Move with Monty

NEW CLASSES ARE HERE 🎉

I’m really excited to finally get these off the ground.

These are small group personal training sessions, so whether you’re completely new to the gym or you’ve been training for years, I’ll make sure you’re getting exactly what you need.

If you’re a beginner, I’ll teach you how to perform every exercise with confidence. If you’re more experienced, I’ll help you choose the right weights, push yourself, and keep progressing.

Although we’ll train together as a group, everyone gets one-to-one coaching as I move around the room. We’ll be working through fun, varied circuits, and I’ll be there to coach, encourage and adapt things for you throughout.

📍 Solo60 Great Eastern
47 Great Eastern Street
London EC2A 3HP

👥 6–8 people per class
💷 £15 per session

I’ve only got a couple of spaces left for next week, so if you’d like to join us, drop me a DM and I’ll send you the details. Looking forward to raising the roof with you! 💙

Monty’s Moves
Ep. 1: My Morning Spine Reset

1. *Hip hike marching* is one of my favourite ways to wake my hips up first thing in the morning.

Keep both legs straight. Lift one hip, then stamp the straight leg firmly into the floor, making solid contact through your heel. Alternate from side to side for about a minute.

That heel strike sends force from your heel, through your shin, knee and femur, and into your pelvis. It helps improve how force is transferred through the lower body while training your lateral hip stabilisers to drive down with strength.

The stamping leg also provides an impact stimulus that can help support bone health, while the opposite side works your obliques and quadratus lumborum (QL). Together, these muscles help control your pelvis during walking, improve long-striding gait, and contribute to healthier lumbo-pelvic mechanics.

It’s a simple movement, but it’s one I come back to regularly because it gets me shifting from left to right and leaves my hips feeling switched on before the day starts.

2. Then I follow it with a *segmented spine extension*.

I focus on lifting my upper rib cage towards the ceiling first, extending through the upper back one segment at a time. Once my thoracic spine has opened up, I let my eyes follow towards the ceiling, allowing a small amount of comfortable neck extension. This switches on the muscles of the lower back while giving the muscles across the front of my body—my chest, abdominals and the front of my neck—a good stretch.

Together, these two movements take me from my heels all the way through to my neck. It’s a simple full-chain movement sequence that gets everything shifting before the day starts. Think of it as giving your spine a bit of WD-40 after a night in bed or a day at your desk.

Have a go and let me know how your hips and back feel afterwards. 👇

Technique is misunderstood.

One of the biggest reasons people avoid the gym is because they’re worried about doing an exercise “wrong”.

They feel like they need someone watching every rep, making sure their technique is perfect.

Now, there is some truth to that.

If you’re not sure what shape you’re trying to make, or how a movement should look, it’s easy to feel exposed. It can feel like everyone’s watching you, and that can make you incredibly self-conscious.

But here’s what I’ve learnt after 13 years of coaching.

Very rarely is someone’s technique so dangerous that it’s likely to cause an injury.

More often than not, the thing stopping people isn’t technique.

It’s embarrassment.

Yes, learn the basic shapes.

Yes, understand what the exercise is supposed to look like.

But don’t fall into the trap of thinking every rep has to look identical.

Every exercise has a purpose.

Every movement has an intention.

If your intention is to work your glutes, then your job is to make your glutes do the work. If your intention is to work your chest, then your job is to make your chest do the work.

Technique is there to help you achieve that.

It’s not the goal itself.

Take a bicep curl.

If you swing the dumbbells a bit, you’re still working your biceps. They’re still producing force. They’re still adapting.

Would I probably get you to go a bit lighter? Sure.

Would there be times where I’d ask you to slow the movement down and concentrate more on the muscle? Absolutely.

But should imperfect technique stop you from exercising?

No.

Learn the basic shapes.

Understand what the movement is trying to achieve.

Know which muscles you’re trying to work.

Go light enough that you can feel those muscles doing the job.

Then build from there.

Don’t be afraid of not having perfect technique.

It’s far less black and white than most people think.

This is one of my more experimental programmes.

My client has osteoarthritis in the big toe on her right foot, occasional lower back pain, and pain down the back of her right thigh.

The strategy has three parts. Each layer supports the next. The hope is that by improving the individual pieces, the whole system becomes more capable.

1. Local tissue

We’re working on active big toe extension to build strength, motor control and positional strength through the big toe extensor tendon. My hope is that restoring active movement creates a healthier mechanical environment for the joint, rather than leaving it in the same restricted position all the time.

2. Strength

We’re progressively overloading her deadlift to build the strength, length and muscle mass of her glutes and hamstrings. The aim is to increase the capacity of the muscles that support the hip and lower back.

3. Integration

This drill explores how the hip accepts and controls the thigh as load transfers through the heel.

The hope is that the hip provides more positional stability, allowing the foot to move more freely and the big toe flexors to grip less aggressively. At the same time, we’re encouraging more contribution from the adductors, glutes and hamstrings whilst exploring a movement that sits outside her normal pattern.

The theory is that these three pieces reinforce one another.

Better toe function.

More glute and hamstring capacity.

Better integration across the whole system.

Maybe that gives the lower back more support.

Maybe it gives the back of the thigh more space.

Maybe it changes how she solves movement altogether.

I don’t know yet.

That’s part of the coaching journey.

This is one of the methodologies I use with clients who have long-standing movement problems. I don’t just build strength or mobility in isolation. I build local capacity, global strength, and then explore how the whole system adapts over time.

I also work closely with her physio. They’re focused on treatment and symptom management. I’m focused on improving long-term movement capacity and function.

One of my clients is a competitive fencer and occasionally gets pain in the front of his shoulder.

He’s also naturally very mobile.

So instead of trying to make him even more mobile, we’re working on the opposite.

More stability.

One way we’re doing that is by creating more tension through the hands and feet.

The idea is that if the end points of the body become more stable, the nervous system has a stronger platform to recruit and stabilise the joints further up the chain, particularly the shoulders and hips. This principle is often referred to as irradiation.

It’s not something I’d want someone doing all the time.

But as a training drill, it can be a useful way of improving shoulder awareness and helping someone feel more supported through the movement.

This was a bit of homework I gave him this week. I thought it was an interesting concept to share because it’s something you might find useful in your own training.

One thing I’ve learned from 13 years of coaching…

The people who get the best results aren’t the ones trying to do everything in one go.

They’re the ones who know when to stop, come back tomorrow, and keep showing up.

Today was productive.

There’s still more I could do.

But today, I’m choosing to stop.

Tomorrow I’ll pick it up again.

This morning was a bit of a milestone for me.

After 13 years as a personal trainer and more than 15,000 coaching sessions, I had the opportunity to present a problem that I think is going to become increasingly important.

As more people use AI for fitness advice, coaches and clinicians are losing visibility over the decisions these systems are making.

That’s a problem.

As coaches, we know far more about our clients than they can type into a prompt.

We know:

• how they move
• what they’ve already tried
• what motivates them
• what they avoid
• what hurts
• what they’re ready for next

That’s the context good coaching is built on.

The future isn’t AI replacing coaches.

It’s AI working with coaches.

Building systems that are transparent, adaptable, and keep the human expert in the loop.

It was a privilege to discuss that challenge with mathematicians and AI researchers from universities across the UK this morning.

I’m excited to help build a future where AI doesn’t replace expertise.

It amplifies it.

DigitalHealth Biomechanics

7 sessions today.

One thing I’ll never get bored of is hands-on coaching.

You can spend five minutes explaining a movement…

Or five seconds helping someone feel it.

Once they feel it, everything changes.

That’s why no two sessions I coach ever look the same.

Different body. Different goal. Different solution.

That’s what I love about coaching.

Three movement problems from this week’s Movement Clinic 👇

Sam was feeling stiff through his upper back, so we used a simple back extension over the sofa to help him access a bit more movement. Just make sure you’ve got something soft underneath you, and remember that not every exercise is right for every person.

Amy was struggling with sit-ups. She didn’t quite have the abdominal strength for a full sit-up yet, so we extended her legs to give her a bit more leverage and bridge the gap between what she could do and what she was working towards.

Damien was struggling with balance during Bulgarian split squats. No magic trick here. We felt it was mainly a confidence and practice issue. Sometimes the answer isn’t a new exercise. It’s simply giving your body enough repetitions to trust the movement.

That’s what the Movement Clinic is all about.

Bring a movement problem.

Something that hurts.

Something you can’t balance on.

Something that just doesn’t make sense in your body.

And we’ll work through it together.

📅 Wednesdays
⏰ 6:00pm–6:30pm
💻 Zoom
💷 £5

DM me if you’d like to join next week’s clinic and I’ll send you the link 👍

Biomechanics MoveWithMonty