Coach Dan King

Coach Dan King Hello my name is Dan, how can I help you?

10/09/2026

If it's chest day and your shoulders are the only thing sore the next morning, this is the setup you're missing.

The problem is happening before you press. Shoulders roll forward, elbows flare straight out to the sides at ninety degrees, and your chest never gets into a position where it can do the work. Your front delts take the lot, which is exactly why they're the bit that hurts.

Two changes fix it.

Pull your shoulder blades back and down into the bench before you press anything. Set that position first, hold it for the whole set.
Tuck your elbows to roughly forty five degrees instead of flaring them wide. Not glued to your ribs, just in from where they naturally want to go.

That's it. Proud chest, then push.

It'll feel strange for the first set and slightly weaker, because your chest is finally being asked to do the job. Then the soreness turns up in the right place and you'll never set up the old way again.

Save this for your next chest session.

09/09/2026

"Leg drive" might be the most misunderstood cue in the gym.

He'd heard it, he'd taken it on board, and what he was actually doing was pushing his hips up off the bench to help the bar move. Which does help the bar move. It also stops being a chest exercise the second it happens.

Here's why it goes wrong. When your glutes leave the bench, three things change at once. Your lower back takes a compression load in an unsupported position, the angle of the press shifts so your shoulders and triceps take over, and you lose the stable base that lets you press hard in the first place. You get more weight up and less out of it.

So what is leg drive actually?

It's horizontal. You're driving your feet into the floor to push your body back into the bench and up towards the bar, creating tension through your whole body rather than lifting your hips. Think about pushing the floor away from you in the direction of your head, not down towards the ceiling.

How to set it up:

Feet flat and slightly further back than feels natural, so you can push through the whole foot.
Shoulder blades pulled down and back, chest up, upper back tight against the bench.
Glutes stay on the bench the entire time. That's the checkpoint. If they come up, reset.
Squeeze everything. Legs, glutes, back. The bench press is a full body lift, it just doesn't look like one.

We fixed it, dropped the weight, and it immediately felt harder. That's the tell. When the cheat comes out, the honest number shows up.

Coach Dan, I got you.

07/09/2026

"Start when you're ready. And get a personal trainer."

That's her advice, not mine. And she'd know, because a while ago she couldn't walk past the free weights section without deciding today wasn't the day.

Gym anxiety is not a small thing and it isn't something you talk yourself out of in an afternoon. It's the feeling that everyone knows what they're doing except you, that you'll pick the wrong machine, that someone's watching. Nobody is. But knowing that and feeling it are two different jobs.

What actually changed it for her wasn't confidence arriving out of nowhere. It was having a plan when she walked in and someone next to her who already knew what the session was.

You don't have to feel ready before you start. You just have to start before you feel ready.
Having a plan removes about half the anxiety on its own.
The rest of it fades once you've done it a few times. It genuinely does.

If that's where you are right now, you're not behind. You're just at the beginning, and everyone in that room was there once.

Coach Dan, I got you.

04/09/2026

If you feel silly asking when you're supposed to go heavier, don't. Nobody tells you. Here's the rule.

Hit the top of your rep range with clean form on every set, two sessions in a row. That's it. That's when you go up.

So if your programme says three sets of eight to twelve, and you get twelve on all three sets with good technique, and you do it again next session, the weight goes up.

A few things worth knowing:

Go up in the smallest increment available. Two point five kilos on a dumbbell, one plate on a machine. Small jumps you can hold on to beat big jumps that wreck your form.
Expect your reps to drop when you increase. That's normal and it's supposed to happen. You work back up to the top of the range and then you go again.
Clean form on every set is not negotiable. If the last two reps are a swinging mess, that doesn't count as hitting the range.

The reason most people stall for six months isn't laziness. It's that nobody ever gave them a rule to follow. Now you've got one.

Save this and check it against your log book.

Coach Dan, I got you.

02/09/2026

Christian tried this one four or five times and still had no idea what he was meant to be feeling.

Not a strength problem. A position problem. Here's what we changed.

🔹 Bench at 30 to 45 degrees, chest properly on the pad. Higher than that and you're doing a shrug. Lower and your lower back joins in. Chest stays glued to the bench the whole set.
🔹 Let your arms hang and stretch at the bottom. Full relax. Shoulder blades come forward. That stretch is where the range comes from and everyone skips it.
🔹 Elbows to your back pockets. Not hands to chest. Drive the elbows down and back, and let the shoulder blades pull together at the top.
🔹 Pause for one second at the top. No bouncing. If you can't hold it, the weight is too heavy.

The whole point of this variation is that the bench takes your lower back out of it entirely, so there's nowhere to cheat. Once it clicks, it's brutal in the best way.

Cracked it in one session 👏

Coach Dan, I got you

31/08/2026

If you're chasing depth on the leg press because someone told you deeper is better, this is the one thing you cannot ignore.

Go too low and your pelvis tucks under, your lower back rounds and lifts away from the pad, and you're now doing that under a genuinely heavy load. That's where the serious injuries happen on this machine. Not from lifting heavy. From lifting heavy in a position your spine can't hold.

The fix:

Only go as deep as you can while keeping your lower back flat against the pad. That's your depth. Not the person's next to you.
The second your hips start to curl under, you've gone past it. Stop there and come back up.

Feet flat, whole foot driving, controlled on the way down.

Depth is earned, not forced. Your range will improve as your mobility does. Until then, work in the range you can actually control.

Save this before your next leg day.

Coach Dan, I got you.

27/08/2026

The bicep curl is the most performed exercise in any gym and the one people are most personally invested in. It's also the one with the highest ratio of effort to results, and there's a very simple reason for that.

Your elbows are moving.

Watch anyone curling heavy. As the weight comes up, the elbows creep forward and slightly upward. The moment that happens, your front delts have joined in and taken the load off the bicep. Then there's a small dip and swing to get the weight moving in the first place, and a fast drop on the way back down. Put it together and the bicep is only genuinely working for about a third of the rep.

Here's how to fix it.

Elbows pinned to your sides, glued there for the whole set. Think of them as hinges bolted to your ribs. Only your forearms move.
No swing to start the rep. If you need to dip your knees or rock backwards to get it moving, the weight has already answered the question for you.
Control the way down for three full seconds. Lowering under control is where a huge amount of the growth comes from, and almost nobody does it.
Squeeze at the top rather than just arriving there.

The drill that proves it: stand with your back against a wall, elbows touching the wall too, and curl without letting either come away. Nowhere to hide, no momentum available. Most people need to halve the weight and most people feel their biceps properly for the first time.

Your arms aren't stubborn. They just haven't been asked to do the work yet.

Coach Dan, I got you.

26/08/2026

125kg. Not on the first go.

Marnie let me post every attempt, which tells you most of what you need to know about her.

The bar said no. Repeatedly. She kept walking back to it and asking again until it went up like it owed her money.

The PB isn't the impressive part. Returning to a bar that's already beaten you is the impressive part.

Lets show Marnie some love with 👏 in the comments

24/08/2026

Rep 8: absolutely thriving
Rep 9: has left the chat

20/08/2026

Nobody tells you that the seated row can quietly turn into a lower back exercise.

Watch anyone doing it in a commercial gym and you'll see the same thing. Torso rocking backwards to start the pull, then forwards again to reset. It looks like effort. It feels like work. And the muscles you actually came to train barely get a look in.

Here's why it happens. The moment you lean back, your body has found a way to move the weight without your mid back having to do anything. The shoulder blades stay locked in place the entire set, and those shoulder blades moving is the entire point of a row.

So the fix is simple, and it's uncomfortable in a good way.

Sit tall and lock your torso in one position. It does not move for the whole set. Not to start the rep, not to finish it.
At the stretch, let your shoulder blades travel forwards. Don't hold rigid tension. You need that range.
Pull by driving your elbows down and back towards your back pockets, then finish by squeezing the shoulder blades together.
Hold that squeeze for a full second before you let it back out slowly.

Then the honest part. Once your torso stops helping, the weight you were using will feel far too heavy. That's not a step backwards, that's the first accurate reading you've had of how strong your back actually is.

Lighter stack, still body, moving shoulder blades. That's a row.

Coach Dan, I got you.

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