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Meet The Team

Coach James

James Iles Coach

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 CrossFit 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 CrossFit.

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! 🛢️👀

Team Valesco