Balance
From growing up as the chubby kid in school, to a Bachelor of Exercise Science, to training with an osteo weekly, to studying neuroscience, My Journey has shaped who I am and how I coach.
I grew up on Tamborine Mountain in Queensland, riding my bike to school and spending afternoons on BMX. I was active, but I was also the chubby kid, which taught me early how people treat you based on your looks.
By 17 I was riding semi-professionally and getting paid to travel around Australia. The crew around me was very into sport and discipline, and around that time I also got pulled into church and youth group. That period gave me structure, but it also sparked a deeper curiosity about who I am and what we are all doing here. That curiosity later led me to study neuroscience and the brain in depth.
I broke both knees, my elbow, my ankle, and fractured my skull in a bad crash. After that, I had to step back and work out what I actually wanted my long-term relationship with training to look like.
I went to university because I wanted to understand how training works, how it helps aging and strength, and how to build a lean body properly. That was the point where exercise stopped being just something I did and became something I wanted to understand.
After uni I moved to Melbourne, became a personal trainer, and eventually owned my own weight-training studio in Hampton for about 8 years. I lived above the studio, ran classes all day, and learned a lot from training, coaching, and the people I trained with.
I trained with an osteo once a week for 8 years after my knee injuries, and he taught me how to rehabilitate properly instead of just pushing through pain. He helped me see the body as one connected system, not a bunch of separate muscle bellies, and drilled into the role of the core, the glutes, and the centre of balance. He also helped me filter out a lot of the garbage online and combine exercise science with real training experience in a way that made the body make sense.
After working with clients for so long, I wanted to understand behaviour change more deeply and to see what neuroscience actually says about it. Studying the free energy principle gave me a stronger appreciation for how much our experiences and environments shape the way we think, act, and respond. It also reinforced something I see in coaching every day: people are far more likely to change when they have the right coach, the right community, and the right environment around them. To me, motivation is shaped far more by lived experience than by willpower alone.
After moving back to Queensland I built Balance, first as a tool for myself and then as something other people could use too. The core idea is simple: if the environment is set up right, people do not have to fight themselves all day. That is why I care so much about systems, consistency, and making the healthy choice easier to repeat.
I don't think change is about trying harder. I think it's about placing yourself in the right environment and surrounding yourself with the right people. That's the whole point of Balance, and it guides my coaching every day.
It is the same principle behind Balance, both in the app and in my coaching.