Where It All Started

Running Around the Block

I was nine years old. There was a block near where I grew up — a thin rectangle, roughly 300 metres around — and we used to race around it. No stopwatches, no coaches, no kit. Just a group of kids seeing who was fastest. That was it. That was the beginning.

It sounds small. It was not. That block was where I first understood what it felt like to push yourself physically — to feel your lungs burning and keep going anyway, to finish and want to go again. That feeling has never left me. Fifty years old and I still know exactly what it feels like.

We played cricket in the back streets. Football wherever there was space. Tennis against a wall. Every sport we could find, in whatever space was available, with whatever we had. Nobody told us to. Nobody organised it. We just did it because it was the best thing we knew.

"We played because we loved it. Not because we were good at it. That distinction matters more than most people realise."

— oldschoolPT

School, Sport, and What It Gave Me

I represented my school at almost every major sport. Football, cricket, athletics, basketball — if there was a team, I wanted to be in it. Not because I was the most talented player in every discipline, but because I loved competing, loved being part of something, loved the feeling of training for something and then doing it.

Athletics was where I was most drawn. Watching it on television as a boy — seeing world records broken, watching athletes give everything they had for a result measured in hundredths of a second — I found that genuinely thrilling. I still do. After football it remains the sport I love most. The purity of it. You against the clock, nothing else.

I tried to pursue athletics more seriously but school came first. That is how it should be. But the love of it stayed, and the understanding that the body is capable of remarkable things when it is trained properly — that understanding shaped everything that came after.

Sunday League and What It Taught Me

As I got older, Sunday league football became a big part of life. Anyone who has played Sunday league knows it is not glamorous. Cold mornings, hard pitches, players who were at the pub the night before and are running that off by half time. But it was real. It was competitive. And it demanded a level of fitness that recreational sport does not.

Basketball followed. If football was tough, basketball was tougher. The conditioning required — the lateral movement, the explosive starts and stops, the sustained intensity — took everything I had. I became fitter than I had ever been, and I started understanding the body at a practical level that no classroom could fully replicate.

Between the sports, the injuries, the training, and eventually the formal education — a BSc in Sports and Exercise Science — I was building a picture of how the body works, what it needs, and what it can do when it is looked after properly. That picture has been building for over forty years. This website is where I am putting it down.

Yorkshire, Opportunity, and Why That Matters

I grew up in Yorkshire. I want to be direct about what that means in the context of fitness and opportunity, because it is one of the real reasons I built this site.

London has always had access. Private gyms, personal trainers, sports clubs, networks, money. If you grew up in a wealthy part of London and wanted to get fit, the infrastructure was there. The knowledge was available. The opportunity existed.

Parts of Yorkshire in the years I grew up were not like that. There were brilliant people, genuine talent, real potential — and very little opportunity to develop it. No contacts, no money, no one to show you the way. Sport and fitness were available to those who sought them out, but the guidance, the knowledge, the qualified support — that was much harder to come by if you did not know the right people or come from the right background.

I saw what sport did for people who had access to it. I saw the confidence it built, the discipline it created, the simple physical joy of being fit and healthy. And I wanted more people to have that — not just the ones who could afford a personal trainer or lived near a good gym or happened to know someone in the industry.

"Fitness is not a luxury. It never should have been. That is the whole point."

— oldschoolPT

The Idea That Predates the Website by Twenty Years

The idea for this website — for a free, honest, qualified fitness resource — started long before 2000. Before social media, before YouTube, before any of the tools that make building something like this possible. I wanted people to see their potential. I wanted the knowledge to be available to whoever wanted it, regardless of where they came from or what they could afford.

That idea sat with me for decades. Life happened — as it always does. The idea never went away.

Now I am fifty and I have finally built it. Not to sell anything. Not to build a personal brand. Not because anyone told me to. But because the nine-year-old running around that block in Yorkshire always believed that fitness could help people live better, longer, happier lives — and fifty years later I still believe that completely.

This site is free. Everything on it — the programmes, the exercise library, the articles, the fitness testing protocols — is free. It will stay free. The goal has always been simple: share what I know with whoever wants to listen, and help people keep going for as long as possible.

That is where it all started. That is where it still is.