Right let me introduce myself, I’m Connor and I live in Burgess Hill. I’m 19 and I’ve been interested in everything sport and fitness wise since I was about 10 years old. For the past 3 years I’ve been working at Waitrose, doing a bit of everything in there from the joyous job of pushing trolleys, stacking shelves and running the checkouts.
I started karate at a young age and was in the England Karate squad for a few years, I won a few National and British championships so this is when my strength and conditioning training really started and my passion for health and fitness really evolved. But it wasn’t until college I looked into training other people, and since then I’ve known that’s what I wanted to do. I kept looking on different sites for jobs but some of them where a little bit off putting, as like most of you I’m not too keen on the typical ‘globo gym’ environment. Then I saw one on Potential and applied straight away.
After doing the interview and being invited back to run a session for Emily and Charlie (who I later found out had never worked out before), I found out I got the job and was over the moon, I was thinking “finally no more trolley pushing”. I pretty quickly forgot about the fact that poor Charlie was being sick in the toilet after his body went into shock!
So far I’ve been here 3 weeks and everyone’s great! It’s strange how much you can learn in such a short amount of time.
After a couple of shifts I got to attend a training course with James Breese in Esher at Pursuit fitness. James is the founder of kettlebell fever and a high end krav maga and fitness trainer. This was a great opportunity to learn loads of new skills to include in the training sessions at Potential. The day started with some body assessment exercises making sure you are working and moving the way it is supposed to, this is a subject that can get into a lot of detail however the way it was explained made it very easy to understand and see how to apply it when doing sessions back at Potential.
Just before lunch we did a little workout to do some of the exercises that had been show to us in the morning session. For the first time in quite a while I could really feel my Abs screaming at me to stop, which was a good thing because I knew they were working. After refuelling and hydrating at lunch we started going into detail with certain core strengthening exercises, stretches and mobility exercises and technique of the deadlift, as 3 of us there were rugby guys learning the details for the deadlift was great news. The mobility stuff was so interesting and made it very easy to understand why it is so important to do these exercises, also watching everyone wince in pain at the hands of James with the roller was quite entertaining, until of course it came around to my turn when I found out I should really do a lot more mobility work myself!
At the end of the day I went away with a real good understanding of all the things that had been taught throughout the day and knew that what I had learnt would help clients become stronger, fitter and healthier! I’m continuously learning new things and look forward to training everyone at Potential!
