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EJT Coaching, 1 Westbourne Villas, Otley (2026)

10/10/2026

If you've been thinking about working with a running coach but never quite got round to it, I want to tell you plainly what it actually involves, because I think a lot of people imagine something much more intense and much more expensive than it is.

It isn't a generic printed plan. It's built around your actual week, your sleep, whatever else you're doing, any niggles you're carrying, what perimenopause happens to be doing to you at the moment, and whatever race or goal you're working towards, if you've got one at all. We talk every week, properly, about what's changed and why last Tuesday's run felt like wading through mud when it shouldn't have.

You don't need to be anywhere near me. I coach runners online, anywhere in the UK, and you run your own routes in your own time, everything else happens by message and video call.

And you don't need to be fast, or even quick for you. This isn't coaching for people chasing a time. It's for any woman over 40 who runs and would like it to feel better than it currently does.

The question I get asked honestly the most is whether a free plan off the internet would do the same job. It might, for a while, for someone it wasn't written for. It just won't know your sleep, your hormones, your history, or your week, because it can't. That's really the whole difference.

Online plans start at £70 for four weeks with a weekly catch-up, or £95 with two strength sessions added in. If you'd like to talk it through properly first, with absolutely no pressure, a discovery chat is free: calendly.com/emmarealpt/discovery-chat

What's stopped you from trying it so far, cost, time, or just never quite being sure it was for you?

07/10/2026

Does anyone else's motivation completely disappear the moment it goes dark by teatime? Because mine does too, most years, and I have to actively manage it rather than just push through it.

This isn't a one off. Every October the same message starts landing: "I don't know what's wrong with me, I just can't get going." Nothing's wrong. The daylight has changed, and daylight does more to our mood and energy than most of us give it credit for, less of it means less serotonin and a melatonin release that shifts later and gets sludgier, and if perimenopause is already having a go at your sleep and mood this year, autumn just piles on.

The things that genuinely help: daylight in the first hour of the day, even a rubbish five minutes in the rain. Moving your session earlier before the afternoon dip lands properly. Booking training in like an appointment rather than waiting to feel like it, because feeling like it mostly doesn't arrive until you're already moving. And on the truly hard days, twenty honest minutes beats another cancelled session.

It's not forever, it's a few months where the environment's working against you rather than with you. Knowing that alone tends to help.

How are you finding the darker mornings this year, worse than usual, or are you one of the lucky ones who barely notices?

05/10/2026

Can we talk about creatine for a minute? I get asked about it more than almost any other supplement now, usually by women who've heard TikTok say two completely different things about it in the same week.

Here's the honest version. Creatine used to be filed under "bodybuilder supplement," and most of us filed it right back where it came from. But the research from the last few years tells a genuinely different story, and it turns out women in perimenopause are one of the groups who benefit most from it, not despite our hormones doing their own thing, but partly because of it.

What it actually does: it helps your muscles hold a bit more energy for those last hard reps of a set, which are the reps that do most of the work of building strength. There's also growing evidence it helps with brain fog and mood, and it works alongside the lifting we're doing to help protect muscle and bone through our 40s and 50s.

It's not magic and it won't do anything on its own sitting in a cupboard. But it's one of the most studied supplements there is, it's inexpensive, and the dose is boringly simple, 3 to 5 grams a day of ordinary creatine monohydrate, no loading phase, any time that suits you.

If you're lifting and not taking it, it might be worth a conversation with your GP first if you're on medication or have any kidney concerns, and then giving it a go.

Do you already take creatine, or is this new to you?

04/10/2026

Morley 10k ✅ 59:05

I’m not going to lie, I was teary on that start line this morning. 🥹

Five months ago I had my gallbladder removed, and there were days I wondered when I’d feel like myself again. Today I stood there with my family cheering me on, and it all hit me at once.

The hills were brutal, but I kept the effort even all the way round, just like I tell my clients to. Every climb, I reminded myself how far I’ve come.

Then I crossed the line, and my hubby was in tears. Mine came right back too. 😭❤️

I’m so proud, and so grateful to my family for being there. I couldn’t have done it without them.

This was a stepping stone to something bigger, and I can’t wait to share what’s next.

If you’re on your own comeback after surgery, illness or injury, please hear this: slow progress is still progress. Keep going. You will get there.

Want to get to your own start line? Message me and let’s make a plan. 💪🏃

EJT Coaching
ComebackStory Morley Running Club - Morley 10km

02/10/2026

I want to gently challenge something, because I think it's costing a lot of women a lot of progress.

When training stops working in our 40s, we almost always reach for the same explanation: hormones. And hormones are real, I write about them constantly, they change what we need and how we recover. But they're not the whole story, and sometimes they're doing the job of a very convenient excuse.

Here's the question I ask instead. What are you lifting today compared with a year ago?

If the answer is "about the same" same class, same 8kg dumbbells, same circuit then nothing about your training has asked your body for anything new in twelve months. And bodies are efficient. They adapt to what they're given, then they stop. Same demand, same body. That isn't perimenopause. That's biology behaving exactly as designed.

What makes it worse after 40 is that we need a bit more stimulus, not less, just to hold onto the muscle we've got. So a programme that stands still is quietly going backwards.

The fix is smaller than people think. You don't need a new plan every six weeks, and you certainly don't need to add weight every session. You need one thing to get harder every few weeks, one more rep, one more set, a slower lowering, a shorter rest, and eventually, yes, a heavier weight. The test is simple: the last two reps of your last set should be genuinely hard.

And the single most useful habit in all of this costs nothing. Write down what you did. You cannot progress something you're not tracking, and almost nobody tracks it.

Be honest with me, do you know what you lifted this time last year, or has it all blurred into "the usual"?

30/09/2026

A slightly unglamorous post about tendons, because this is the one I get asked about most at this time of year.

If you're over 40 and running, you may have noticed that the niggles have changed. It's not the dramatic injuries. It's the Achilles that's stiff for the first two minutes every single morning. The plantar pain on the first steps out of bed. The deep ache right on the sit bone that's fine on the flat and horrible uphill.

These are not random, and they're not simply "getting older". Oestrogen plays a real role in how we build and maintain collagen, and collagen is the raw material of tendons. As oestrogen drops and fluctuates through perimenopause, tendons become slightly less springy, slower to adapt, and much less tolerant of a sudden increase in training. So the niggles cluster, usually right when you've added a bit of mileage for an autumn race.

The instinct is to rest. It's the wrong instinct. Rested tendons get weaker and they're usually just as sore when you go back. Tendons want load, controlled, heavy, repeated load.

In practice that means slow heavy calf raises for the Achilles and plantar, proper hamstring and glute work for the sit bone one, three times a week. It means not spiking your mileage, because tendons adapt more slowly than your lungs and legs do. It means warming up properly now the mornings have turned. And it means giving it eight to twelve weeks, not eight to twelve days, which is the real reason most people conclude that rehab "didn't work" when they stopped at week two.

Nearly every woman I've coached through this has come out the other side running, and running better than before.

What's your current niggle, and how long have you been quietly running on it?

28/09/2026

Can I talk about 3am for a minute?

It's the most common thing I hear from women in their 40s, and it's almost never mentioned as a training issue, it's filed under "just one of those things". Awake at three, hot, brain going at full speed, then the alarm at half six and a day to get through.

And then there's the training question. Do you go, or do you write the day off?

Most women I meet do one of two things. They cancel, which is fair enough, and then one bad night turns into a fortnight off. Or they go in and absolutely batter themselves to prove that they're still on it, and spend the next three days wrecked.

There's a much better middle option, and it's the one I use with clients constantly.

Keep the session, shrink it. Same weights, fewer sets. Strength work holds up on poor sleep far better than people expect, it's the volume and the flat out conditioning that punish you, not the heavy lifts themselves. Take out anything technical or maximal, because tired bodies get sloppy and that's how niggles start. Twenty-five honest minutes is a genuinely good session.

Then get daylight and some proper protein in you within the first hour of being up. Both do more for tonight's sleep than anything you'll do at bedtime.

The women who keep making progress through perimenopause aren't the ones sleeping beautifully. Nobody's sleeping beautifully. They're the ones who stopped treating every bad night as a reason to start again on Monday.

How's your sleep been this last month, and does it change what you do that day, or do you just plough on regardless?

25/09/2026

I want to clear something up, because it comes up constantly and it stops women getting help they'd really benefit from.

You do not have to be fast to work with a run coach.

Nearly every woman who enquires about run coaching says some version of the same thing in the first two minutes. "I should say, I'm quite slow." "I'm not a proper runner." "I'm probably not what you usually work with." As though there's an entry standard and they're worried about failing it.

There isn't one. Coaching isn't a reward for being quick. It's for any woman over 40 who runs and would like running to feel better than it currently does.

Here's what actually changes when someone starts.

The first thing is that every run has a purpose. Most of us head out and pick a pace based on some mixture of how we feel, how guilty we are about last week, and what the watch says. When each run has a job, the whole week starts working together instead of all the runs cancelling each other out.

The second is that the niggles stop piling up. Most running injuries in women over 40 aren't bad luck and they're not because you're getting old, they come from load going up faster than the body can absorb it, particularly when sleep and hormones are already adding their own stress. That's a planning problem. Planning is precisely what a coach is for.

The third is the one people don't expect, and it's honestly the one that matters most. Training that bends around real life. Slept four hours? Symptoms flaring? Week from hell at work? We move things. A plan can't do that. A person can, and that flexibility is the difference between a training block you finish and one you abandon in week five.

The obvious question is why not just download a free plan. It's a fair question and I'll answer it honestly. A free plan doesn't know you're 47. It doesn't know about your left Achilles, your sleep, your history, or the fortnight where your mother was ill. It can't look at your last three weeks and tell you the right thing to do on a Tuesday night. Everything useful about coaching lives in exactly those gaps.

And because it's all online, it genuinely doesn't matter where you are. I coach runners anywhere in the UK. You run your own routes in your own town, I build the plan around your week, and we speak every week.

Online personal running plan with a weekly catch-up is £70 for four weeks. Add two online strength and conditioning sessions a week and it's £95.

Autumn race season is in full swing, and spring training starts sooner than most people think. If you'd like to talk it through with no pressure at all, book a free discovery chat here: calendly.com/emmarealpt/discovery-chat

And if you're local rather than online, tell me, and I'll point you at the in person options instead.

23/09/2026

Race in a few weeks? Runners over 40, don’t waste the taper.

(My videos can only get better right, you gotta start somewhere, and the more I do the better I will get…..being a beginner at something sucks but I never give up!)

23/09/2026

I want to talk about something that comes up in nearly every first session, and it almost always starts the same way: "I know this is going to sound mad, but..."

And then it's some version of the same list. Hands that are stiff and sore first thing. A shoulder that's got inexplicably tight and won't loosen off. Hips that ache getting out of the car. Feet that hurt for the first few steps out of bed in the morning and are fine by the time you're downstairs.

They say it apologetically, as though it's a bit pathetic to mention. And they've nearly always decided privately that it means they're getting old and falling apart.

Here's the thing nobody ever explains to us.

Oestrogen isn't just about periods and hot flushes. It's involved in every bit of connective tissue in the body, tendons, ligaments, the surfaces of our joints, the tissue under our feet. When it falls and, just as importantly, when it swings up and down unpredictably the way it does through perimenopause, that tissue gets stiffer, less elastic and more prone to inflammation.

Which means the aches arriving in your 40s are very often hormonal rather than mechanical. Not damage. Not decline. Not something you've done to yourself. And because it's a whole body change, they tend to turn up in a cluster, which is exactly why it feels like everything is going wrong at once and you must be falling apart.

Now the part that catches people out.

The instinct is to rest. Do less. Wait for it to settle down. Every sensible bone in your body says protect it.

But stiff, under used connective tissue almost always gets worse with rest, not better. Tendons in particular are built to be loaded, that's how they stay strong and elastic. Take the load away and they quietly get weaker, and then the next ordinary thing you ask of them hurts more.

What they want is sensible, gradual load. Moving the joint through its range. Building the muscle around it. Adding a bit more over weeks, not days. Not grimly pushing through pain, but not stopping either. That middle path is the whole game, and it's genuinely hard to judge on your own, which is one of the more useful things a coach does.

It's a big part of why I train people in my own private gym. I can adjust a session to the body that walked in this morning, the shoulder that's flared up, the hip that's grumbling, without anybody queuing behind us or watching.

So, honestly: which one is it for you? Hands, shoulder, hips or feet? I'd genuinely like to know how many of us are quietly dealing with the same thing.

EJT Coaching

10/10/2026

07/10/2026

05/10/2026

04/10/2026

02/10/2026

30/09/2026

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