Strength For Health

20/01/2026

This guy is my favourite nutrition nerd. He has a PhD in neurology & then decided to get his MD purely to allow him to speak with more authority on human health. He makes these videos to catch attention but the science behind them is sound.

Here he shows that (for him at least) eating huge quantities of saturated fat doesn't increase so-called 'bad cholesterol'. Previously he showed that he could drastically lower his LDL by eating Oreo cookies! (Do not try this at home, folks.)

17/01/2026

16/01/2026

Strength for Health is not a bodybuilding gym but I'd be foolish to ignore the lessons offered by the sport of bodybuilding. And one of those lessons is illustrated here:

Sometimes less is more.

If you train hard enough you need to recover just as hard. That primarily means eating & sleeping well but it also means not training too often.

Personally I like to train in the gym twice a week if I get the chance but very often I only get the opportunity to train once. But it works. And it works very well for all of my clients too.

The world of sports science & academic research says we should all be in the gym more often. Yet some of the most successful athletes & coaches in different forms of strength sport find that training less often can bring better results.

If you've only got time to go to the gym once a week & therefore think it isn't worth your while (I had a lecturer at university tell me just that) then I'm glad to tell you that it definitely is.

Get strong, stay strong.

Mike Mentzer explained that many of his clients trained consistently—three times per week—yet still fell short of their true potential. He realized the problem wasn’t undertraining, but overtraining. Even when he reduced workouts to once every 72 hours, results improved only slightly.

The real breakthrough came in 1995, when Mentzer cut training frequency to once every four to seven days. With extended recovery, clients finally began achieving the dramatic muscle gains he always believed were possible. What had once been rare—gaining 10–20 pounds in a month or 30–40 pounds in a few months—became the norm.

Mentzer’s conclusion was clear: muscle growth depends less on how often you train and more on allowing the body enough time to recover and grow.

15/01/2026

Beginner’s Barbell Coaching Sessions

Do you train for strength in the gym? Are you considering doing so? Are you unsure of what you are doing and want to learn more? But is hiring a coach or personal trainer on a regular basis just a bit more than you can afford? Maybe a one-off coaching session or a short series of workshops will help you gain some useful knowledge and confidence without breaking the bank.

On Wednesdays 21st & 28th January and 4th February two of my lucky, lucky clients are away on holiday getting some winter sun (I am so jealous…) and their evening training time – 7-9pm – is available. So, for the next three weeks only, Strength For Health is offering the opportunity to learn the basics of barbell strength training.

You can attend one, two or three of these training sessions and they will all take more or less the same format. But those who can attend all three will get the most benefit and I will prioritise them in the application process. I aim to primarily focus on the Back Squat and Deadlift and add in Overhead Press and Bench Press as time permits. But I will tailor each session to those who attend and nothing is set in stone so please be prepared to be flexible.

The cost is £25 per person per session and I will be asking for payment in advance to secure your place.

Please be aware that these are not private training sessions and you may end up working alongside people you don’t know and with different people on different nights if you attend more than one. You may be working with people who are older or younger than you with more or less experience and I will be aiming my coaching at the lowest skill level present (while aiming to give everyone equal time and attention). If you are already an experienced lifter you might benefit from a separate workshop so please inquire directly with me.

I have two lifting stations and can train two people per station if they are the same height (within an inch or so of each other) so I am able to train between one and four people.

If you would like to attend one or more of these coaching sessions then please complete an application form. Applications are open until midday on Sunday 18th January (though I will consider applications received after this time if I haven’t filled all the spaces) and after that time I will try to match and invite attendees to provide the best coaching experience I can.

Please us this link to apply https://forms.gle/hGoCeN3WMVcSNTrA7

For all other enquiries please contact me via Messenger or WhatsApp.

14/01/2026

12/01/2026

Watching this might be the most important 20 minutes you spend in 2026.

My clients will no doubt see echoes of their own experiences here but even they might not have really considered whether their elderly parents, relatives and friends might benefit from strength training. Most certainly they will benefit enormously.

I am sharing this - and asking you to do the same - to spread the word. It is not about me trying to drum up business for myself (I only have a couple of training spaces left at the moment) but to encourage people to seek out gyms and trainers and create a demand for strength training. This video references an organisation called Starting Strength - The Aasgaard Company and they are the inspiration for what I do. I believe we need more trainers and coaches to be using their methods and similar (I use a modified version of the SS method myself) because so much of what is sold to older people is just inadequate to meet their needs. Worse than that, the advice often given by medical specialists is woefully poor if not downright wrong.

Being older does not mean that it is unsafe for you to work very hard in the gym or that you won't benefit from it if you do. If you can walk at all - however poorly - you can walk into a gym and begin your transformation into a stronger version of yourself.

In this one-year-update of Rebuilding Mum & Dad, we document the remarkable progress my parents have made in their 80s through strength training and the tang...

23/12/2025

72 years old and adamant that she wouldn't go to a gym! But she tried it and 3 months later the benefits she is experiencing are enormous.

You may have noticed that I share a lot of videos from Starting Strength. That is because they are the inspiration for me to create Strength for Health and coach the way I do. If I lived in the USA I would likely be a Staring Strength coach instead of working for myself. But, then again, I might still have gone my own way.

I hesitate to claim that my way is better than theirs but I believe it is otherwise I would be coaching exactly their way. My earliest clients from three years ago will attest to the fact that I did follow their model much more closely than I do now. But my clients have taught me many lessons and the way I coach now reflects those lessons and I will always change what I do in light of new evidence and experiences.

But the most profound thing anyone watching this video (or any of the others I share) can take away is that strength training brings enormous benefits to your life and especially so when you are older and becoming less capable.

Sylvia, a member from Starting Strength Boise, discusses why strength training is so important as we age and why she started doing Starting Strength after a ...

23/12/2025

I found this conversation profoundly depressing but completely unsurprising. Twelve years ago I returned to university to study the science of sport and exercise (with emphasis on the latter) and Strength for Health is the product of that time. But much of what I thought - even 'knew' - to be true about health care and medicine back then has been called into question or even shown to be false. And this conversation illustrates why.

Much of the scientific evidence that underpins medical treatments is just wrong. Some of it has been fraudulently created (as in, made up by the authors) while others has been so deliberately manipulated that the results are misleading or even detrimental to health. Highlighted here are the examples of 53 studies into treatment for cancer and haematology (studies which form the basis for actual 'life saving' treatments being provided today) and only 11 of them could be replicated.

That is the very first hurdle in science: if scientist A does an experiment and gets a result then scientist B (and preferably C and D as well) can do the same experiment and get the same result. If they can't, it pretty much negates anything scientist A claims to have discovered through that experiment and the study should be retracted. In these 53 examples, the experiments were carried out by the same lead scientists who could not replicate the results of their own experiments and the studies have not been retracted and the treatments are still offered to patients today. That is terrible science and even worse healthcare.

Another example is that the study that provides the underpinning science to justify all the research into beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's disease research for the last 20 years was shown to be made up and important images were photoshopped! The lead author admitted it but is still getting funding for research and others are still using her work to continue to study amyloid plaques (which should now be thought of as a blind alley).

As a former engineer I find it hard to get my head around this approach. As Dave Feldman says at 11:30, engineers want to know why structures fail and kill people and those responsible face consequences while the medical science establishment apparently doesn't care about patients who die in spite - sometimes because - of the treatments they receive.

As the Emily Kaplan says at 13:45 says, just don't get sick.

🎧 Watch FULL conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6326DIMZ6Q🔵 The podcast episode is sponsored by... ourselves! -- Own Your Labs http://ownyourla...

18/12/2025

86 years old and lifting over 50kg/100lbs from the floor. This should be seen as normal behaviour because - short of actual physical injury or disability - this is what the human body is well capable of. And this is not a woman who has been lifting all her life but someone who didn't do anything more than walk until starting strength training aged 86.

Barbara “Corki” Rawlings talks about how strength training has improved the quality of her life and made her daily chores much easier. Corki is coached by Gr...

17/12/2025

Currently, my oldest client is only 75 years old (though my mum is 80 and started lifting six years ago at my urging) so I have some way to go before I match this!

And this in not the oldest person I have heard about training this way. The oldest was 98 and she started because her 77 year old daughter encouraged her to!

In the nicest possible way, if you think you are too old to get stronger you are almost certainly wrong.

A slip and fall can be a death sentence for older adults. But Saralie Lewis decided she was going to become “harder to kill” and began training at Starting S...

27/11/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1Crc29AgY4/

26/11/2025

I'm sharing this particular video for three reasons:

The first is that pretty much any information offered by Dr Berry is worth paying close attention to. He does a very good job at explaining complicated health & medical issues in reasonably simple terms without oversimplifying them.

The second is that consuming adequate Vitamin B1 is vital for health & low B1 has negative implications for metabolic health (e.g. Type II Diabetes, PCOS & cardiovascular disease) but also for neurological health (e.g. Parkinson's, Multiple Sclerosis & Alzheimer's). So please make sure you are consuming some.

Personally, I eat quite a lot of pork (not just in the form of bacon) but I also take a Vitamin B complex supplement that hopefully gives me abundant amounts of all the vital B vitamins.

The second is to highlight just how complicated the consumption of micronutrients is. First, you need a good source of the nutrient; then you need to ensure that you are not eating another food that blocks the uptake of that nutrient; then you need to have enough of the other nutrients that make the first one work properly (& they all need to be balanced out in turn); then you need to know if your health condition and/or the medication used to treat it are blocking the uptake of those nutrients as well.

It is a lot more complicated that just taking a multivitamin tablet a couple of times a day.

It is a subject area that I spend quite a bit of time trying to get my head around purely for my own benefit & it is something I feel I can only offer general guidance on to my clients. The best advice I have to offer is that eating plenty of a variety of meats, eggs, fish (& seafood) & dairy gives you the best opportunities to be well nourished.

Vitamin B1 (thiamine) is essential for healthy nerves, proper carbohydrate metabolism, mitochondrial function, and overall metabolic health. In today’s video...