About Ben

Hi, I’m Ben.

Professionally, I am a:

• Functional Movement / Strength Coach
• Personal Trainer
• Bodywork / Massage Practitioner
• Health & Wellness Coach

I’m not sure where one starts and the other ends…

But above all, I’m a husband to my wife, Ella, and a father to three teenage boys.

So staying fit, strong, and healthy isn’t just a professional interest for me. It’s personal.

I want to keep moving well, stay strong, do the things I enjoy, and be capable for the people who matter to me for as long as I can.

I’ve been doing this full-time for over 20 years now. Which, according to my kids, means I’m old.

But it also means I’ve learned a thing or two along the way.

Most of those years have been spent coaching here in St Kilda. For more than 12 of them, I also owned and ran my own studio, The Fit Stop.

After COVID and Melbourne’s extended gym closures, I eventually decided not to reopen the studio.

By then, my thinking about coaching — and what I wanted my work to look like — had started changing too.

These days, I work independently, which gives me the freedom to keep things smaller, more personal, and focus on the parts of coaching I find make the most meaningful difference to the people I help.

Across my career, I’ve spent tens of thousands of hours coaching people with different bodies, backgrounds, goals, and challenges.

What 20+ Years of Coaching Has Taught Me

When you’ve spent this long working with people and their bodies, you start noticing patterns.

You also get pretty comfortable with the fact that you won’t always have the answer.

I’ve worked with hundreds of people and spent a lot of time trying to understand why one person responds quickly to something while another doesn’t.

Why an exercise helps one person but irritates another.

Why something that looks like a strength problem sometimes isn’t.

And why the obvious answer isn’t always the useful one.

That’s why I often say my clients have been my biggest teachers.

Courses and textbooks have given me knowledge. Coaching has forced me to work out what to do with it.

Over the years, I’ve also written about strength, movement, and fitness for Red Bull, with my work published, translated, and adapted across Red Bull’s international network.

Writing has reinforced something I value in coaching too: being able to take a complicated idea and make it useful to the person in front of you.

My Body Was My First Teacher Too

My interest in all of this didn’t begin because I wanted to become a coach. It started because I was trying to understand my own body.

I grew up active, played sport, and always enjoyed movement. From the outside, I probably looked naturally athletic. Looking back now, though, I can see that I was also a pretty good compensator. I could do a lot of things well enough to get by, even when I wasn’t necessarily doing them particularly well.

When I was fifteen, I discovered bodybuilding and strength training. Like a lot of teenage boys, I wanted to get bigger and stronger. That eventually grew into a much broader interest in strength, athletic performance, movement, and how the body actually works.

Then my own body started giving me different problems to solve.

After a couple of significant back injuries, along with years of various aches, restrictions, and training frustrations, the question gradually changed from:

“How do I get stronger?”

to:

“Why is this happening in the first place?”

That question changed the direction of my career.

It sent me down a long path of studying, experimenting, getting things wrong, changing my mind, and gradually developing a broader way of looking at the body.

What Shaped My Approach

Over the years, I’ve studied Health Science, including anatomy and physiology at university, along with strength and conditioning, functional movement, corrective exercise, bodywork and massage, breathing, nutrition, rehabilitation, and the psychology and neuroscience of behaviour change.

Some of this has been through formal study and professional qualifications. Some has come from following questions that interested me and trying to understand how the different pieces fit together.

But I’ve never been particularly interested in collecting methods just for the sake of having more methods. I’m more interested in understanding where an idea fits — and when it doesn’t.

But I’ve never been particularly interested in collecting methods just for the sake of having more methods. I’m more interested in understanding where an idea fits — and when it doesn’t.

People can look at the same body through very different lenses.

A strength coach sees one thing.

A physio may notice something else.

Someone interested in breathing, posture, or the nervous system may see the problem differently again.

Often, there’s something useful in each perspective.

The problem comes when one piece of the puzzle gets mistaken for the whole thing.

Useful ideas without context can become random ingredients. And random ingredients don’t automatically make a good recipe.

So I’ve become less interested in being loyal to particular methods and more interested in understanding the principles underneath them.

What is happening?

Why might it be happening?

What’s the simplest useful thing we can do next?

How I Think About Coaching Now

I don’t see people as broken bodies that need fixing, and I don’t think my job is to convince someone that I have all the answers.

My job is to observe, ask questions, test ideas, and help the person in front of me make sense of what we’re seeing.

That may lead us towards strength training, movement work, bodywork, breathing, recovery, or simply changing the way someone trains.

Usually, there’s some overlap.

The aim is to give someone more options, not make them dependent on me.

The better you understand your own body, the better equipped you are to look after it.

Read more about my approach →

Still Learning:

Twenty-plus years into this career, I’m probably more comfortable saying “I don’t know” than I was when I started.

Not because I know less. I’ve just seen enough to know that bodies and people don’t always behave according to the textbook.

I’m still coaching, training, reading, and experimenting. And I still change my mind when something better comes along.

The questions have evolved too.

How do we stay strong without beating ourselves up?

How much of what we blame on age is really the accumulated effect of what we’ve been doing — or not doing — for years?

How do we build bodies that work well in the gym but remain useful outside it?

I don’t expect to arrive at a final answer.

But after 20 years, I think I’ve become pretty good at asking better questions.