I built my first home gym in 2009 in a cold student room in Portsmouth — a second-hand bench, a £40 barbell, and a set of plates the previous owner literally rolled across the carpet to me. The kit was bad. The progress was real. Strong Home Gym is the site I wish had existed back then.
In the decade between that first setup and starting this site, I qualified as a PE teacher and spent over ten years in front of secondary-school classes. The experience taught me two things that shape everything we publish: most fitness advice is more complicated than it needs to be, and the people who actually move the needle are the ones who simplify without dumbing down.
I write the bulk of the gear reviews and home-gym build guides on the site, with a focus on the budget tiers where most readers spend — under £3,000, where the differences between products genuinely matter and where lazy reviewing causes the most expensive mistakes. Every recommendation is tested in my own garage gym in Essex, or in Steve’s gym in Manchester, before it goes on the site.
Outside of writing, I play football, padel, and spend more weekends than I should on a paddle board. Off the gym floor my reading habit runs heavily into monetary history and finance — gold standards, central-bank balance sheets, sovereign-debt cycles — the same instinct for following the money that makes for a useful equipment review applies surprisingly well there. I run Strong Home Gym from a small home office with one rack, two kids, my wife Sarah, and a coffee machine that has paid for itself many times over.