About me
Hi, I’m Dan, the founder of Strength of Mind Fitness (SOMF).
SOMF is derived from my experience trying to balance physical and mental performance with the demands of work and family. I am a dad with 3 young kids. My wife is the founder and managing director of a successful business. I work another job alongside SOMF. And to top it off, we have a dog.
I know how difficult it is to make time for training. Time is always the limiting factor.
And I also know how frustrating most of the advice on the internet is. It is either contradictory or impractical. Or both. You end up more confused than when you started. And with a lingering feeling that you are somehow a failure.
SOMF is the result of my years grappling with this problem. Trying to solve it for myself and then realising there were many others out there facing the same difficulties. Now I’m sharing what I’ve learned and the programmes I have created.
My Background
In my early teens I discovered fitness training and was hooked. Ever competitive, I pushed myself to improve my performance: lift more weight, run faster, and endure longer. After university, I joined the military and served for over 17 years - predominantly in frontline, elite units - partly because of this passion.
When I was serving full-time in the military I needed to maintain a high level of fitness across many different modalities. While I undertook my own training on top of programmed PT sessions, this was relatively easy: I had the time to train and was paid to do so.
In 2018 I left full-time service and became a military reservist, starting a civilian career with a Big 4 Consultancy. As a reservist, I still needed to maintain the same level of fitness, but now I had to do it alongside a demanding corporate role and within the time constraints imposed by this and a growing family.
Juggling multiple commitments, I found it hard to make time for the level of training I was used to. Every training programme I came across was either too narrowly focused on a single modality (e.g. endurance, bodybuilding etc.) or took more time than I had available. Or both. Therefore, I found myself combining programmes and rewriting them to match my needs and time constraints.
Over the years, I became skilled at stripping away the excess, leaving only the most effective and efficient aspects. I then began writing my own programmes for myself and others, to achieve optimal physical performance in limited time.
That’s the physical performance part. Though closely related, the mental part is slightly more complex.
Serving in elite military units clearly comes with a requirement for a high level of mental fitness. I thought I had this covered. But what I found out through failure, a failure that though faded, still haunts me a decade later, was that I was more brittle than I realised. I also found when moving into the civilian world and having more involvement with my young children that new skills were needed. Patience being a big one!
To learn more, I sought out the best available resources to understand my mind and learn practical tools for cultivating humility, courage, tenacity, and resilience. I then turned these into actionable steps I could take to optimise my mental performance, alongside my physical performance.
Physical and mental fitness are symbiotic. However, the motto of SOMF comes from the recognition that mindset is foremost: Strength Starts Within.
A hike in the south of France carrying c.50kg (110lbs) - not sure if I’m enjoying the view or just taking a breather! I ruptured my achilles tendon the year before and my right calf is still noticeably smaller than my left.