How i got here, my background and experience
I've spent more than two decades in the training and conditioning arena. I like to think I've served an endless internship in exercise and bodywork.
At the age of 19 I represented South Africa at the Southern hemisphere underwater hockey champs, in Wellington in 1995, and went onto play in a further 2 x World Champs. After of almost 8 years of training myself, bodywork was a natural progression.
I started out as a massage therapist. In 2003 I moved to London, London opened up a myriad of qualifications and courses, I was a bit like a kid in a candy store with the opportunity to attend courses.
I went on to study sports massage therapy but soon became frustrated with the quality of gym trainers my clients were seeing, so after various progressions moved back to my passion, exercise.
In 2005 after obtaining numerous and varied international qualifications I progressed to working as a personal trainer at high end gyms, most notably at Club Kensington in Kensington. Working alongside and at times under the guidance of the resident Australian physiotherapist, I then continued through a series of CHEK (Corrective hi-performance exercise kinesiology) courses between April 2005 and September 2006. These courses really enabled me to develop my skills as not just a personal trainer but corrective exercise specialist.
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In 2006 I had the opportunity to study Neuromuscular therapy an American qualification in soft-tissue manual therapy, requiring an exceptional knowledge of anatomy. This upskill in my anatomy knowledge has been invaluable ever since.
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I returned home to South Africa and settled in Port Elizabeth in 2009, working with and in the practice of a Chiropractor, Dr Russell Hill. Again working alongside and under the guidance of Russell, I was able to refine my skills as a corrective exercise specialist dealing with movement issues from all walks of life, from athletes to everyday people.
A real strength of Russell’s was managing spinal pathologies. I was able to apply my CHEK skills and knowledge gained from a course I attended in London in 2007 - Assessment and multi-disciplinary management of spinal pathologies – Presented by Dan V . Plev (Consultant neurosurgeon) and Jon Bowskill (Corrective exercise specialist). I have since developed a very strong non-invasive, exercise based strategy to dealing with many movement issues to help my clients maximise their time in the gym and help them stay strong and injury free.
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I have had the privelage over the years to work with many professional sportspeople, most notably Graeme Whale (Port Elizabeth Golf Club professional) Christopher Reid (2016 Olympian for backstroke), Mona Pretorious (Olympic lifter, Commonwealth bronze medalist) and Garth Wright (ex Springbok scrumhalf).
I also had the pleasure of working with many junior up and coming athletes and helped numerous teenagers achieve their goals of sporting scholarships to US universities and regularly helped out Graeme Whale with the E.P junior golf conditioning.
Other achievements included pre-season conditioning coach for Grey 1st XV 2014 (they finished the season ranked 3rd in SA), and head coach to Walmer (High School) Black Eagles 2014 and 2015 (this was one of the most enjoyable undertakings I've been involved in, we put together a local township school team, who had been invited to play in a league (nobody told them they were supposed to just be making up the numbers) we made the play-offs both years regularly beating sides we were not supposed to beat.)
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I also worked alongside James Fleming, physiotherapist for E.P. Kings 2013 and 2014. Athletes worked with include – Sergeal Peterson, Darron Nell, Luke Watson, C.J van de Linde, Siyande Grey, B.G. Uys, Gary van Aswegen and Micheal van Vuuren. I also helped out Rory Kockott, during his off-season gaps from France 2014 and 2015.
I moved to Cape Town in 2017 and I'm currently running a private practice in Vredehoek with an active and healthy client base.
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I've always sought out the knowledge of those considered leaders in their field and my background in sports massage has prided himself on his grasp of anatomy and functional movement.