SOS Athletic Excellence

Saturday Team Training with the crew🙌🏻

THROWBACK… 15 years ago.

Still one of my favourite transformations from all the years I've been coaching.

Zoe lost 13.5 stone in under 16 months.

Her husband Daz lost 12 stone alongside her.

25.5 stone between them.

Mad when you look back at it.

But there's another part of this story that's probably even more relevant now.

Do you know how often they trained with me?

ONE small-group PT session a week.

ONE!

Now, I'm obviously not suggesting one gym session a week is some magic formula for losing 13 stone.

It isn't.

The real work was making sure the rest of their week was right.

I knew what their week looked like.

We worked on their food, their habits, their activity, their weekends and the bits that were likely to trip them up.

Then they'd come back in the following week and we'd go again.

The weekly architecture was right.

And that's something I think we've become even better at understanding over the last 15 years.

More isn't always better.

Especially for the people we coach at SOS now.

They're running businesses, managing teams, working demanding jobs, bringing up kids and trying to have some sort of social life at the same time.

They don't need fitness to become another full-time job.

They need to know what matters.

They need a week that works.

And they need someone making sure they're actually doing it.

Our coaching has obviously moved on massively since this photo.

The facility is better. The team is better. We've got better systems, better programming and technology we'd have dreamed of having back then.

But the principle hasn't really changed.

Look at the whole week, not just the hour someone spends in the gym.

Get the important bits right.

Make them realistic.

Then keep doing them.

Zoe and Daz were proving that 15 years ago.

We just didn't call it "weekly architecture" back then.

And maybe we should shout about this stuff a little more.

We've been coaching people for a very, very long time.

Some of today's "fitness experts" were genuinely still in primary school spilling their milk when we were producing results like this 😂

That's only half a joke.

There are some brilliant coaches out there and we're certainly not pretending we've got all the answers.

But after 20 years, thousands and thousands of coaching hours and a lot of people helped…

We're very good at what we do.

We probably don't say that enough.

Then again, we don't really need to.

We've got over 20 years of receipts.

Coach Sam 💪

Jess said something that stuck with me.

I was reading through a testimonial from one of our members, Jess, this week and this bit stood out:

“As someone who loses motivation on her own at the gym, this was perfect for me.”

And I thought…

That’s probably a lot of people.

Most people we speak to already know what they should be doing.

Train a few times a week.

Eat reasonably well.

Get your steps in.

Don’t go mad every weekend.

None of this is particularly groundbreaking.

The difficult bit is doing it consistently when real life gets involved.

Work.

Family.

Holidays.

Meals out.

Everything else that needs your attention.

And in Jess’s case, running two businesses too.

Because when you’re doing it on your own, it’s very easy to miss Tuesday.

Then Thursday gets busy.

Then you tell yourself you’ll definitely get in at the weekend.

And before you know it, you’ve barely trained for two weeks and you’re waiting for another Monday to get going again.

Jess knew she was like that.

She didn’t need us to magically make her more motivated.

She needed a setup that meant motivation didn’t have to do all the work.

Sessions in the diary.

A programme ready when she walks in.

A coach who knows what she’s working towards.

People around her who notice when she’s there.

And support when life inevitably gets a bit messy.

She still has to do the work, obviously.

But she doesn’t have to keep figuring everything out on her own.

And I think there’s a big difference between the two.

So if you’ve had gym memberships before and keep finding yourself starting, stopping and starting again…

Maybe another gym membership isn’t what you need.

Maybe doing it on your own is the bit that isn’t working.

If that sounds familiar, comment START and we’ll tell you a bit more about how we do things differently at SOS.

📍 SOS Athletic Excellence | Cardiff

You probably make enough decisions during the day without having to make another 20 when you get to the gym.

What am I training today? Is the rack free? Someone’s on the bench I need, so what do I swap that for? Am I lifting heavy enough? Should I be doing more cardio?

Then if the scales haven’t moved for a week, it’s very easy to start questioning that as well.

Maybe I need to eat less. Train more. Change the programme.

Before you know it, you’re making it up as you go along.

We’ve spoken about this quite a bit at SOS this week because I think it’s one of the things people underestimate about having a coach.

You shouldn’t have to think about all of this stuff.

When our members walk in, the programme is already written. We know what we’re trying to achieve with the current training block and how it fits into what comes next.

The kit is there. The coach is there.

And because we actually know the people we’re coaching, we also know that what’s right for one person isn’t necessarily right for the next.

Some people need a bit of a push.

Some need reining in.

Some absolutely love getting themselves into the pain cave. Others would happily never go there again 😂

Then there’s the other side of it.

Is it actually working?

Rather than panicking after a bad week and changing everything, we can look at body composition, strength, performance, attendance and how you’re actually feeling.

Sometimes we change things.

Sometimes the best advice is simply to keep doing what you’re doing and give it time.

That’s probably one of my favourite things about the way we coach at SOS.

For a lot of our members, it’s an hour where they don’t have to be in charge.

They’ve spent all day making decisions at work, looking after other people and sorting problems.

They come through our doors and, for an hour, we take care of the training.

All they need to do is turn up.

We’re going to take a similar approach with nutrition next week.

Coach Cole is running a Nutrition Seminar on Zoom on Wednesday 19th August. We’re going to strip things back, get rid of a lot of the noise around nutrition and concentrate on getting the basics right.

Then on Monday 24th August we’re starting our 21-Day Fat Loss Plan, with support and accountability to help people actually put those basics into practice.

We’re opening both up to non-members as well.

If you’d like to get involved, comment NUTRITION below and we’ll send you the details.

Coach Sam