussion afterwards. Not only was it highly amusing, but if you’d only watched our 20 minute presentations in isolation you might have thought we were in complete disagreement about hypertrophy and studies telling us what to do with clients, but in reality we were all on a similar page 📄

Eric closed one of his eloquent responses with “science isn’t meant to tell you what to do with Mrs Higgins (a character from my own presentation) on a Tuesday. It’s there to tell us what relationships exist.”

I wish more trainers would hear that message and think about what they’re spending their time studying (let alone arguing about in comments sections) 🗣️

- speaking of, continued below

The Exercise Educator

28/12/2025

08/08/2025

12/04/2025

28/02/2025

19/01/2025

07/01/2025

05/01/2025

31/12/2024

09/12/2024

20/11/2024

14/11/2024

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