Calibre Performance Coaching

Calibre Performance Coaching Strength & Conditioning Coach, PT, Personal Trainer, Boxing Coach, Redditch Based in Redditch and covering Worcestershire & West Midlands.

Personal Training, Strength & Conditioning Coaching & Boxing Coaching to suit all levels.

02/09/2026

High velocity
Transferring gym strength to speed with ballistic & plyometric exercises
Low dosages, long rests, high intent

Can you build strength and your engine at the same time?Fighters, and most people who train seriously, don’t get to pick...
10/08/2026

Can you build strength and your engine at the same time?
Fighters, and most people who train seriously, don’t get to pick one quality. You need to be strong and you need an engine. So the question comes up constantly: does chasing both at once mean you get less of each?
This is the “interference effect”, the idea that endurance training blunts your strength and power gains when done alongside resistance training. It’s a real phenomenon. It’s just a lot more specific than people assume.
Wilson et al. (2012) pooled 21 studies on concurrent training and found it isn’t a flat penalty for combining the two. Strength and hypertrophy outcomes stayed close to resistance training alone. The real interference showed up specifically with running, not cycling, and got worse the more frequent and longer the endurance sessions were. Power took the biggest hit of the three. Modality and dose matter far more than simply “doing both.”
That means the fix isn’t choosing one quality over the other, it’s dosing the endurance side deliberately. Lower-impact modalities (bike, sled, rower) carry less interference than heavy running volume. Keeping conditioning focused rather than long and frequent protects power. And contrary to popular belief, exercise order within a session matters less than people assume, the evidence behind “always lift before you condition” is shakier than the confidence it’s usually said with.
For fighters specifically, this is exactly why your S&C should be built around your sport’s actual demands, not maximum volume of everything. You need the engine your sport requires and the strength to hit, throw, and hold position, not an Ironman base and a powerlifting total layered on top of each other with no plan.
Both qualities are trainable together. It just takes a programme that respects the dose, not a coin flip between them.
Get in touch if you want your strength and conditioning built to work together, not against each other.

Rep ranges, Rest periods, Exercise order, all variables can make a difference in your training outcomes. “Optimal” volum...
04/08/2026

Rep ranges, Rest periods, Exercise order, all variables can make a difference in your training outcomes. “Optimal” volume for hypertrophy is a big variable that gets debated. If you’ve spent hours down that rabbit hole trying to perfect your muscle-building programme, I’ve got good news: for 99% of gym-goers, you’re solving the wrong problem.Here’s the truth, strength and muscle size are tightly linked. Get stronger, and you build muscle. Chase the strength, and the size mostly takes care of itself.
A 2025 study (Marques et al.) tracked lifters through 15 weeks of lower-body training, measuring both muscle growth (via MRI) and strength gains. The finding: muscle growth and strength gains moved together closely. The underlying message: gain strength, and muscle tends to follow. This is why most Olympic Weightlifters have huge thighs.
This relationship doesn’t weaken with experience, it strengthens. The longer you train, the tighter “get stronger” and “get bigger” become the same instruction. Peterson et al. (2005) found much the same in trained athletes, a huge correlation between strength and muscle size.If in doubt, get strong, and you’ll build muscle by default.
Strong is never wrong.
What this looks like in practice: pick a handful of compound lifts. Add weight or reps to them over time, in a sensible rep range. Track your numbers. Be patient. You don’t need to micromanage volume or chase the “perfect” exercise for hypertrophy, progressive overload is doing almost all the work.
Who should be worried about tiny variables of hypertrophy? Bodybuilders and Physique competitors. That’s when fine-tuning volume, exercise selection and technique specifically for optimal hypertrophy starts to earn its keep (bear in mind they will do anything to get there 💉). It’s just not the conversation most people need to be having in year one or two of training, or really ever unless you want to wear a tiny pair of Y-fronts on a stage....
So, if you’re stuck in analysis paralysis over programming minutiae, stop. Get under a bar, get stronger over time, and your physique will change too.Get in touch if you want a programme built around getting you stronger, not more confused.

The stronger you get, the fewer hard sessions you can handle. Most people assume progress means always doing more; more ...
28/07/2026

The stronger you get, the fewer hard sessions you can handle.
Most people assume progress means always doing more; more weight, more volume, more hard sessions stacked on top of each other. For beginners and intermediates, that’s often true. For genuinely strong lifters, it works the other way.
A hard rep isn’t a fixed cost. As your strength goes up, so does the tax each effort places on your body. More load means more motor units recruited, more force through your tissues, more strain on your nervous system.
Beginners are highly sensitive to load and volume. It doesn’t take much to force an adaptation, you can add weight almost every session and grow from surprisingly little work. But tolerance is low, so doses need to stay small. Push too hard and technique breaks down, tissue gets overwhelmed, recovery can’t keep up.
Intermediates have built armour. Technique is solid, tissues are robust, work capacity grows. Tolerance for load and volume climb together, so you can add weight, add work, hit more hard sessions per week, and adapt. This is the window where “more” pays off.
Advanced lifters hit a ceiling. Loads are so heavy that every true high-intensity effort is expensive, systemically and neurologically. Overall work capacity is still high, but the volume of genuinely near-maximal work has to come back down.
A lifter squatting 100kg can usually handle three or four hard sessions a week and bounce back fine. Get that same lifter to 200kg and try the same frequency, and it’ll bury them. Relative effort hasn’t changed. The cost to the system has.
Recovery capacity doesn’t scale at the same rate strength does. That’s why advanced athletes train near their max less often, a maximal session at elite strength is a bigger withdrawal from the recovery bank than the same session was five years earlier. They shift away from top-end work, saving true max efforts for when they actually count.
Bigger numbers on the bar should earn you more respect for recovery, not less.

27/07/2026

SIMON Ibekwe delivered a 28-second knockout as the Redditch heavyweight produced a devastating performance on Tyson Furys undercard.

Huge Statement Win from Simon Ibekwe this weekend in Thailand as Chief Support on the Tyson Fury undercard. A demolitio...
27/07/2026

Huge Statement Win from Simon Ibekwe this weekend in Thailand as Chief Support on the Tyson Fury undercard.
A demolition of a more experienced fighter in 28 seconds by knockout.

With less than 3 weeks notice we couldn’t even get Simon peaking properly. Imagine what he can do with more notice 💥🥊

Months & months of training around cancelled fights opponent pullouts, Simon should be credited for his dedication and consistency, staying in shape all year round.

As always I love playing my role with athletes/clients in helping them achieve big things.

HARDWARE VS SOFTWAREThink of athletic performance as a computer. Your hardware is your physical capacity: strength, spee...
20/07/2026

HARDWARE VS SOFTWARE

Think of athletic performance as a computer. Your hardware is your physical capacity: strength, speed, power, mobility, conditioning and physical resilience. Your software is your sporting skill: technique, timing, decision-making, tactical awareness and the ability to select and execute the right action under pressure.
Sport practice develops the software e.g. a boxer learns to read an opponent, manage distance, choose the right shot and react to changing information. A footballer learns to scan, position and make decisions. These qualities are developed by practising the sport, good S&C is NOT recreating the sport in the gym.
Good Strength and Conditioning develops the hardware that the software runs on. It builds an athletic base. Stronger legs will not tell a fighter when to attack, but they may increase the force available when that decision is made. Better conditioning will not create a game plan, but it can help an athlete maintain their skill and decision-making as fatigue builds. More power will not fix poor technique, but it can give good technique greater physical potential.
This is why strength and conditioning should complement sport training rather than imitate it. The most sport-specific activity is the sport itself. The role of S&C is to develop physical qualities that are difficult to overload through technical practice alone. The sport coach then helps the athlete express those qualities in the right place, at the right time.
The two systems still need to work together. Better hardware does not automatically produce better sporting performance, and excellent software can eventually be limited by underdeveloped hardware.
Athletic development is not hardware or software. It’s an expression of both working together.
Build the hardware.
Refine the software.
Practise using both together.
If you are serious about improving performance and want S&C that supports your sport rather than competes with it, get in touch to discuss coaching.

Address

Redditch

Opening Hours

Monday 6am - 10:30pm
Tuesday 6am - 10:30pm
Wednesday 6am - 10:30pm
Thursday 6am - 10:30pm
Friday 6am - 10:30pm
Saturday 7am - 4pm
Sunday 7am - 2pm

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+447837913722

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