Katie Louise Coaching

Fiona and Tess took on their first team competition the other weekend, and I couldn’t be more proud of how they handled it. A completely different environment to what either of them usually trains for, a format neither had done before, and they got on with it and did brilliantly.

It’s the whole point, really. Stepping outside what’s familiar and finding out you’re more capable than you thought.

Huge thanks to Tomos for being an honorary Strength Lab athlete for the day, you fit right in.

More of this. 🖤

On Sunday I am heading off to do the Dragon Ride, 153km of cycling that I anticipate to be around 6-7 hours in duration.

This sort of event is not one you want to wing. So this week I will be ensuring my glycogen stores are full to the brim to ensure Sunday is an enjoyable event and not one I slog through.

Training for an endurance event and not sure how to approach your fuelling? Drop me a message. Coaching spots available 📧

A great weekend for The Strength Lab clients last weekend.

of.saa hit a very well deserved PB at the Scottish Bench Press Championships, with a impressive 92.5kg

made a return to the platform after an insane off season and managed to secure add an impressive 27.5kg to his best total with 7/9 lifts

And last but definitely not least played an absolute screamer at Bench Press World Championships in Poland, securing a massive 5kg PB on her Bench and taking silver on bodyweight.

All three of these clients are the epitome of showing up in whatever capacity they have and trusting that it will pay off 🙌🏼

Jen competed at the All England Championships last weekend and had one of those days you work months to set up.

She came in lighter, added significantly to her total, and hit loads on her third attempts she had never touched before. Her deadlift third was 7.5kg above her previous best pull and 10kg above her last heavy of the prep. We called for 190kg in the final attempt, chasing third place on the leaderboard. The other lifter made their lift, but Jen pulled 190kg like it belonged to her.

The prep was built around fuelling properly and recovering from it. For the last few months we’ve worked on nutrition strategies that support the training she’s doing, not just in sessions, but between them. Stronger recovery, better quality work, loads that her body could absorb. It all compounds.

What I love about coaching Jen is that she outsources the belief entirely. She doesn’t second-guess the process because she trusts the work has been done, so when she walks out on the platform, there’s nothing to resolve, she just lifts.

6/9 on paper. Welsh records and PBs in reality.

Sam competed at the Welsh Championships and walked away with a 115kg squat, 67.5kg bench, and 145kg deadlift - plus three Welsh records and a PB total. The third attempts were numbers that hadn’t been touched before, or hadn’t been touched in a long time. Missing 151kg on the deadlift at the last second on grip was the only thing keeping this from being even more extraordinary.

The 6/9 scoreline doesn’t tell the full story. A PB total from a day that looked imperfect on the surface says more about where Sam’s training is than a clean scorecard ever could.

We’ve got a lot of data to work with now, and a very clear picture of what the next few blocks need to look like. Genuinely one of the most satisfying meets to be on the platform for.

The advice I kept getting was: show up more, share more, be more visible. It never quite felt like me.

In September I’m starting an MSc in Sport and Exercise Nutrition.

I already have a postgraduate qualification in human nutrition and several nutritional adviser courses behind me, so the obvious question is why I’m adding another one.

The coaching industry, training and nutrition, has become increasingly saturated. A large part of that is down to how social media and consumer brands have operated: incentivising content creation and personal branding as the primary route to building a business. It works for some people. But I am not a content creator, and I never have been. For a long time I felt like that was something I needed to fix, that if I just showed up more consistently online, shared more of my life, provided more free value, the business would follow. The truth is that even when I was doing those things, I could feel that it wasn’t me. I suspect people could feel that too, even if they couldn’t quite name what was off.

I didn’t want to leave the industry. So I had to find a different way of existing within it.

The MSc is a pathway to SENr accreditation, a protected title in sport and exercise nutrition. What that opens up is the ability to work with teams, clubs, and elite athletes, while also bringing that same depth of knowledge and research grounding back to recreational athletes: the runners, cyclists, triathletes, and gym-goers who deserve better than generic advice.

There’s a real divide in this space between people who dismiss research in favour of lived experience, and those who dismiss experience in favour of research. Both of those positions miss something, lived experience without rigour can become anecdote dressed up as expertise. Research without application can become theory that never touches the ground. What I want to do is work in the space between them, where evidence and practice are actually in conversation with each other.

That’s what this is for.

The Strength Lab and coaching remains. This is just what it looks like when it grows up a bit ♥️

Nine weeks

This client came to me eating reasonably well, nothing obviously wrong, no dramatic habits to unpick. But the timing was off and her macros weren’t completely supporting what she was asking her body to do. She was training hard and wanted something more to show for it, which is where the nutrition side of things becomes of higher importance.

We didn’t overhaul everything. We shifted when she was eating relative to her sessions, brought her protein up, and redistributed her carbohydrates around training rather than away from it and incorporated a few more whole foods over convenience. Pretty unglamorous stuff on paper.

The bloating she’d had experienced started settling within a few weeks.

The photos show the physical change. What they don’t show is how much better she feels day to day, which is probably the part that matters more.

If any of this sounds familiar, feel free to drop me a message - I have coaching spots available ✨

I’ve been thinking about the word “athletic” a lot lately, and what it means to train for it.

Not to be the strongest person in the room. Not to have the best engine, or the most impressive mobility, or to podium in any one thing. Just to be well-rounded - the kind of athlete who can step into different seasons of training and find that they already have something useful to bring.

Not hybrid (a word I find a bit hollow if I’m being honest), something closer to a base that compounds. The more well-rounded you become, the more resilient you are when you eventually double down on something specific. Strength sits under everything. Aerobic capacity gives you room to work. The ability to move well keeps you training.

What I keep noticing is this: strength athletes who move into more varied training often say they feel incredible. The instinct is to credit the new training style, as though functional movement was the answer they were missing. Sometimes it is. But often what’s changed isn’t the philosophy, it’s that they stopped repeating the same stimulus until something gave way. A change in stimulus creates adaptation. It’s not a hybrid argument, it’s just physiology.

The goal isn’t to be mediocre at everything. It’s to be capable enough across enough things that you’re never starting from scratch and never so one-dimensional that removing one variable breaks the whole structure.

These are some of the meals I have on rotation at the moment.

Context: I’m working in a small deficit while prioritising recovery, I came back from burnout earlier this year, so how I’m eating right now is as much about supporting my system as it is about body composition.

Four structured meals spread through the day to keep blood glucose stable. Mostly whole foods, though I won’t pretend some of my training cycles aren’t partly fuelled by cake.

Fat comes mainly from extra virgin olive oil, eggs, nuts, and avocado. Carbs from potato, rice, pasta, oats, and sourdough. Protein from egg whites, chicken, mince, and whey.

Nothing complicated. Everything is straightforward to put together, and nothing is off the table but genuinely, I feel pretty good eating this way and variations of it.

Longer rids out on the bike are being fuelled by coconut water, dates, dried apricots or banana alongside caffeine and cake ofc.

If you’re curious about how to structure your meals around your training or recovery, send me a message or drop a question in the comments.

I haven’t opened up 1-2-1 coaching spots in a few years, so this feels worth mentioning.

I’m deliberately opening up a couple from April through to August. Online coaching has shifted a lot recently and I’ve been thinking carefully about what working closely with someone actually looks like now, this is part of that.

If you’re interested, just send me a message.

📍 Cardiff