I was not a very good personal trainer.

Years ago I had a client I will call John, because that is what I called him when I first wrote this down and he is entitled to stay anonymous.

John was successful. Good career, two young kids, a wife who loved him, a life most people would take. The one thing he did not have was his health, and it ate at him, because he had had it once. Somewhere between the career and the family he had stopped being active, and one morning he looked in the mirror and did not recognise the man looking back.

So he hired me. He wanted to lose weight, put muscle back on, and get back to being the man he was in his twenties. He told me he was committed, that he was a man who got what he wanted when he set his mind to it, and that he needed someone to hold him accountable.

We trained three hours a week. Which meant there were 165 hours a week where I was not there, and that gap is the entire problem with personal training as a product.

For the first month John was excellent. He showed up, he worked, he was coachable. He drank water, cut the sugar, slept better. We retested and he had lost 25 pounds. He hit his goal.

Then he started missing sessions. Work. Family. Stuff. Which is to say, life. One week became two, three sessions a week became one every other week, and I could see the weight coming back on.

Eventually he came back and said what they always say. It's okay, Dai, I'm back, I'm ready to refocus and lose this weight again. He said it with his hand on the roll around his middle.

And I told him I would not train him any more. Not because he had failed. Because he had proved he could succeed and it had changed nothing. John knew what to do. By that point he knew how to do it better than most of my clients. What he would not do was work out why, and without that I was being paid to help him lose the same 25 pounds for the rest of his life.

I told him I would support him however he wanted. I would not take his money to run that loop again.

That was a bad business decision and the correct coaching decision, and I have made some version of it many times since.

John's goal was a number on a scale and a notch on a belt. Once he reached it there was nowhere to go, because the goal contained no version of his life in it.

Actuaries quantify lives. That is a real job and a useful one. I am in the other business, which is helping people qualify theirs. The question is not how many years you get. It is what is in them.

The two questions I have been asking men since about 2016 are these. How do you want to spend the last twenty years of your life? And how will your health affect that?

No one has ever answered either of those with a weight.

In 2016 I wrote that the fitness industry is broken, and I have not changed my mind.

On any given day the industry will tell you a fat-reduced diet makes you skinny, that abs come in three minutes a day, that anything less than an hour five days a week is pointless, and above all that a particular body shape will make you happy. Those four claims are wrong, and three of them are wrong in a way that makes people give up.

The structural problem is straightforward and nobody in the industry likes saying it out loud. It is a business, and its revenue depends on people needing it again next year.

I have been in this industry for close to thirty years and I am not comfortable with much of it. I am a father of two. What is happening to men's health in particular, and to the way men are sold solutions to it, worries me more the longer I do this.

So I stopped selling hours and started building the smallest thing that actually holds.

I coach men over 40, mostly dads, mostly people who are successful at everything except this.

The framework is thirty minutes a day, which is two percent of it. Fifteen minutes of movement, five of stillness, ten of reading something that makes you better. I started using that framing in February 2016 and it has not changed, because the size is what makes it work. It is small enough that a man cannot argue with it, and small enough to survive a week where everything goes wrong.

I wrote a book about it, The Whole Life Fitness Manifesto. I ran it as free 28-day cohorts for years. In 2019 I built a version specifically for dads over 40 and called it the #DadBodyProject, and went looking for four men to test it. That work turned into what I run today.

I also had to take my own advice, twice. Once as a morbidly obese fourteen-year-old, which is where all of this started. And again at 44, when I looked in a mirror while shaving and did not recognise the eyes looking back, which is roughly what John had described to me a decade earlier. There is no version of me that is above this. I have just been round the loop enough times to know where it turns.

Most men I meet have not decided that yet. That is the actual work, and it is the reason I am still doing this after thirty years.