VICTORIA, BC
Strength coaching for Victoria adults over 50
Victoria is home for me, and it is the city I know best. Live coaching over video, in the room where you actually use your strength.
What sets Katie apart
The same hour, with me, wherever in the world you happen to be sitting.
- Private one-to-one coaching — never a group, never a video you follow along to
- Two live sessions a week, at times chosen around your week rather than a class timetable
- A plan built for your body, your history and what you actually want to be able to do
- Strength, mobility, balance, Pilates, yoga and restorative movement, in whatever mix the week calls for
- Nutrition and wellness guidance woven through the coaching, included rather than added on
- Someone who notices when something changes, and adjusts before it becomes a problem
Victoria hands you a walking habit, then calls it fitness
Between Dallas Road, Beacon Hill Park and the causeway, this is a city that gives you a walking habit whether you asked for one or not. Most of the people over 50 I speak with here already have one. Some of them walk further in a week than I do.
Then a grandchild wants picking up, or a suitcase has to go up a flight of stairs, or a raised bed needs turning over in April, and it turns out the walking never covered that part. That is not a failure of effort. Walking is good for you and I would never talk anyone out of it. It just stops asking anything new of your muscles after the first few weeks, and muscle only changes when something asks.
The staircase in your own house is the honest test
The streets off Cook Street Village, up through Fairfield and into Rockland, are full of character houses. Character houses have narrow stairs with a turn partway up and a rail down one side only. Coming down those with a laundry basket is a balance task. Going up them twice in five minutes is a strength task. Nobody was thinking about either in 1912.
So I ask people how they take their own stairs these days. Some tell me they have started using the rail when they never used to. That is worth noticing, without any alarm attached to it. A stair is a single-leg squat you perform forty times a day and never warm up for. If it has begun to feel like something you brace for, the leg is asking to be stronger, and legs stay remarkably willing about that.
What the first week of November does around here
Our winter is not harsh. It is grey and wet and it goes on, and I have watched the same sequence for years. The seafront walk gets shorter. Then it gets skipped on the sideways-rain days. By late January it has quietly become a thing you used to do, and come March you are rebuilding it from nothing with four months of nothing in the legs.
An hour of training indoors is completely indifferent to the sky. That is the least romantic argument I have for coaching people at home, and probably the most useful one.
A session, from a front room in James Bay
We train live over video, twice a week. You in your own space, me on the other end of the call, watching each rep and talking while you move. It is not a video you follow along to. It is not a plan that lands in your inbox on Monday.
You need floor space about the size of a bath towel and somewhere to prop a screen. Early on we use your own body weight, a solid chair and a wall. Bands arrive later. A dumbbell or two after that, once I have seen you lift and know what weight to ask for.
Why the drive was never really the barrier here
Victoria has good trainers in it, so I will not pretend online is your only sensible option. What I have found is that distance is rarely the thing standing between someone over 50 and a gym. It is the parking. It is changing in a room full of people half your age. It is sixty minutes of faff wrapped around forty minutes of actual work.
Take all of that away and what is left is the hour that mattered. You also get strong in the room where you use your strength, on your own floor, at your own chair height, next to your own stairs. Nothing has to transfer across from a gym, because it never left.
What we would actually work on
That depends on you and we would sort it out properly on a call. In this city it usually turns out to be some version of the same list. Legs that handle stairs and hills without negotiation. A hip and an ankle that cope with the camber of a hundred-year-old sidewalk. Shoulders that put a bag in an overhead bin. Balance you trust on a wet path in the dark.
Sometimes it is smaller and much more specific than that. Getting up off the floor after an hour with a grandchild. Carrying groceries up from the street without setting them down halfway. Walking up the Gonzales hill without your heart rate having opinions about it.
You do not need to be fit before you begin
That is genuinely the whole reason to have a coach rather than a programme. If you knew exactly what to do and were doing it consistently, you would not be reading this page.
Fifteen minutes on a call, then a first session so you can find out what being coached by me is actually like. If it is not a fit, that is a useful answer too, and it costs you nothing to get it.
Work with me
How to start working together
Four simple steps. We start with a conversation, you experience what one-to-one coaching is like, and then we build your personalized plan.
A complimentary discovery call
We talk about your goals, your current situation and what you're looking for.
There's no pressure to commit.
Your first session is free
If we're a good fit, we'll train together so you can experience what personalized online personal training is actually like.
Receive Your Personalized Plan
Your workouts, nutrition guidance and goals are personalized to your body and your life.
Begin Training
We’ll train together, build your strength and fitness, and adjust your program as your body gets stronger and your goals evolve.
You’ll have a plan, a coach and the accountability to keep moving forward.
Start where you are. We build from there.
- We talk for fifteen minutes.
- We train together once, free.
- We build a plan that fits your week.
- We keep adjusting it for as long as it is working.
Book a discovery call and we will find out whether this is a fit.
Training in Victoria — questions
Do I have to go anywhere for this?
No. Everything happens over a video call, from wherever you are.
There is no studio to drive to, no room I ask you to come into, and I do not travel to houses. You prop up a laptop or a tablet in your own front room, click a link, and we train. That is as complicated as the logistics get, and it is the same whether you are on the next street in Fairfield or an hour up the highway.
I already walk every day. Why would I need training as well?
Because walking and strength are two different things, and this city is unusually good at making you think they are one.
A daily loop along the water keeps your heart happy and your head clear, and I would never suggest dropping it. What it does not do is give a muscle a reason to grow, because after a few weeks it simply is not hard any more. Strength work is the part that carries suitcases, gets you up off the floor and holds you steady when a wet path moves under your foot.
My house has steep stairs and not much floor space. Is that a problem?
The stairs are an asset, honestly. The floor space matters less than people expect.
I need enough clear room for you to lie down and stretch your arms out sideways, which usually means shifting a coffee table for an hour. Old Victoria houses tend to be short on open floor and long on staircases, and a staircase is a genuinely useful piece of training equipment once you know what to do with it.
I am dealing with a knee thing at the moment. Should I wait?
Usually not, but let us talk about it on the call first.
If you are working with your doctor or your physiotherapist, I train around what they have told you and alongside them rather than second-guessing it. I am not the person managing the knee. I am the person making sure the rest of you keeps getting stronger while it settles, which is often what stops the same thing coming back.
Training from Victoria, wherever you are in it
Tell me what you would like to be able to do, and we will find out on a call whether I am the right person to help you get there.
Fifteen minutes, no cost and no pressure. If it sounds like a fit, your first session is free too — so you find out what the coaching is actually like before you commit to anything.