I have never met a lazy client.
Not once, in twenty-five years, across three countries. I've met a great many people who were exhausted from following instructions that were never going to work, and who had quietly concluded that the failure was theirs. This Library is what I did about that.
I used to dip in and out of gym classes and crash diet before holidays […], always looking for quick results and thinking I had to be really strict to see them. Nelson taught me that consistency is key, and completely shifted my mindset around both training and food. […] Jules C. · Dubai · more from people I’ve taught →
Thousands of people, lied to. Politely, and by professionals.
That isn't a figure of speech. It's a count I stopped keeping somewhere around the second country.
Since 2001 I've taught group exercise; since 2006 professionally; since 2010 as a personal trainer as well. Portugal, then Bahrain, then the United Arab Emirates. Different languages, different currencies, identical conversations.
It always happens the same way. Somebody waits for the room to empty after class, then asks the question they were too embarrassed to ask in front of thirty people. Should I stop eating after eight? My friend says carbs at night turn into fat. Is this powder worth what I'm paying for it? Am I too old to start? And nearly every time, the thing making them anxious wasn't their body. It was something they'd been told.
People arrive for all sorts of reasons, and almost none of them are the reason they give at reception. A wedding. A scan result. A birthday with a zero in it. A photograph they couldn't look at.
Some arrive at genuinely low points in their lives. A class at seven in the morning is not treatment for that — I'm not qualified to treat it and I won't pretend otherwise — but a room where somebody knows your name and expects you on Tuesday is not nothing either. I've watched it do a great deal of work while the actual professionals do theirs.
I've had pregnant women in my classes, and women coming back after birth, which is precisely the point where this industry's confident advice turns dangerous. The correct answer there is a referral and a slower plan, never a bolder one. I've said go and see your doctor first, then come back to me more often than I've said almost anything else, and I have never once regretted it.
The thing I've watched change most often isn't a waist measurement. It's the sentence people use about themselves. Somebody walks in describing themselves as a person who has never been sporty, and eight months later they're rearranging their week around a Thursday class and getting mildly aggressive about their squat depth. Nothing about their skeleton changed. Their self-description did.
That's the part that keeps me in the room. Everything else is admin.
I'm not trying to be your coach from a distance. I'm trying to hand you what I wish somebody had handed me at twenty-two: the ability to work out, on your own, whether a claim deserves your money, your Tuesday evening, or your knees.
I'm not an especially interesting man. I've read more systematic reviews than is socially advisable and built a small publishing house out of the notes. But I know what somebody's face does when a thing finally makes sense and they decide they can keep going. Twenty-five years in, that hasn't got old.
You can't answer the same question for twenty-five years and not write it down.
Eventually the arithmetic gets embarrassing. Thirty conversations a week, most of them the same six questions, for two and a half decades — and every answer disappearing the moment the person walked out of the room. Somebody would ask about protein timing on Tuesday and I'd give the same careful answer I'd given on Monday, to somebody else, who is now telling a slightly wrong version of it to a friend.
So I started writing the answers down. Then checking them against the actual research rather than against what I'd absorbed on courses. That part was humbling: a fair amount of what I had been confidently repeating for years turned out to be thinner than I thought, and a couple of things I'd dismissed turned out to be well supported. Then I wrote down the source, so the next person wouldn't have to take my word for it.
Ninety-seven titles later, that is still the entire method. A volume to understand the thing. A field guide for the specific mess. A programme for what to do on Monday. A cookbook, because people have to eat on the days they don't train. All of it in the voice I'd use if you'd stayed behind after class — because that is exactly the conversation it came from.
See what came out of it — all 97 titles →
Three numbers, all true, measuring three different things.
If you compare my CV with this page the years won't add up, and I'd rather explain that than have you assume I'm rounding in my own favour.
- 2001Group exercise startsUniversity, Vila Real. Part of the course was teaching real classes — to our own cohort and to the community. No money, real people, real mistakes.
- 2006It becomes a jobGroup Exercise Manager at Moove Health Club & Spa. Same work, now with a payslip and a timetable I was accountable for.
- 2010Personal training startsHolmes Place, and the PT qualification. Both tracks in parallel for the next decade — group exercise on the floor, personal training one to one, and eventually training the instructors themselves.
So: twenty-five years of group exercise, twenty of them professional, fifteen-plus as a personal trainer. My CV leads with the fifteen because it is the most conservative of the three. This page leads with 2001 because that is when it actually started.
I don't take personal training clients any more. That's a choice, not a lapsed certificate — group exercise and instructor development is where I'm useful, and I'd rather be excellent at one thing than adequate at two.
How many rooms, actually.
Every number in the Library carries a grade saying what kind of number it is. It would be strange to exempt my own, so here it is, graded and with the working attached.
Comfortably past ten thousand classes taught, and somewhere north of a quarter of a million attendances.
The working, so you can argue with it: sixteen classes a week is my long-run average, but I've costed the professional years at twelve to absorb holidays and the stretches spent managing rather than teaching — twelve a week across forty-four weeks for the sixteen years to 2021 is 8,448. The student years add roughly 400. Crank adds more than 3,000 since 2022, and that one isn't an estimate: it comes out of a booking system, alongside a monthly average above a thousand bookings. Total, floored: about 11,800. Attendances assume thirty a room, which is an average and not a promise. These are my figures about my own working life — they are not evidence of anything, and nothing in the Library rests on them.
Rooms, not theories.
Everything in the Library was pressure-tested somewhere with mirrors and a sound system before it was written down. The specialisations, roughly in order of hours spent:
Indoor cycling — premium specialty cycling. ICG National Trainer for
the UAE, Freestyle Indoor Cycling Specialist.
Les Mills — BodyPump, BodyAttack, BodyBalance.
Strength and conditioning tools — Power Plate, TRX, bootcamp and circuit
training.
Personal training — Holmes Place Personal Trainer, with a specialisation
in advanced stretching.
And the thread through all of it, which matters more than any single certificate: teaching the people who teach. Most of my career has been spent standing behind an instructor rather than in front of a class. It is less glamorous and it reaches far more people, which is a reasonable summary of why I write books now.
In order, with the titles as they actually were.
- 2006–2009Group Exercise ManagerMoove Health Club & Spa · Portugal
- 2009Physical Education TeacherVila Real Schools Association · Portugal
- 2010–2015Master Trainer & PresenterHolmes Place · Portugal
- 2016–2018Fitness ManagerFitness First · Bahrain
- 2018–2019Senior Group Exercise InstructorFitness First · Bahrain & Dubai
- 2019–2020Area Group Exercise ManagerFitness First · Bahrain
- 2020–2021Club General ManagerFitness First, Marina Gate · Dubai
- 2022–nowMaster TrainerCrank · Dubai
- 2025–nowStudio ManagerCrank Town Square · Dubai
Holmes Place — Master Trainer and Presenter for two group exercise programmes: instructor education, certification courses, curriculum and assessment. Group exercise, not personal training. I have seen that role described the other way round and it isn't what it was.
Fitness First, Bahrain — Area Group Exercise Manager — group exercise across two active clubs, plus the launch strategy for a new one.
Fitness First Marina Gate, Dubai — Club General Manager — one club, every department in it: fitness, group exercise, sales, member services. Then the pandemic arrived and the job became closing a club properly and opening it again, which is not a thing any certification prepares you for.
Vila Real Schools Association — physical education, grades one to four. A better education in explaining something clearly than any certification I have taken since, and I have taken a lot of them.
Read down that column and it is the same job at nine different altitudes. Teach the class. Train the person teaching the class. Run the department. Run the club. Every step took me further from the floor, which is precisely why I keep finding my way back to it.
The most important sentence on this site.
I am not a doctor. Not a nutritionist. Not a physiotherapist. Not a psychologist. You'll see that sentence at the bottom of every page here, and it isn't legal throat-clearing — it's the point. A trainer who performs as a clinician is one of the main ways people get hurt, and this industry is full of them.
Qualifications.
Degree: Bachelor's in Physical Education and Sports Teaching, UTAD, Portugal.
Personal training: Holmes Place Personal Trainer · specialisation in advanced stretching.
Group exercise: Les Mills BodyPump · Les Mills BodyAttack · Les Mills BodyBalance.
Cycling and equipment: ICG National Trainer (UAE) · Freestyle Indoor Cycling Specialist · Power Plate · TRX · Bootcamp & Circuit Training.
None of that makes me a scientist, and none of it is a substitute for a citation. It is why I can tell which claims are worth checking — not why you should believe the answer. The sources are why.
The standard, stated plainly.
Every factual claim carries a citation, drawn in this order of preference: systematic reviews and meta-analyses, then randomised controlled trials, then cohort studies, then position stands from bodies like the ACSM, NSCA, ISSN, WHO and ACOG.
Every claim carries a confidence rating. Settled science, strong evidence, emerging, or contested. When experts disagree, you're shown the disagreement rather than the side that makes the better paragraph.
Every opinion is labelled as an opinion, and every anecdote as an anecdote. Twenty-five years of watching people train is worth something. It is not worth a meta-analysis, and it will never be dressed up as one.
Nothing is exaggerated to sell it. There is a list of words this Library will not print — the ones the supplement aisle depends on. If a claim needs that vocabulary to sound impressive, the claim isn't impressive.
If evidence is mixed, say so. If a claim is contested, show both sides. Never present a contested claim as settled.
Written by a human. Narrated by a machine.
I write the Library. Research assistance and production tooling are AI-assisted — that's how one person ships a catalogue this size — but a human decides what it says, and a human is accountable for every claim in it.
The audiobooks are narrated by an AI voice. That's disclosed on every product, in the audio itself, and here. It isn't my voice, and it isn't pretending to be. Nobody is being fooled, which is a low bar the rest of this industry keeps limbo-dancing under.
Brad and Susan aren't real.
Across the volumes you'll meet a recurring cast — Brad, who is confidently wrong in a new way every time, and Susan, who quietly outlasts everybody. They're composite illustrations drawn from twenty-five years of coaching. Names, ages and details are invented; the patterns are not, and the science around them is cited like everything else.
Or browse all 97 · questions answered
Questions, corrections and errors: [email protected]. Health questions get a referral rather than improvised advice — see the FAQ · How it’s made · Corrections · In their own words.