
Yeah, I look like a bit of a tit here, but this is me just after securing gold at the prestigious BJJ British Open competition not only in my master's age bracket, but taking the adult title too. So stoked!
I’m SJ, a performance and nutrition coach specialising in helping athletes and high-performers build systems that support sustainable progress, long-term health, and achieve elite-level outcomes. My background combines scientific research, teaching, and competitive sports, allowing me to bridge the gap between evidence-based practice and the realities of everyday life and training.
Before moving fully into coaching, I acheived a PhD in Cellular Pathology and worked as a university lecturer within the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Newcastle University. There, I taught and mentored students across many areas, including physiology, pharmacology, genetics, microbiology, and medicine. Many of them happened to be athletes seeking high accolades in both their sporting and academic careers.
Countless late nights at the lab bench were spent performing hands-on research that contributed several peer reviewed scientific articles to the scientific community. I've made a few very cool discoveries about how our bodies deal with stress (ask me in our intro call if you're curious!) and developed a suite of nanotechnological biosensors that other brilliant scientists are now applying to their own research questions.
My scientific roots and experiences as a pioneer researcher fortify my coaching foundation. I believe clients deserve clear explanations, thoughtful strategies, and approaches grounded in evidence rather than trends or extremes.
Alongside my academic career, I’ve spent years competing and training in demanding environments. I understand the pressure of balancing performance goals with work, recovery, stress, relationships, weight management, and identity outside of sport.
My coaching focuses on creating personalised systems that are realistic, adaptable, and capable of producing measurable progress without sacrificing your physical and mental wellbeing or the stuff that actually makes a life worth living.
Whether your goal is improving performance, making weight safely, building better habits, increasing energy, or simply developing more confidence in how you fuel and care for your body, my aim is to help you build the knowledge and structure to move forward with clarity.
Coaching with me is collaborative, supportive, and practical. I design systems that create lasting change you can self- sustain and build world-beating progress upon, long after your short term initial goals are reached.
Designing & delivering evidence-based performance programmes tailored to athletes and leaders means integrating mindset training, behavioural optimisation, and high-pressure decision-making skill developement alongside nutritional and technical training.
Consistently showing up as a trusted advisor and performance partner is the core of the work. Offering proactive support, feedback, & strategic insights enables clients to consistently operate at their highest level.
Getting clients, teams and partners to where they want to be needs a structured and responsive plan. Using regular reflective practice, goal refinement, and course correction framework sustains long-term intentional personal and professional growth.
Implementing data-driven assessment tools to track meaningful progress with physical, mental and nutritional goals. Through this, we identify bottlenecks and implement specific course-corection interventions.
Performance systems need to stand up when the coach is not present. Clients that grow and achieve are the ones that can learn wht they need and implement independently. High quality resources support this journey and scaffold the independence transition.
No single professional offer all that an individual needs. Recognising the community surrounding a client and collaborating across discplines and skills sets ensures continuity of support, and reduces directional conflict during strategic planning.
Bringing teams together to grow as a unit empowers the collective to elevate their own standards and hold each other accountable. By strengthening a team's ability to self-govern, culture and leadership capability is universally enhanced.
Building mental resilience, instilling emotional regulation processes, and developing consistency takes time and practice, but ultimately enables people to excel in competitive, high-stakes environments.
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