What Decades of Training Leave Behind
Last week, I stepped on a set of body composition scales.
What it revealed wasn’t a number I could train toward, but the quiet accumulation of choices made over a lifetime.
I started training at fourteen. Not in a gym, but on a mat. Judo first, then karate. I was fortunate to learn under teachers who valued balance over force, including Tatsuo Suzuki, who introduced Wado-ryu karate to the UK. From the outset, the lesson was simple: control mattered more than power, and technique mattered more than effort.
Those ideas stayed with me — even when I temporarily ignored them.
In my twenties and early thirties, I followed a familiar path. I went to the gym. I lifted heavy. I tried to get bigger. It worked — visually. But one day, standing in front of a mirror, I noticed something I couldn’t ignore: imbalance. My upper body was progressing faster than my lower body. Strength, yes — but not symmetry.
I stopped.
Not because I was injured, but because the pursuit had become empty.
Later, I took up boxing. Late — never to compete. I wanted to understand what it actually felt like to go toe-to-toe, not in theory but in practice. In my first sparring session, I was paired with someone far more experienced.
I left with a broken nose.
I stayed.
I went on to qualify as an assistant boxing coach, not to fight, but to understand the science of boxing — a chess match that goes far beyond punching and being punched.
By then, I had already been teaching movement for years. I taught my first fitness class at twenty-two. That path eventually led me into yoga, where I am now an accredited senior teacher. Over time, I developed my own certified training programmes — not to chase performance, but to offer an alternative philosophy.
Alongside all of this, I rode motorcycles. I began at sixteen and travelled extensively across Europe. I also had accidents — several. One was severe enough to require hip resurfacing surgery. The driver responsible was later prosecuted for reckless driving.
When I arrived at court, I was sent to the witness room. The people there were waiting to give evidence in my case. When I thanked them for turning up, every one of them thought I had died.
That was the severity of the accident.
I didn’t.
But it clarified something about fragility — and how narrow the margin becomes when the body can no longer absorb error.
When I stepped on the scales last week, the results were clear: low visceral fat, high lean mass, near-identical distribution across left and right, upper and lower.
What struck me wasn’t how lean the numbers were.
It was what I couldn’t find.
Most bodies shaped by injury or poor training methodology carry their history in asymmetry. This scan showed something rarer: symmetry. Not engineered. Not chased. Preserved.
The figures themselves are worth seeing — not because they reflect decades of training, but because they would be considered strong, balanced markers at any stage of adult life. Nothing extreme. Nothing optimised. Just a body that continued to respond, adapting well beyond midlife rather than accepting decline as inevitable.
I’ve trained for over fifty years. I’ve been injured. I’ve had several surgeries. I live with pain.
I also live independently and move freely.
They coexist.
I’ve always thought of training like a bank account. Some sessions are deposits. Others are withdrawals. Recklessness drains it faster than inactivity ever will.
I was the mind-and-body coach to British boxer Darren Barker. By the time we worked together, much of his career had already been shaped by injury. Talent was never the issue.
Continuity was.
When he changed how he trained, some boxing pundits laughed.
No running.
No sit-ups.
No weightlifting.
A journalist once remarked, “It’s hardly Rocky Balboa.”
The result was a world title.
For a long time, this way of thinking sat in an unnamed space — too measured for performance culture, too physical for wellness trends. Particularly in midlife, where the language offered is either decline or denial.
Eventually, it needed a name.
That language became Meta-Age.
Not as a programme or a promise, but as a way of describing a third path: ageing with agency rather than fear, staying capable rather than chasing youth, protecting physiology rather than pursuing fitness for its own sake.
Over time, water became my reference point.
It is my training medium.
My training partner.
My opponent.
Water resists without damage. It adapts without ego. It never demands more than the system can return.
Today, I train with a knee that is clinically bone-on-bone — a condition where imbalance is usually inevitable. Yet it has not been allowed to distort the whole.
Fitness is temporary.
Physiology is not.
Fitness shows what you can do today. Physiology determines what you can still do years from now. The most impressive body isn’t the one that peaks.
It’s the one that quietly refuses to fall apart.
The body never forgets how it was trained — only whether it was respected.
