Get on the big step

Hey, I'm SJ. It's great to see you here.
I'm a performance and nutrition coach helping athletes in emerging sports build sustainable, evidence-based systems to perform at their best.
As both a competitor and coach, I understand the pressures of balancing ambition, performance, identity, and long-term health. I’m especially passionate about supporting athletes at transition points, whether that’s stepping into higher-level competition for the first time or pursuing elite level goals. My approach combines science, curiosity, empathy, and real-world performance experience to support my clients make confident, informed decisions about their development.
Alongside years of competitive sport experience, I hold a BSc in Pharmacology and a PhD from Newcastle University here in the UK, where I taught and mentored within the Faculty of Medical Sciences. My post-doc research focused on energy systems, metabolism, and physiologial stress. Translating my research and teaching experience into practical applications and personalised coaching keeps me truly evidence based.
I mainly work with ambitious hobbyist, serious amateur, and developing professional athletes who want to see significant progress and performance development in both training and competition. My clients are typically competing in high-intensity, ultra-endurance or weight-class dependent disciplines sports such as Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, MMA, Hyrox, Ultrarunning, ice hockey, and wrestling.
Our coaching starts with a detailed assessment of your current habits, daily routine, training demands, body composition, performance targets, and competitve schedule. This helps me understand how your personal strategy could be broken into phases to align with short, medium and longer term goals. From there, I design a structured nutrition strategy that supports energy availability, recovery, and where required, weight management.
As part of your coaching package, you’ll receive clear, practical guidance on how to systematise your fuelling habits so that you'll actually want to follow through on the work. Depending on how closely we work together, this might look like meal and macro planning, support with fuel timing for training, hydration protocols, and specific planning for complex competition days.
How you choose to measure progress will be heavily dependent on what goals you set for youself. Metrics we collect over time could include data on body composition, training complience, markers of recovery, and habit consistency. We can also use personal diagnostics to track biomarkers of health from blood monitoring and body measurements, or performance metrics for key movements, mobility and force generation.
While incredibly helpful, athletes should not only focus on objective measures of progress. Subjective & emotional dimenstions such as mood, training intensity and motivation, confidence, clarity, and fatigue are all critical components of undertanding progress on your personal journey. Together we'll create your dashboard of data that gives the insight you need.
In short, yes, I offer both remote and in-person support depending on your needs and location. For athletes in North East England, in-person support is easily integrated into your regular coaching or fight camp, including check-ins, diagnostics and assessments, and hands-on nutirition and recovery guidance. For athletes based further afield, remote support remains highly effective and includes detailed planning for both fight camp and competition day, with clear protocols you can follow independently.
Competition day concierge support is also available as a premium service for domestic and international events. This is especially useful for athletes unfamiliar with local services or ingredients who don't want to spend the brain power on negotiating supermarkets abroad. Event concierge involves personal food procurement and meal preparation, managing your nutrition and hydration strategy in real time to ensure all fuelling is timed, prepared, and adjusted as needed so you focus solely on your performance.

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