The person behind the practice.

Learning Unwound exists because of a frustration I couldn't let go of: the people who most want to train well are the ones handed the most contradictory advice. Every question — how often, how heavy, how long, in what order — has a hundred confident answers, and almost none of them are written for the person actually asking.

I came to coaching from the learning side rather than the performance side. Training became interesting to me as a problem of interpretation: how do you take a body of evidence that was never intended for one individual and turn it into decisions a specific person can act on this week, in their own life, with their own history?

My academic route ran through behavioural neuroscience and now biostatistics — years spent learning how claims are built, where they hold, and how often a confident headline rests on a study that never asked your question. Teaching, first on a tennis court and now in the gym, taught me the other half: an explanation only counts once the person in front of you can use it.

The client shouldn't have to become an expert in fitness to train intelligently.

That sentence does a lot of work. It means the reasoning behind a session belongs to you, explained in plain language, not held back as proprietary method. It means a programme should be defensible — I should be able to tell you why this exercise, this load, this week, and you should be able to repeat that reasoning to someone else.

It also means restraint. Most people don't need more information; they need less of it, better ordered. The job is subtraction as often as it is instruction.

Sessions are unhurried and specific. We spend time on technique because technique is what makes progress repeatable, and we review honestly — including when something isn't working. Progress is treated as evidence to act on, not a scoreboard.

You should never leave a session unsure why you did what you did. If a plan changes, you hear the reason. If something isn't working, we say so early rather than waiting for a milestone to confirm it.