Harry Phillips.
I came to coaching the long way round. A computer science degree, a career as a software engineer, and somewhere in the middle of it, a 4st transformation of my own that the Daily Telegraph eventually wrote a cover story about. The engineering side never left; it just changed what it was pointed at.
Since 2018 I've been coaching out of West 4 Gym in Chiswick. The clients I work with best are 40-plus, time-poor, and slightly burned by the experience of being sold a generic transformation package. They want a real coach. One human, every session, programming that respects what they did last week and what they're doing this weekend.
Building ProgramGrid was the obvious next step. I'd been writing programmes in one place, tracking client lifts in another, juggling diet macros in a third app, and none of it talked to each other. So I wrote the thing myself: training, diet and physio in one app. Every Chiswick PT client gets it free for the duration of their coaching, and the plans inside it remain theirs afterwards.
Coaching is what I do full-time now. If you want the long-form version of how I think about training, the Instagram below is the unfiltered feed.
- Coaching since
- 2018
- Primary studio
- West 4 Gym, Chiswick
- Background
- Computer Science · Software Engineering
- Specialisms
- Strength · Rehab · Body comp
- Software
- Creator of ProgramGrid
- Press
- The Daily Telegraph cover story · Sept 2024
17st 4lb to 13st. The long version.
I lost 4st 5lb the same way I'd want you to: slowly, sustainably, without giving up the things that make life worth living. The Telegraph ran the cover-story interview in September 2024. Three habits, no extreme protocols, and a programme I could keep doing.
I went from a software engineer with a bad back to competing on a mat.
For years I was the spec my older clients arrive with. Software engineer at a desk, eleven hours a day at a screen. The back went first. The posture followed. The weight piled on behind both. By the end of it I was 17st 4lb, the chair was reshaping me, and the obvious diet that goes with that life had me sleepy by 3 pm every day.
The fix wasn't a programme. It was a relationship with training. 4st came off across a year, the back settled inside the first six months, the posture rebuilt over the next twelve. Six years on the work is the part I look forward to. The competition mat is just where I get to test that the work was real.
Most of what you'll get from me as a coach comes from those years. The patience with people whose body has been quietly losing ground. The respect for joints that have been sat on too long. And the conviction that the fitness you fall in love with is the one that lasts.
The bigger surprise was the second one: I fell in love with teaching the same thing. Watching someone hit their first chin-up, watching a back that's been grumpy for a decade go quiet, watching a client realise they're stronger at 60 than at 40. That's the part I get up early for now.
Coaching the same fix, every week.
The thing I love now is the inverse of the problem I started with. I was the desk-job overweight guy. Now I'm the coach for the next ones. Watching the back go quiet, the lifts go up, the posture rebuild. Doing it for somebody else turned out to be the better job.
Book a free
consultation.
A free first session at the gym, or a phone call. We work out the plan together. If I'm not the right coach for you, I'll tell you so on the day.