I used to think strength training was bonkers.
Not the casual "oh, that's not for me" dismissal that most of us give to activities we can't be bothered with. Proper bonkers. I'd watch Sohail—a friend who'd become completely fixated with powerlifting—and think he'd lost his mind. All that grunting, all that focus on shifting increasingly heavy lumps of metal around. What was the point?
The irony, of course, is that I was exactly the sort of person who needed it most.
I'd always defined myself as fit, not strong. Triathlons, tennis, running—I could go for hours. Following on from basketball, kayaking, skiing and sailing from my youth, I had decent cardiovascular fitness and wasn't embarrassed about my athletic ability. But ask me to lift something heavy? Disaster. I was that person who'd put their back out moving house, or tweak something in the garden, then spend weeks wondering why I was so useless at basic human tasks like picking things up.
At 50-plus, I was fit but fundamentally weak. And like most people in that position, I'd convinced myself it didn't matter.
Looking back, I can see exactly why I avoided the weights section of the gym like it was reserved for a different species of human. I'd built up a collection of assumptions that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time:
Strength training was for specialists. Bodybuilders, powerlifters, people who wanted to look like they belonged in a fitness magazine. I was a sailing and running person—what did I need with barbells?
I was already fit, so I was fine. I could run 5Ks, cycle for hours, race dinghies without feeling completely knackered. Surely that was enough?
Starting after 50 was pointless. Everyone knows you lose muscle mass as you age. Why fight biology?
You had to lift "super heavy" to get any benefit. The whole gym culture seemed to revolve around how much weight you could shift. I wasn't interested in competing with 25-year-olds about who could deadlift a small car.
All of these seemed perfectly sensible. All of them were completely wrong.
The catalyst was preparing for the 2022 Aero 7 World Championships in Cascade Locks, Oregon. I'd returned to sailing as my children went off to university—I'd given it up just after they were born, and suddenly found myself with time to get back on the water again. After years away from competitive sailing, I wanted to give myself the best possible shot at performing well on the world stage. That meant looking seriously at every aspect of preparation—including the bits I'd been ignoring.
Watching Sohail's journey had planted a seed, even if I'd been too stubborn to admit it. His initial powerlifting obsession had evolved into something broader—a genuine understanding of how strength underpins everything else. The health benefits, the injury prevention, the performance gains across completely different sports.
So in November 2021, somewhat reluctantly, I started strength training.
The gait analysis was another revelation entirely. My running form was actually quite good—until I got tired, which was almost immediately. Under load, everything fell apart. The problem wasn't technique; it was that I simply wasn't strong enough to maintain good form when it mattered. All those years of thinking I was fit, and I'd been fundamentally limited by basic strength deficits.
Four years on, I've never lifted "super heavy." I'm not setting powerlifting records or looking like I belong on the cover of Men's Health. But the results have been transformational in ways I never expected.
The numbers tell part of the story: I'm 8 kilos lighter overall but 4 kilos heavier in muscle mass—which means I've lost 12 kilos of fat while getting genuinely stronger. My 5K time, which had been stuck at 23 minutes for the best part of 15 years, is now down to 22:30. At this summer's Aero 7 World Championships in Quiberon, France, I finished in the top 20—something I'd have thought was well beyond my reach.
But the real transformation is more fundamental. Those niggling injuries from basic lifting tasks? Gone. The sense of being fundamentally weak despite being cardiovascularly fit? Completely changed. My entire approach to training has shifted: two strength sessions a week alongside two intervals and two zone-2 workouts, split between cycling, running, and sailing.
The strength work is sailing-specific—lots of front chain and pulling exercises for the hiking and mainsheet work, plus plenty of isometrics to build the kind of endurance you need for long races. But it's the general strength foundation that's made the real difference.
I'm obviously not heading to the Olympics anytime soon. My race strategy is still largely "try not to be last," and I'm usually successful by smaller margins than I'd like to admit. But that's rather the point.
You don't need to be elite to benefit from strength training. You don't need to be young, or naturally gifted, or particularly ambitious about lifting heavy things. You just need to be honest about the fact that being fit and being strong are different things—and that most of us who pride ourselves on the first are surprisingly lacking in the second.
The later-life benefits everyone's talking about now—the bone density, the metabolic health, the injury prevention—are real and significant. But for me, the revelation was simpler: strength training doesn't replace the sports and activities you love. It makes you better at them.
I'm involved with Brawn professionally now as chair, working alongside people like Sohail and Paul Richardson who have deep roots in the strength training community. But my conversion happened years before that professional involvement—it happened when I stopped making excuses and started lifting things.
The beauty of strength training is that it meets you where you are. You don't need to transform yourself into someone else. You don't need to abandon the activities you love or completely restructure your life. You just need to add two sessions a week of getting systematically stronger.
If a stubborn, set-in-his-ways sailor who thought the whole thing was bonkers can figure it out at 50-plus, so can you.
The only question is: what are you waiting for?
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This is the first in a series of personal stories from the Brawn team about strength training journeys. If you'd like to share your own story, or learn more about how strength training could transform your athletic performance, get in touch.