A few weeks ago Brad and I walked into the bush with three kids between us, one of his and two of mine, and camped in the middle of nowhere.
Three to four hours of walking to get in, packs on. No car park at the other end. We got in before dark and lit a fire.
What makes that day worth writing about is not that it happened. It is that for Brad it was ordinary.
He has been hiking like this for years, ever since the first time we worked together. Six years ago he could not have walked in there. Now it is just what he does, and that is a better result than any number on a scale.
What a day like that actually asks of you
People underestimate a day like that, because it is not a run.
- You are carrying a pack, and it does not come off for four hours.
- You are carrying gear for a kid as well as yourself.
Which is worth saying plainly. Getting fit enough to hike was never the goal. It arrived because he finally had a body that could handle it, and then it stayed.
The message, in 2019
Brad sent me a Facebook message on 13 May 2019. A mate had given him my details, and he would be keen to have a chat and see if I could help him in any way.
Asking for help is the hardest part. Most people who need a coach never send that message. Brad did, and over the next couple of years he lost 25kg and got fit.
What the training looked like back then
I still have the original spreadsheet, and the first block from December 2020 looks nothing like what he does now.
There were no barbells in it, and sessions were not tied to days of the week, because the win then was getting them done at all.
The weeks either side were similar. Walks at MAF, ROMWOD, three hip flexor mobility days, and a line in the plan literally called Low Hanging Fruit.
By May 2021 that had built into one minute of running at 160 cadence against two minutes of walking, and eventually a 13km easy run. From walking, in five months.
What he lost was not the fitness. It was the progression
Here is the part most client stories leave out. By the end of that first stretch, Brad had what he came for.
“He took the time to listen attentively to my concerns and aspirations, tailoring a personalised program that perfectly aligned with my fitness level, lifestyle, and preferences.”
“One day I’m sure I’ll be equipped with the tools and knowledge to continue my fitness journey independently, empowered to maintain a healthier lifestyle long after Nathan gives me the boot again!”
He wrote that in May 2023, near the top of that first stretch. He was right about the last part, although not in the way either of us expected.
What went away was the structure. No programming, no accountability, nobody asking how the week went. He did not fall apart and he did not lose all of it. But he stopped moving forward, and slowly some of it slid.
That is the honest cost of no structure. It is rarely a collapse. It is a plateau that lasts long enough to start going the other way.
In May 2025 he came back, and he came back for the structure.
What a week actually looked like in 2025
Three sessions locked in. Anything else optional.
Notice what is not in there. No prescribed weights, no pace targets. Everything is a percentage of perceived effort, because I want him reading his body rather than his watch.
What changed in 2026
Once the aerobic base was back, the work moved toward shaping.
The food, and the part nobody warns you about
Back then the lever was restriction. Protein sat between 100g and 150g a day, carbohydrate was capped and at times under 75g, and the number we worked to kept getting smaller. His logged intake ran at a median under 1,500 calories a day.
The shift is easier to see than to describe. These are medians from his own logging, not the targets we set.
It worked, until it did not. Once the number was low enough the scale stopped moving anyway.
Here is what that taught me, and it is the thing almost nobody writes about. Losing weight takes effort. Keeping it takes more, because you cannot eat less forever.
Bring them back too fast and the body fat comes with them, because the body has not had time to adapt. So you do it slowly, over months, while the scale does nothing. It is monotonous, and it is the most important part of the whole thing.
Which is why I will not push a deficit so low that someone has no willpower left to climb out of it. The way out costs more than the way in.
Brad and I stopped working together around that point. He had got where he wanted to be and he was content. My view was that his base needed to come up. A coach can advise, the client decides. It is why the old spreadsheet has no record of his intake climbing back up.
The numbers, since you will ask
Across 2026 he has gone from around 114kg to sitting consistently at 103 to 104.
Then he had seven weeks off. No structured training, no tracking, no plan. He came back and had not gained a kilo.
If you have ever lost weight and watched it creep back on, you will know why that is the part I am most proud of.
Losing weight and keeping it off are two different jobs
What do you do when you are happy where you are?
Nothing dramatic happens. There is no progress photo. You keep turning up, and the reward for doing it well is that nothing changes.
What all of the training is really for
One of Brad’s inner goals, the one underneath everything else, is to live life to the fullest and have a body that can lead him in that direction.
Read that again. The body is not the goal. The body is what makes the goal possible.
Every sled push and every incline round is a deposit toward days like that one, and those days are not rare for him any more.
There is no training metric for a night around a fire with your kids. But it is the entire point.
What is next for Brad
Not an event. He has no interest in racing and he does not need one.
His next job is consistency, and the slow work of bringing his calories back up to something sustainable without overhauling his life to do it. That means eating a little more, week after week, while the scale stays where it is, and holding your nerve when there is nothing to show for it.
The muscle tone he wants comes out of that. It does not come out of another deficit.
If any of this sounds like you
Whether you are where Brad was in 2019, or where he was in the quiet years without structure, both are coaching problems and both are solvable. Losing weight and keeping it off is rarely one job done once.
Brad sent two lines on a Tuesday in May. Seven years later, a night in the bush with his kid is just a weekend.
That is what coaching with MFHP Adventures is for.