Why I Built FORMA

In professional sport, you don't guess.

An academy player who tweaks a hamstring doesn't return when he feels ready. He returns when his numbers say so: force production tested against his own pre-injury baseline, side-to-side symmetry within a defined threshold, sprint and change-of-direction data compared to where he was before. Somebody wrote those numbers down months earlier, specifically so they'd exist when they were needed.

A player coming back from an ACL reconstruction has it mapped out more precisely still. Strength symmetry, hop test batteries, movement quality under fatigue, psychological readiness. Six criteria, measured, and the player doesn't train unrestricted until all six are met. There's good evidence behind that approach (athletes returning without meeting the full criteria show substantially higher re-rupture rates), and nobody in that environment treats the testing as optional. It's just how return to play works.

Then I went to work in NHS cardiac rehabilitation, and found exactly the same thing at the other end of the spectrum.

People arriving after a heart attack, after bypass surgery, after a stent. Every one with a measured exercise capacity, a prescribed intensity range, a monitored response. Before a session you know their numbers. During it you know what's happening. Afterwards it's recorded, and next week you compare.

Different population, opposite ends of the fitness range, same method. Measure, prescribe within what the measurement supports, re-measure, adjust. Nobody in either setting treats that as sophisticated. It's simply what you do when being wrong carries a cost.

Then I moved into private coaching, and almost all of it stopped.

Better facilities than the NHS could dream of. Equipment a Championship academy would be happy with. Clients who were fitter, more motivated, better resourced, and paying substantial sums for an hour of my time.

And the measurement, the thing that had structured every decision I'd made for years in two very different environments, largely disappeared.

The inversion

Line the three up.

A 19-year-old on an academy contract: tested comprehensively, several times a season, with a baseline on file before anything goes wrong.

A 68-year-old six weeks after a stent, treated free at the point of use: capacity measured, intensity prescribed from it, response monitored every session.

A 42-year-old lawyer paying £100 an hour to train twice a week, who's had the same back problem for four years: no baseline, no symmetry data, no idea what he can currently produce. His intervention is built from observation and conversation.

The people with the fewest resources got the most rigorous assessment. The people with the most got almost none.

That still seems backwards to me. And once you've seen it, you can't stop seeing what it costs.

This isn't about trainers being bad

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this story is that personal training is poor and I'm the exception. That version is self-serving and it isn't true.

I've trained in big gyms. I teach on a personal training qualification. Some of the best coaches I know work in exactly the settings this story is set in, and they get excellent results through experience, attention and judgement.

The issue is structural, not individual.

The hour is the product. Clients pay for sessions, so time spent testing is time not spent training, and it feels, to both parties, like time taken rather than time invested.

The equipment isn't there. Dynamometers, velocity measurement, standardised protocols. These aren't in a commercial gym because the business model never required them.

It isn't in the qualification. You can complete a PT certification without ever being taught to interpret a limb symmetry index or build a force-velocity profile. Not through negligence, but because that content sits in sport science and clinical pathways rather than in fitness qualifications.

So a trainer who wanted to work the way I'd worked in cardiac rehab would need equipment their gym doesn't own, knowledge their qualification didn't cover, and session time their client is reluctant to spend on anything that isn't training.

That's not a people problem. It's a model problem. And no individual working inside the model can solve it.

Where the gap actually sits

The other half of this became clear from the people arriving after treatment.

Someone finishes with a physiotherapist. The pain is resolved, they're discharged, they're told to build back gradually. Then they come to a trainer and the first question is: what can they actually do?

Nobody knows. The physio's remit ended at discharge. That's what discharge means, and resolving the episode is the job. The trainer has no measurement to work from. The client has a feeling, which is not information.

So the first weeks are cautious guesswork, and either they do far less than they're capable of for months, or they find the ceiling the hard way.

That space (treatment finished, performance not yet resumed, nobody measuring) is where the recurrence lives. And it's nobody's fault in particular, which is exactly why it persists.

What I built

FORMA is an attempt to put the cardiac rehab method into the space where people are healthy.

Five tests, before anything else. Movement quality, strength and symmetry, recovery capacity, force-velocity profile, reactive strength. A written report. Then training built from what the tests found. Then the same tests again at eight and sixteen weeks.

Assess. Train. Retest.

Two decisions in that structure are deliberate and worth explaining.

The assessment is a product, not an upsell. You can book it and never see me again. It's £400, you get the full report and a debrief, and there's no obligation beyond that. If the assessment only existed to sell coaching, I'd be incentivised to make the findings point at coaching, and you'd be right to discount everything in the report.

The retest is included, not optional. A single assessment is a snapshot. The useful question isn't what are my numbers, it's did the last eight weeks change anything, and you can only answer that with a second measurement under identical conditions. Without the retest the first set of numbers is interesting and not much else.

What I'm careful about

I don't diagnose and I don't treat. If something hurts, that's a physiotherapist or your GP, and they come first. I'll say so and refer you.

The tests don't predict injury. No measure in this battery, alone or combined, has shown adequate sensitivity for that in this population, and I'd rather state it plainly than let a number imply something it can't support.

I don't clear anyone to return to sport. That decision belongs to the treating clinician. I supply data into it.

Being specific about what this isn't is the only way I can be confident about what it is.

Where it is now

FORMA runs in Fleet Street. I'm an exercise physiologist with an MSc in Clinical Exercise Science, a BSc in Sport and Exercise Science, around ten years of coaching, and prior NHS experience in cardiac rehabilitation.

The method isn't novel. Measure, prescribe from the measurement, re-measure. It's how clinical exercise physiology has always worked.

It just hasn't been available to people who aren't ill.