A lot of the women who contact me open by apologising for their body.
They list what is wrong with it before they have said anything else. They say things like “I do not know if you can even work with someone like me,” and they say it in the tone of somebody who has already been told no somewhere.
I want to talk about that, because after thirteen years of this studio I have a fairly clear view of what actually makes a body difficult to train, and it is almost never the thing she is apologising for.
What has come through the door
Over thirteen years I have worked with women whose bodies came with real complications.
Neurological conditions. Joints that had already been operated on and rebuilt. Long-standing pain that six different professionals had looked at without resolving. Shoulders that had simply stopped doing part of their job. Backs that had been managed rather than fixed for decades.
None of that is unusual here. It is a fairly ordinary Tuesday.
What I will not do is list conditions and imply a result for each one, because that is not how any of this works and it would be a form of promising. What I can tell you is that “my body is complicated” has not been a reason to turn anybody away, and that the complicated ones are the part of this job I actually enjoy most.
What happens when I do not know
This is the part worth being straight about.
Sometimes something turns up that is outside what I do. Not often, but it happens, and the ones where it happens are usually the interesting ones.
When it does, I say so. Out loud, in the session, in plain words. I do not improvise, and I do not quietly work around the edges of it and hope.
Then I go and ask. I have a network of doctors, physiotherapists, chiropractors and osteopaths I lean on, here and overseas, built up over a long time. I would far rather send you to one of them and lose the session than guess at your expense.
Bring me the hard problem and I will find you an answer. Sometimes the answer is somebody else, and that is still the answer.
I also write participant reports as a personal trainer for allied health work. I am not a registered NDIS provider and I would never suggest otherwise.
The thing that actually makes a body hard to train
It is not complication. Complication is just information.
The bodies that are genuinely hard to work with are the ones nobody has looked at. Where there is no record of what was tried, no idea what set it off, and a program written from a template by somebody who never watched her move.
That is not a difficult body. That is a body with no information attached to it, and the fix for it is the same in every case, which is that somebody has to look first.
That is the whole reason the first session here is a screening and nothing else. Not a workout you have to get through. Half an hour to forty five minutes of me watching how your joints, your muscles and your tendons are actually working, before a single thing gets written down for you.
If you have been sent away before
Being told that something is as good as it is going to get is not the same as it being true.
Occasionally it is true. More often it means the person saying it had run out of ideas, which is a fact about them rather than a fact about you.
You do not have to be an easy case to belong here. Frankly, almost nobody who walks in is.
Fourteen days of training with Lachlan, at no cost to you.
All writing. Published 7 September 2026.