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With True Form Coaching by Liam. Strength | Mobility | Longevity | Health

Coaching and Knowledge sharing after 20 Years of training and learning.

Serving clients globally online. In-person; Wicklow/Dublin.

03/11/2026

Ladies, this one's for you.
Lifting heavy will not make you bulky!

Here's the biology. Men's circulating testosterone runs more than 15 times higher than women's, and that's a big part of why men put on size so much faster.

Women still respond really well to training. A meta-analysis comparing men and women on the same programmes found similar relative gains in muscle, and upper-body strength gains that were actually larger in women. But in absolute terms, the muscle you build comes slower and smaller. It shows up as shape and definition, not bulk.

What "bulky" actually takes: years of targeted training, eating in a surplus on purpose, and often some extra body fat sitting over the muscle. Not a few weeks of squats. If you feel bigger early on, it's usually water, a pump or food, and it settles.

What heavy lifting does give you:
• Shape where you want it: glutes, shoulders, arms
• Stronger bones.
• Strength for real life
• More muscle and less fat

Heavy just means challenging for you. The last two or three reps should feel hard. If you have a bone or joint condition, get a physio to help you start safely.

Tell me your favorite comeback for someone that says they're scared of getting bulky?
Comment below, and save this for next time.

Sources: Handelsman et al., Endocr Rev, 2018. Roberts et al., J Strength Cond Res, 2020. Watson et al., J Bone Miner Res, 2018.

02/11/2026

Hot take from a coach: You might not even need one!

A lot of progress comes down to tracking, and you can do that yourself.
• Track your training.
• Track your food. Cronometer.
• Collect the data.
• Nail the basics.

Free plans from Google or AI will help too. They just won't know you.

That's most of the work, and it's yours either way.
A coach is what takes it beyond the basics:

• Reads the data.
> You collect the numbers, a coach spots the trend behind them and what it means
• Plans the next stage.
> When to push, when to back off, when it's time for a new phase
• Knows your body.
> Injuries and niggles (alongside your physio, never instead of them), plus how your cycle, perimenopause, stress and sleep can change how you train and recover
• Form checks.
> Send a video and get the half rep or dodgy knee spotted.
• Plans that bend.
> Illness, a bad week, travel. The plan changes so you don't stop
• Accountability.
> Someone expecting your check-in is a reason to show up

You do the work.
A coach is the cherry on top 🍒

DM me HELP if you want that accountability.

01/11/2026

Tired. No drive. Progress in the gym has stalled. Your feed says it's low testosterone, and there's a test kit in the bio.

Here's what that content leaves out.

A 2026 study looked at 46 high-reach Instagram and TikTok posts about low T. None cited scientific evidence, and 72% had a financial interest, like selling tests, supplements or clinic visits. It's a small study of the most popular posts, but the pattern is hard to ignore.

What actually moves the needle:
• Sleep. In a small study of 10 young men, one week on 5 hours a night cut daytime testosterone by 10 to 15%.
• Body fat. In men carrying extra weight, losing it was linked to higher testosterone, and the more lost, the bigger the rise.
• Lift consistently and ease off the drink.

When it's worth testing: low s*x drive, fewer morning er****ons or er****on problems that stick around. Done properly, that's two early-morning fasting blood tests, read by a specialist like an endocrinologist or men's health doctor. Not a home kit.

You're probably not broken. More often you're under-slept, carrying a bit extra and running on stress. Fix the basics for 8 to 12 weeks first.

Which one is your weak spot?
Comment below, and send this to a mate who's been eyeing up T clinics.

Sources: Gram et al., Soc Sci Med, 2026. Leproult and Van Cauter, JAMA, 2011. Corona et al., Eur J Endocrinol, 2013. Bhasin et al., J Clin Endocrinol Metab, 2018.

31/10/2026

10,000 steps a day isn't a magic number. It's widely traced back to a 1960s Japanese pedometer campaign, not a study.

The better question is what your number actually does for you. A rough guide:

• 5,000 to 6,000+: a solid healthy habit. Research links this range to a clearly lower risk of early death compared with very low step counts.
• 10,000+: heart health. In a 2023 meta-analysis, people averaging about 10,400 steps had a 77% lower risk of dying from heart disease than those around 2,300.
• 15,000 to 20,000+: fat loss support. More steps means more energy burned, and walking is easy on the joints. It works alongside your diet, not instead of it.

Worth knowing: the research is observational, so it shows a link, not proof that steps alone did the work. Another review found heart benefits build up to about 7,000 a day, so you don't need 10,000 to start seeing a difference. The 15,000+ range is my coaching rule of thumb, not a study finding.

Build up gradually. If you have pain, a health condition or you're on medication, check with a physio or your prescribing doctor first.

What's your daily average right now, and what's your goal? Drop both in the comments. If you want help building a plan around it, send me a DM.

Sources: Banach et al., Eur J Prev Cardiol, 2023. Stens et al., JACC, 2023.

30/10/2026

Chocolate for weight loss. Red w**e instead of the gym. Eggs as bad as smoking. All real headlines. All a lot shakier than they sounded.

Before you change what you eat or how you train because of one, ask the 5 Ws.

• Who was studied, and who paid?
74-year-old men, or people like you? Humans, or rats? And check the funding. A big Cochrane review found company-funded drug studies report favourable results more often.
• What was measured?
A hormone spike isn't muscle. A questionnaire about a lifetime of egg yolks isn't a diet trial.
• Where did the claim come from?
A study of 462 UK university press releases found exaggerations often started there, not in the newsroom.
• When, and for how long?
One week isn't six months, and one new study doesn't cancel decades of research.
• Why was it done?
If the brand selling the supplement ran the study, read it twice. In 2015 a journalist ran a deliberately tiny chocolate study to prove how easily this works. Media around the world ran it anyway.

One study is a question, not a commandment.

Send this to the friend who sends you headlines.

Sources: Lundh et al., Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2017. Sumner et al., BMJ, 2014. Spence et al., Atherosclerosis, 2012.

29/10/2026

Lads, before you spend money on a testosterone booster, look at your sleep.

In a small lab study, 10 healthy young men (average age 24) spent a week sleeping 5 hours a night. Their daytime testosterone dropped by 10 to 15%, and their vigour scores fell night after night. For scale, the authors note normal ageing lowers testosterone by about 1 to 2% a year.

Keep it in proportion:
• 10 men, one week, in a sleep lab. It doesn't tell us what years of short sleep do
• Levels dipped (16.5 vs 18.4 nmol/L on average), they didn't fall off a cliff
• Most of the daily testosterone release happens during sleep, which is why this matters

Where I'd start:
• Same wake time seven days a week
• Give yourself 7+ hours in bed
• Caffeine cut-off by early afternoon
• Loud snoring or gasping at night? Sleep apnoea is linked to lower testosterone, so ask a sleep specialist

Still flat after a couple of weeks of decent sleep? Get bloods done with a doctor who knows hormones rather than guessing.

How many hours did you actually get last night? Be honest in the comments. And send me a DM if you want help putting the basics in place.

Leproult & Van Cauter, JAMA, 2011.

28/10/2026

Meal of the week: sticky gochujang chicken bowls. On the table in 25 minutes, and a long way from boring chicken and rice.

Per serving (serves 2), roughly:
• 660 kcal
• 53g protein
• 72g carbs
• 18g fat

Why it works for busy weeks:
• Chicken thighs stay juicy and are hard to overcook
• The sauce is three cupboard ingredients: gochujang, honey and soy
• It doubles easily, so tomorrow's lunch is sorted

Swipe for the full recipe. Gochujang is a Korean chilli paste you'll find in most supermarkets now. Go easy on it the first time if you're not a fan of heat.

Macros are estimates from standard nutrition data, and brands vary.

Would you make this one? Save it for later, and tell me in the comments what meal you'd like to see next.

26/10/2026

Grip strength is one of the simplest health markers there is, and one of the least talked about.

The PURE study followed 139,691 adults aged 35 to 70 across 17 countries for a median of 4 years. Every 5kg lower grip strength was linked to a 16% higher risk of death from any cause. Grip was a stronger predictor of death than systolic blood pressure.

Now the bit that gets left out: this is observational. Grip strength is a window into your overall strength and health, not a magic dial. The authors themselves said it's still unproven whether improving strength reduces that risk.

So don't go buying a stress ball. Get stronger overall:
• Full-body strength training at least twice a week
• Loaded carries, deadlifts and rows, which train grip along the way
• Dead hangs if your shoulders are happy with them

Share this with someone in your family who keeps saying they'll start lifting next year.

Source: Leong et al., The Lancet, 2015

25/10/2026

I've been quiet for a while.

I never stopped caring about coaching or training. I got tired of the noise, the trends and the textbook advice, and a full-time job plus a new project took up most of my time.

Here's what's coming: context over trends, research with its gaps pointed out, and the old-school basics that still work.

Coming back to something yourself?
Tell me what it is in the comments.

25/10/2026

Weight-loss jabs are everywhere. The muscle question gets far less airtime.

A 2026 systematic review in Annals of Internal Medicine looked at 35 randomised trials of GLP-1 type medications (median 26 weeks, median 78 participants). Across them, a median of about 28% of the weight lost came from muscle-related measures, with a wide range of roughly 16% to 40%.

Before anyone panics, the context:
• "Lean mass" includes water, organs and connective tissue, not just muscle
• None of the trials measured physical function
• Weight loss without medication also lost lean mass in many studies
• Measurement methods varied too much for a pooled analysis

What that means in practice: if you're losing weight by any method, give your body a reason to keep its muscle. Strength train 2 or 3 times a week, get protein in at every meal even when you're not hungry, and track your strength alongside the scale.

Medication questions belong with your prescriber. If you want help keeping your strength while the weight comes off, send me a DM.

Source: Batsis et al., Annals of Internal Medicine, 2026

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