Hey Team! I’m James.
I’m originally from Pembrokeshire on the coast of Wales 🏴 and moved to the Southwest in 2007 to study. After graduating university in Bath, I was able to find a job that allowed me to hang around in the SouthWest for a while and in 2018, after joining as a member a year earlier, I obtained my Functional Fitness Level 1 and began coaching. When I’m not either training or coaching at Valesco, I’ll typically be at my actual full-time job with a large and well-known technology company! 📱
I have been a member of Valesco since 2017 and made the move to become a Coach in 2019. Since then, I have been involved in a bunch of different things at the gym; everything from the Podcast, helping manage our Strength In Depth teams and competing as a Valesco Athlete, through to some of the website, apparel, gym branding and some programming here and there.
I got into sport during school where I spent time training as a track athlete specialising in the 100m and 200m events. As I tried to develop my speed and power, I was introduced to weight training and never really looked back! After becoming a bit too heavy to run as fast as I would have liked, I decided to embrace it and started to focus on powerlifting! After a few years of full-time 1-rep maxes, shaving my head and growing a beard (which, can confirm, adds roughly 10kg to all lifts), I decided I needed to start looking after my body a bit more than I was and wanted to see what else it was capable of. With that in mind, I started to start doing some ‘Functional Fitness’ workouts alongside my strength training and it didn’t take long to get sucked into everything Functional Fitness.
I’m sure you’ll all agree, the family-vibe of our gym – the coaches and all of the members – instantly made it feel like somewhere I wanted to be and I’ve never enjoyed training more than I do now.
Fun Fact; I reached the live shows of the first ever series of Britain’s Got Talent and soon after went on to perform on stage at a sold-out Royal Albert Hall… creating music as a trio on brushes, frying pans and Dustbins! 🛢️👀