Its been a little while since I updated our team news here at Ultimate Performance.  The ongoing, and loooong overdue new website development has meant that I have stalled with adding details of the expanding UP London personal training team.  So in anticipation that the new site will be up and running in a matter of weeks (at the most I hope!), I thought it would be useful to detail some of the changes that have occurred at UP over the last three months.

New Horizons

We have long been searching for premises in west or central London in order to expand the business away from our main City of London personal training gym.  Despite putting in offers on a couple of locations at the start of this year that search still continues apace.  It’s actually been a heck of a challenge as the property market on that side of London just doesn’t seem to support spaces that would be suitable for a 4,000 – 6,000 square foot gym.  Rest assured that every hurdle is seen as being part of the inevitably difficult route towards success and that our efforts are redoubled as given our positioning as the preeminent, in fact possibly the only, legitimate, results driven personal training business in London it just seems plain daft not to have another London location.

We were at one stage using a small gym in a private members club in the Covent Garden area, INC Space, but as nice, clean and avant garde as the decor and staff were it just wasn’t appropriate for our business model.  We require serious facilities in order to achieve serious results and a small fitness spa environment was never going to be suitable for us.  So for any of you who were looking for us in that part of London I’m afraid we no longer have a presence there at the time of writing.

New Personal Trainers

It’s been a busy few months with new personal trainers making great marks from within UP. All will have full details added to the main UP site once we are finally live with the new version  We welcome:

Eddie Baruta

Eddie has been with us several months already and has already made a fantastic impression upon clients and colleagues alike.  Very much the modern, career personal trainer I first met Eddie at a Continuing Education seminar on BioSignature Modulation in Dublin and was immediately impressed with the seriousness with which he approaches all aspects of personal training.  In keeping with my insistence that those personal trainers who make it at UP must ‘live the life’, Eddie is a walking, talking advert for being in top shape and practicing what he preaches!

Dave Lewis

Dave is our newest, and youngest, recruit. Only in his early twenties, the norm for personal trainers but a rarity within UP, what Dave lacks in hours of experience (although I should add that he has travelled the world to study from Charles Poliquin and is a level 2 BioSignature practitioner as well as a level 2 PICP coach) he more than makes up in passion and commitment. He has already given everyone a kick up the backside with his very strong work ethic and hunger to improve both himself and get the best results with his personal training clients.  The one thing that all our personal trainers compete on is who can get the best fat loss transformation at the the end of the year, and I can see that Dave is trying to keep his eye on the big prize already!
Kostas Stavrev

Although Kostas has been working with us for a little while I have kept his profile quieter due to his ongoing involvement with working on the fitness and conditioning teams at Premiership football clubs West Ham United and Tottenham Hotspur. Hopefully we can continue to get a bit more access to Kostas’s time as the man is a font of knowledge following a lifetime’s involvement in all things to do with fitness.  I’ve personally known him for over fifteen years and if you ever want a good honest workout, with the potential for an absolute tonne of variety then he is your man.  A nice blend of a dry sense of humour and that Eastern European hardness means all his clients are guaranteed extremely challenging workouts.

James Langley

James has actually been working at UP since we opened the personal training gym in May 2009, but it is only this year that he made the switch from freelance trainer to working as part of the UP team.  He has come on leaps and bounds in the last twelve months and should take great credit for his professionalism and desire to keep learning and pushing himself forward.  He is working hard to get his pure resistance training education up to the highest level to complement his increasing understanding of BioSignature Modulation and it’s impact upon fat loss, and his all round training skills have made him a burgeoning fat loss star.  James’s other string to his bow is his boxing / kickboxing abilities, honed in Thailand where he has taken himself on specific courses, and his individual and two-on-one boxing conditioning classes are proving very popular as an extra way to shed body fat.  I’ll be posting up some video of this very soon as James has managed to make something that is very hard work look like great and accessible fun.  Not so much fun that I fancy trying it myself, but my inability with boxing gloves is another story…

James Langley in an Aha moment...

Bruce Butler

Bruce is an extremely accomplished therapist who, whilst not being formally part of the UP team, is permanently based at our City of London gym and treats a number of our staff and clients alongside ART practitioner Heather Pearson.  Bruce has a whole world experience and what really sets him apart is the fact that he seems to have a limitless supply of tools in his treatment box and can draw upon everything from Active Release Techniques to more traditional rehabilitation and myofascial work.

Grace Chan

Grace is our newest recruit to the UP family, and whilst not actually being a personal trainer that makes her no less important to what we do.  In fact, working alongside Gym Director Ridhi Sharma in ensuring that the gym runs smoothly you could well say that she is part of the single most important aspect of the business!  Grace started out with us just a month ago on work experience after graduating with a degree in Sports Therapy, and has impressed us so much with her intelligence, thoroughness and self starting attitude that I had no choice but to hire her on a permanent basis.

I should also note that it is not all about growth at UP as we need to constantly prune our way to excellence, and we have recently said goodbye to personal trainer Tony Bayliss. Although he left under something of a cloud that we are still trying to sort out the financial repercussions of, myself and his former colleagues wish him well.  Despite having worked with top Hollywood actor Benicio del Toro, Tony Bayliss is very much an old school fitness trainer  (unfortunately scorning any encouragement to pursue ongoing education) rather than a modern personal trainer in the UP fashion, so it was always difficult to keep him busy as most of our clients are interested in scientifically sound body composition advice rather than being barked at when running up and down our sprint track and dropping to give five press ups. Justin Maguire needs to take a lot of credit for taking up a lot of his own time in trying to assist Tony Bayliss with some semblance of structured weight training programmes, and I’d also like to praise our own Glenn Parker who tried to help a former Armed Services colleague by asking me to give a struggling guy a break.  You can’t win them all Glenn!