About Me — Chris Davidson. Irishman. Husband. Dad-of-3. Trainer…
By: Chris Davidson
Tags: Self Improvement, Coaching, About Me, Training, Fitness

Irishman. Husband. Dad-of-3. Trainer. Coach and …. Author?

I hate tooting my own horn or talking about myself much. I could listen to my wife, kids and coaching clients talk all day, but ask me to talk about me for longer than a minute and I’ll struggle.

So bear with me here on this attempt to write About Me, I’m shooting for a 3-minute Read, which for me is like my very own Gettysburg Address.

A sprint through my first 35 years

Ireland, school, into fitness/nutrition but studied ‘sensible’ business & languages, meet Canadian girl, marry her, move to London, corporate career, yuck-stop-retrain in Fitness, back to Ireland, 3 kids, start training people, open own gym.

My Coaching Career

It’s been an odd route really to where I am now. It took me until my 30s to realise what I wanted to do. I had a general feeling I wanted to help ‘normal’ busy people to look after their health and fitness better. From that point I just made things up as I went along:

Got a basic personal training qualification, figuring I’d learn more through doing;

Started advertising to train people in their homes/parks;

Offered to coach ex-clients online to keep them on track;

Realised I could earn more by having my own facility despite the increased overheads, so umm… did that despite not knowing how;

Decided I knew enough, and had helped enough people by now, to actually write about my approach in a book;

Started writing on Medium!

My Writing ‘Career’

I am struggling to call it a proper career just yet as I haven’t earned much money, and as with my training/coaching business, I am making it all up as I go along.

I am treating it as part of my job now, so maybe I should lose the inverted commas around ‘career’…

I didn’t start out wanting to write on Medium. I was already using Medium as a way of reading great, informative articles having become bored and disenfranchised by online news sites with their political slants and clickbaity headlines.

Then I offered to write about my experiences in sleep hacking for the Better Humans publication here on Medium, for which I was paid actual money.

This article has to date had 68k reads, and has led to me receiving free sleep products from random companies, and some freelance writing work.

The smart thing to do would have been to start churning out more articles for Medium, as it was clearly worth doing. But sometimes I’m not that smart…

Instead I didn’t write on Medium for a couple of years, as I got distracted by life and work, seeing writing as a If-I-Have-Time-And-Inspiration thing.

During my 2-year Medium hiatus I did write my ebook about Doable Wellness, which I’m very proud of and sell a few copies of each month mostly via social media traffic.

The Future

The recent lockdowns gave me a chance to re-calibrate what I want to do going forward.

I am 44 and as much as I love training clients day-in day-out, I don’t want to still be getting up at 5.30am in my 50s! I no longer feel challenged with 1-on-1 in-person training.

After over 10 years you have kind of seen and done everything there is to see and do in the world of personal training. My brain needs shaken up a bit with new challenges.

I see writing and reaching people online as the next logical step, and the more I write, the more things flow and the better (I think!) I get at this thing!

I am trying not to get too distracted by stats etc on Medium just yet. I’m very much still finding my voice, and I believe my ‘doable wellness’ message is an important one to share, i.e. most of us try and fail to get in shape and healthier because the changes/habits we aim for aren’t doable longer term as life gets in the way.

I love trying to boil health, fitness and wellbeing down to their most simple, realistic steps that will pay off in the long term for us tired, busy people!

At the same time I’m trying to put in place new habits of my own around writing and reading which are doable for me too.

Can I stop talking yet? :-)