MY GYM (STONELEIGHFIT) and THE RAM RUN helped me develop TotalFit

All my competitive sports life I trained personally and instructed others as elite athletes. I continued this through my sixties. Then I met a new challenge – non athletes, sometimes with injuries or physical conditions wanting to get back to health. I learned how to motivate and help them achieve whatever challenge they wanted to set for themselves

Aged 67 I set up my own gym – Stoneleigh Performance Fitness Centre. Early users were the Coventry Football and Rugby teams but very soon people working on Stoneleigh Park, especially at The National Agricultural Centre, were joining and forming training groups. Very few were athletes, many had no sports motivation – they just wanted to feel and look better. My mindset became TotalFit – Fitness for All

I set up my gym to fulfil my TotalFit ambitions – Fitness for All. Looking back at the photos and films and other documents included in this section I get a real feeling of pride. This really was TotalFit for Everyone.

Elite sportsmen – Coventry professional rugby, Coventry City Soccer Academy, Paralympian skier Anna Turney, Inline skating European champion Rich Parker (his training session I filmed is one of the most intense I have ever seen).

Teenagers and adults wanting to develop better, healthier bodies, busy people needing to cram a session into lunchtime (we had a great group of lunchtime regulars). Our KIDFIT holiday camps were brilliant

I developed exercise programs to develop whole body fitness, improve balance, improve posture, improve stamina, improve flexibility, improve strength. These are always athletic based but with an appropriate intensity. Browse through the photos and you will see the variety of movements that these younger people and the not so young were undertaking – and we all enjoyed the sessions.

The principles are the same for Age-Fit but movements and intensities are toned down to suit the group – usually with very simple or no  equipment

Soon after opening the gym I was introduced to Obstacle Course Racing (OCR). There was a high level competitive element but I saw also the enormous potential in OCR for whole body exercising for non athletes, non competitively minded people wanting to improve their bodyform and fitness, having fun doing it.

I formed our own OCR event  – The Ram Run – based at the brilliant natural environment of Stoneleigh Park with its three bridges over the River Avon. For the next few years hundreds and hundreds of entrants made huge gains in their personal fitness, self confidence and self esteem, especially those locally who joined Team Ram and had the benefit of joining our training sessions and especially the course testing runs. In the films it also shows that working hard at the right exercises can be fun

Enjoy the films – OCR is not for Age-Fit, other than to illustrate how much more we can do when motivated and properly instructed – at any age