Hey I’m James and welcome to StrongerFitterYou!
Since 2005 I’ve been practising my greatest passion parkour (aka freerunning) and have been lucky enough to even coach and perform for one of the biggest Parkour coaching and commercial organisations in the world. I love it so much that while I was studying at university I changed my degree from Computer Science to Sport Science, something I had no prior knowledge of, to learn as much as I could about the human body and exercise physiology to help myself and others with their own training be it for parkour or any other discipline!
My Story
Along my journey I’ve had rough patches here and there and have accrued many injuries from my vast training background (Weight Lifting, Gymnastics, Brazilian jiu jitsu, Muay Thai, Athletics) but have always managed to do some kind of training and spring back to action. That was until I suffered my greatest injury to date…two severe spinal disc herniations in my lower back.
After herniating two discs in my lower back I was unable to do what I loved most and was truly frustrated. Initially I couldn’t even get out of bed for two weeks due to the excruciating pain shooting down my back to my feet and not being able to walk.
Not only that but a medical professional even told me I would never be able to do parkour EVER again let alone any kind of physical exercise.
After hearing that devastating news I sunk into depression not knowing how I was going to live my life not being able to do what I love. After a few weeks I made the concious decision….I wasn’t going to listen to anyone other than myself and do whatever it took to get myself back to training again. 9 months later I was back to doing basic movements and could start on my path again to practising something I knew I couldn’t live without. Cut to now I am weightlifting again and even performing parkour professionally once more (check out a trailer for the latest parkour project I’ve worked on).
So why this blog?
After that life changing experience I was compelled to share what I had learned in anyway possibly could. What I soon realised was that a lot of what I was told by some of the medical professionals I saw was often inaccurate, incomplete and only one method of approaching my injury. Not only that but the treatments I received from some barely helped while treatments from others created milestones in terms of my road to recovery.
Without doing the tonnes and tonnes of research and experimentation (believe me I had a lot of time on my hands not being able to train day in and day out) it would’ve taken me much longer to recover and I may have even gone down the surgery route which is always a last chance saloon and can come with a great amount of complications.
So I wrote up articles and created YouTube videos in an effort to help educate those who are in a similar position that I previously was. My articles and videos have been viewed over 25,000 times so far and I constantly get people thanking me for sharing what I learned and how it has helped them greatly in their efforts to recover also.
After that series was completed I realised that from my years and years of coaching, training, personal experiences and research I have a wealth of knowledge I could share to help people again.
Thats my ultimate goal and motivation with this site:
To help people become injury free, feel great and become as physically capable as possible!
So hopefully I can help you in some way. So in the mean time why not check out some of the most popular posts on here or even subscribe to the newsletter where I share insider content that I typically only share with my closest friends and clients.
Train smart,
James
