About the Journey
The Past; The Present and the Glorious Future
I have been carrying out massages for over 20 years and it all started almost by accident; well it sort of did, because of an accident I had during my period as a teenager training and hoping to become a professional footballer. That had changed my whole direction in life with regards to the physical side of my life.
At the time in question, I was a senior karate instructor and chairman of one of the largest karate associations in the UK.
The Karate Jutsu Kai were always keen to learn more about our chosen martial art and so we would invite the very best Sensei (Masters) from Japan to spend time in the UK, teaching us as much as we could absorb. One evening, at the end of one of those sessions, the Japanese instructor barked something in his language (they had limited English); the interpreter translated to say that apparently there was something ‘wrong’ with my back.
I was ‘invited’ to get on the floor and for the next 40 minutes or so, the Japanese Sensei worked on my body in such an intense manner with massage and movement, that at the end of it, I was able to walk and move in a way that I had never been able to, after the back injury I had suffered many years before in judo.
The Karate Jutsu Kai were always keen to learn more about our chosen martial art and so we would invite the very best Sensei (Masters) from Japan to spend time in the UK, teaching us as much as we could absorb.
One evening, at the end of one of those sessions, the Japanese instructor barked something in his language (they had limited English); the interpreter translated to say that apparently there was something ‘wrong’ with my back.
I was ‘invited’ to get on the floor and for the next 40 minutes or so, the Japanese Sensei worked on my body in such an intense manner with massage and movement, that at the end of it, I was able to walk and move in a way that I had never been able to, after the back injury I had suffered many years before in judo.
That experience opened my eyes to a world I didn’t know had existed and I started to do deep investigation into different forms of manual therapy. I practised a number of different martial arts and styles, and within each, there were experienced experts who could show and teach me massage and manipulation techniques which I then used on a variety of people of different ages. Some were my students and others were friends and others introduced to me by people I knew; all for the same purpose; to benefit from the massage techniques that I had learned which brought to those in pain and discomfort.
That experience opened my eyes to a world I didn’t know had existed and I started to do deep investigation into different forms of manual therapy. I practised a number of different martial arts and styles, and within each, there were experienced experts who could show and teach me massage and manipulation techniques which I then used on a variety of people of different ages. Some were my students and others were friends and others introduced to me by people I knew; all for the same purpose; to benefit from the massage techniques that I had learned which brought to those in pain and discomfort.
Over the years, I had become a highly qualified and experienced instructor in Judo and martial arts as well as being qualified at two levels of Counselling at the Adam Smith College.
But although I had accumulated considerable practical experience in massage and related techniques, I had never formalised that part of my knowledge with a professional massage qualification.
Eventually, I decided that practical experience was not enough. I wanted to understand much more about what I was doing: the anatomy and physiology behind it, the technical principles of massage and treatment, the contraindications, and, above all, how to work safely and effectively.
While living in Scotland, I therefore studied on the appropriate Diploma courses at the Scottish Massage Schools; the specialist and prestigious massage college in Edinburgh.
The training took me far beyond technique. It required an in-depth understanding of the body's eleven major systems and their relevance to massage, together with the professional, practical and safety considerations involved in treating another person.
Just as with my experience with the Sensei, the course was an eye-opener and I became even more fascinated with treatments and their effects.
Fast forward to 2025 when I finally took the plunge after my Italian wife-to-be suggested we take life a little easier than the high-octane, pressurised life I was living in the UK; and so we decided to move to the land of my birth; St Vincent. She had fallen in love with the island after a couple of holiday visits. I was at a bit of a loss as to what I would do when I got here, until a friend suggested that I do the thing that had given me much pleasure and much relief to others over the years; yes, mind and body therapies.
Instead of setting up just a massage clinic, my wife and I decided to create a large treatment centre that would cater for both residents and tourists; offering Mind & Body treatments via a variety of Massage Therapies; Exercise & Body Toning; Nutrition & Diet guidance and advice; and Counselling.
Setting up such a venture would take some time and considerable investment, including finding the right location as well as suitable premises; which would probably need a lot of preparatory work. Rather than wait until every part of that longer-term plan was complete, we established our current Centre in Harmony Hall.
It gives us the opportunity to develop the services, systems and standards on which the larger vision will eventually be built, while providing those services to people now.
So here we are, in the position where we can give treatment for those who want a massage simply for relaxation purposes; those who need it as an ongoing therapeutic treatment; for those who need it as part of their sport improvement/recovery programme; those who need remedial treatment or deep-tissue therapy.
The other services available such as Exercise & Body Toning, Nutrition & Diet guidance and Counselling, will also help to reflect the ethos of the Centre, which is to offer a holistic service; based on the principle that looking after the body and looking after the mind should not be treated as entirely separate pursuits.
This Centre may represent the present stage of that journey rather than its final destination, but the philosophy behind it is already firmly established.
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We look forward to welcoming you to our Centre.
A little History
For those who like to know a bit more about the subject
Origins & Traditions
Massage Therapies
Massage therapy has travelled a long, winding road from ancient healing traditions to modern clinics, treatment rooms and sports facilities, but at its heart lies an extraordinarily simple human instinct. When something hurts, feels tired or becomes stiff, we reach for it. We rub it, press it or move it, often without consciously thinking about what we are doing. Long before anyone understood muscles, nerves or circulation in the modern scientific sense, people had discovered that skilled touch could change the way a tired or uncomfortable body felt.
Some of the earliest written traditions come from ancient China. The Huangdi Neijing, or Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic, became one of the foundational works of Chinese medicine and described methods of rubbing, pressing and manipulating the body. Within the traditional Chinese understanding of health, such techniques were used to encourage the movement of qi—the body's vital energy—to relieve pain and address what practitioners understood as stagnation and imbalance within the body.​
China, circa 1890
A practitioner works on a patient’s shoulder—an intimate view of therapeutic touch.
Watercolour by Zhou Pei Qun. Wellcome Collection. Public domain.
Exactly when the different parts of the Huangdi Neijing were written and brought together remains the subject of historical debate, but the important part of the story is clear: more than two thousand years ago, Chinese healers were already using their hands deliberately and systematically as part of caring for the human body. Those practices continued to develop through traditions known as anmo and, later, tuina, forms of Chinese therapeutic massage that survive today.
In India, massage developed within the much broader tradition of Ayurveda. Oil massage, or abhyanga, was not something reserved for a rare day of pampering. Warm oils were worked rhythmically into the body as part of ordinary care, traditionally intended to keep the joints supple, nourish the body, encourage relaxation and help maintain balance between body and mind. The explanations belonged to the Ayurvedic understanding of health, but the image itself is remarkably familiar: someone using warm oil and skilled hands to ease and care for another person's body.
Africa has its own long and diverse history of hands-on healing, much of it passed from one generation to another orally rather than preserved in the great written medical texts through which we know ancient Chinese, Indian or Greek medicine. Across a continent containing hundreds of peoples and healing traditions, there could never have been one single form of 'African massage'. Yet accounts from different regions describe healers rubbing, kneading, stretching and manipulating the body, sometimes using plant preparations, oils or animal fats as part of the treatment. Massage and manipulation also became associated with childbirth, muscular and joint problems, injury and traditional bone-setting.
Among the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa, researchers have found massage to have been an important part of traditional healing. Perhaps most interestingly, it appears to have been so ordinary that early outside observers sometimes paid surprisingly little attention to it. The dramatic ritual might make its way into the traveller's notebook; a mother, healer or family member rubbing an aching back or working oil into tired muscles might not. Yet it is precisely those ordinary human moments that may tell us most about how deeply touch was woven into everyday care.
Ancient Egypt gives us something even more immediate: we can actually see it.
Walk into the tomb of Ankhmahor at Saqqara—or, today, look at photographs of its wall reliefs—and there are figures more than four thousand years old apparently having their hands and feet worked upon by attendants.
The tomb dates from approximately the 24th century BC. We cannot ask the people in the picture exactly what they were doing, and historians have variously interpreted the scene as massage, manipulation, medical treatment or even an early form of manicure and pedicure.
But whatever the precise explanation, there is something rather extraordinary about looking at human hands attending to other human hands and feet across a gap of more than four millennia.
In ancient Greece, massage became closely connected with medicine, exercise and athletics. Hippocrates wrote about anatripsis—rubbing or friction—and discussed the effects that different kinds of rubbing could have upon the body. Herodicus, who is traditionally associated with Hippocrates and with the use of exercise as therapy, also helped establish the idea that movement and physical treatment belonged alongside medicine. Then there were the athletes.
Greek competitors trained and performed without the modern support teams, recovery technology and sports science we now take for granted, but they certainly understood that a body being pushed hard needed looking after. Oils were rubbed into the skin; muscles were worked before and after exertion; trainers and physicians attended to the bodies upon which victory depended. The connection between massage and sporting performance, therefore, is not something invented by the modern football club or Olympic team—it reaches back more than two thousand years.
The Romans inherited much from the Greeks and, characteristically, built an entire social institution around it. Their bathhouses brought together heat, water, exercise, oils, scraping and massage. Imagine the soldier after days of marching, the athlete after hard physical exertion, or simply the Roman citizen escaping the noise and business of the city: the bathhouse offered somewhere for the body to be heated, washed, oiled, rubbed and worked upon. Massage could be about recovery, physical care and pleasure at the same time.
Across the Atlantic, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas had developed equally rich approaches to healing long before European arrival. There was no single 'Native American medicine'—hundreds of nations developed their own traditions—but touch, heat, plants, movement and spiritual practice repeatedly appear as parts of caring for the body.
Among some North American peoples, the sweat lodge brought several of those elements together. The intense heat and steam could be accompanied by traditional plant preparations, rubbing or working tired parts of the body, while the ceremony itself carried spiritual and communal meanings far beyond anything we would now call a massage treatment. For hunters, warriors and others whose lives could demand enormous physical endurance, care of an aching or exhausted body was intertwined with a much broader process of recovery and renewal.
Further south, among Maya communities, hands-on healing developed traditions of its own. Forms of massage known as sobada were practised by specialist healers and midwives, with hands working over the body and particularly the abdomen, often alongside herbs, prayer and ritual. Traditional explanations could involve restoring the body's internal balance or returning something believed to have moved from its proper position. Modern anatomy may explain the body differently, but generations of sobadores and sobadoras kept the practical tradition of skilled touch alive.
Across parts of South America, including the Andes, traditional healers likewise combined plants, ritual and hands-on care. Rubbing, massage and manipulation could sit alongside preparations made from the plants of the surrounding landscape. The explanations differed from one people and region to another, but once again the same basic human behaviour appears: when another person's body was hurting, exhausted or injured, somebody put their hands on it and tried to help.
Thousands of miles away in the Pacific, Hawaiian lomilomi developed within an entirely different culture, but with an equally powerful relationship between touch and wellbeing. Traditional lomilomi was much more than the flowing 'Hawaiian massage' now offered in resorts around the world. It belonged to a Hawaiian understanding in which the health of an individual could not easily be separated from family, community, spirituality and harmony. Knowledge was passed through families and specialist practitioners, and massage could accompany healing, preparation for important events and significant moments in a person's life.
The physical style could be wonderfully distinctive: hands and forearms moving in long, flowing, sometimes wave-like movements over the body, with rhythm becoming part of the treatment. Modern lomilomi has developed in many directions, but behind it lies something far older—the idea that working upon the body could also be part of restoring balance to the person as a whole.
Lomilomi in practice
The forearms become part of the flowing, rhythmic work described above.
Photograph: Marco Ubaldini / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. Resized; image unchanged.
The nineteenth century brought a new layer of structure to this very old human story.
In Sweden, Pehr Henrik Ling—a poet, teacher, fencing enthusiast and a man troubled by rheumatism—made an important discovery using the most convenient experimental subject available to him: himself. Ling found that fencing and vigorous physical exercise seemed to improve his own condition. Rather than simply being grateful that he felt better, he became fascinated by why.
He studied anatomy and physiology and began combining what he knew about fencing, gymnastics, movement and the human body into a systematic approach to physical training and what became known as 'medical gymnastics'.
In 1813, with support from the Swedish state, Ling established the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm. What had partly begun with one man's attempts to understand and improve his own troublesome body was becoming a formal system in which movement and hands-on physical techniques were being studied and taught.
Pehr Henrik Ling, 1839. Portrait by Johan Cardon. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Ling is often called the 'father of Swedish massage', although the real history is more interesting than that convenient title suggests. He did not single-handedly invent the massage we recognise today. His work created part of the foundation, while others built upon it.
Later in the nineteenth century, the Dutch physician Johann Georg Mezger helped systematise and popularise massage techniques using the French terminology that therapists still recognise today: effleurage for long, gliding strokes; petrissage for kneading and working the tissues; friction for more concentrated work; and tapotement for rhythmic percussion.
Now the story begins to look remarkably familiar to a modern massage therapist: hands gliding along the body to warm and work the tissues; fingers and palms kneading tighter muscles; more focused friction where required; rhythmic percussion; and movement of joints and limbs.
This was not simply pampering. Massage and medical gymnastics were increasingly being treated as serious approaches to physical care, movement and rehabilitation. As the methods spread through Europe and North America, massage gradually moved beyond the worlds of traditional healers, private households and bathhouses and into hospitals, clinics, gymnasiums and professional practices.
Ancient ideas were beginning to meet modern anatomy and physiology. Some explanations survived that encounter; others did not. But the ancient practice of using skilled hands upon the human body was finding a new language.
Sport provided a particularly natural home.
The Greeks had already connected rubbing and physical treatment with athletics, but the growth of organised competitive sport created entirely new demands. Athletes trained harder, competed more frequently and pushed their bodies towards increasingly extraordinary levels of performance.
Massage changed with them.
Rather than simply giving everyone the same whole-body treatment, sports and remedial practitioners increasingly concentrated on particular muscles, areas of tension, injuries and movement patterns.
The sprinter's legs, the swimmer's shoulders, the boxer's back or the footballer's hamstrings presented different problems and demanded different attention.
By the twentieth century, the physiotherapist and massage table had become familiar sights in professional sport.
Football offers a clear illustration of how routine physical treatment had become. It is a familiar sight at every level of the professional game. During a demanding match, a player who goes down with a knock or cramp is often treated on the touchline: the therapist works the affected muscle, restores some comfort and movement, and the player returns to the game. In extra time and penalty shootouts, when legs are heavy and fatigue is obvious, that kind of hands-on care becomes part of the visible drama of the sport. When Coventry City striker Garry Thompson suffered a broken leg, he later credited the club’s therapist George Dalton with helping him rebuild properly enough to play until the age of 37. It is not magic, and it does not replace proper medical assessment, but it reflects how deeply massage and hands-on therapy-style treatment are woven into the everyday machinery of elite football.
More than half a century later, the principle is visible in an altogether more extreme environment.
Lewis Hamilton driving his Mercedes W13 at the 2022 British Grand Prix.
At the 2022 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton's Mercedes was bouncing so violently at high speed that he finished the race in obvious discomfort and struggled to climb from the car.
He later described his back as sore and bruised and publicly thanked his physiotherapist Angela Cullen, saying that he had received physiotherapy and acupuncture before preparing for the following Grand Prix.
There was no miracle cure and no suggestion that treatment somehow made the car less brutal to drive. What the episode showed was something rather more realistic about modern elite sport: when an athlete's body is being subjected to extraordinary physical demands, hands-on treatment, physiotherapy, conditioning, recovery and medical care can all become parts of the same support system.
That is essentially where modern sports and remedial massage sit today.
Research does not support some of the extravagant claims that have occasionally been made for massage. It does not magically make an athlete stronger or faster, nor does it 'flush toxins' from the body. Evidence is more supportive of modest benefits in areas such as flexibility, post-exercise soreness and aspects of recovery, while research into massage for pain and other conditions continues to produce results of varying strength.
That distinction is important because massage does not need mythology in order to have value.
Today, the many branches of massage range from gentle, rhythmic relaxation work through to firmer and more focused remedial and sports techniques. Some traditions have developed within modern healthcare and physical therapy; others retain strong cultural or spiritual roots reaching back through generations.
The explanations have changed enormously along the way. An ancient Chinese physician, an African traditional healer, a Maya sobador, a Greek athlete, a Swedish fencing master and the physiotherapist standing beside a Formula 1 driver would certainly not all explain what they were doing in the same way.
Yet there is an extraordinary thread connecting them.
Across continents, cultures and thousands of years of history, human beings have repeatedly discovered that touch, pressure and movement can change how another person's body feels.
Modern science allows us to question the explanations, test the claims and understand the human body in ways our ancestors could not. But it has not removed that remarkably simple relationship between skilled hands and a tired, tense or uncomfortable body.
​And perhaps that is why massage, after travelling such a very long road, is still with us.
Nutrition & Diet
Nutrition and diet have been shaping human health, resilience and performance since long before anyone spoke of vitamins, calories, protein or 'macros'.
For most of human history, people did not choose their food after reading the nutritional information on the back of a packet. They ate what their environment provided, what they could grow, hunt, catch, gather, preserve or trade—and over generations they learned some very important lessons about which foods sustained them, which made them ill and which seemed particularly valuable at certain times.
Traditional Aboriginal Australian foodways provide a fascinating example. Depending upon Country and season, foods could include fish and shellfish, kangaroo and other game, insects, seeds, roots, fruits and an extraordinary variety of native plants. Obtaining that food itself required physical effort: walking, tracking, hunting, fishing, gathering and digging.
Food and movement were therefore not two separate subjects called 'diet' and 'exercise'. They were parts of the same life. And food meant considerably more than nutrition. Knowledge of where and when particular foods could be found, how they should be prepared and who could gather or share them was tied to Country, family, ceremony and culture.
Ancient Egypt gives us one of history's earliest opportunities to see what an organised civilisation actually ate. Bread and beer made principally from emmer wheat and barley were staples. Onions, garlic, dates, figs, lentils and other foods supplemented the diet, while fish and meat were available in differing quantities according to place, wealth and circumstance.
For the thousands of people involved in Egypt's enormous building projects, food was also logistics. A workforce cannot build monuments on an empty stomach.
Archaeological evidence from settlements associated with the pyramid builders shows that feeding large organised groups required bakeries, food preparation and substantial supplies of grain and other provisions. Behind the magnificent stone structures that survived for thousands of years stood something much less glamorous but equally necessary: somebody had to make sure the workers ate.
Egyptian medicine also began recording relationships between food, digestion and illness. The explanations were very different from modern nutritional science, but the underlying observation was already there: what entered the body could affect what subsequently happened to it.
India developed that relationship into an extraordinarily detailed system. Within Ayurveda, food was not simply fuel. Diet was one part of a much broader understanding of the individual, involving digestion, lifestyle, season, age and the three doshas—vata, pitta and kapha.
Foods and spices could be selected according to the qualities traditionally attributed to them and to the needs of the individual. Modern nutritional science does not accept the doshas as physiological structures, but the underlying idea that the same diet may not suit every person equally well feels considerably less strange today than it might once have done.
Across the Americas, Indigenous peoples developed sophisticated food systems adapted to dramatically different environments.
Among Haudenosaunee peoples, maize, beans and squash became known as the Three Sisters.
The name is wonderfully appropriate because the plants help one another while they grow. Maize provides a natural pole for climbing beans. Beans help replenish nitrogen in the soil. Squash spreads across the ground, helping retain moisture and suppress weeds. Put them on the plate and another partnership appears: maize supplies carbohydrate, beans add substantial protein and squash contributes vitamins, minerals and other nutrients.
High in the Andes, preservation presented another challenge. Potatoes were exposed to freezing nights and intense daytime sun, repeatedly frozen, dried and processed to produce chuño. The resulting product could be stored for long periods—an enormous advantage in an empire where food might need to support people travelling across great distances and dramatic variations in altitude.
Africa offers another vast collection of food traditions rather than one single 'African diet'. Across different regions, diets developed around crops and animals that local climates would support: millet and sorghum, yams and other tubers, legumes, leafy vegetables, fruits, nuts, fish and meat.
Fermentation became particularly important. Long before anybody knew microorganisms existed, people discovered that allowing particular foods to ferment could change their flavour, texture, digestibility and—very importantly in a world without refrigeration—their keeping qualities.
Nobody needed to understand the microbiome to notice that one method of preparing food produced something useful that lasted longer than another.
That distinction between knowing that something works and understanding why it works runs throughout the history of nutrition.
Ancient Greek medicine provides a good example. One of the most famous nutritional quotations in history is attributed to Hippocrates:'Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.'
There is a problem: he almost certainly never said it. The precise sentence does not appear in the surviving Hippocratic writings, despite being reproduced endlessly on websites, posters and health-food packaging.
The irony is that Hippocrates hardly needs the invented quotation. Diet really was central to Hippocratic medicine. Food, drink, exercise, environment and daily habits were considered relevant to health and illness. Later, Galen developed these ideas within the theory of the four bodily humours. The theory itself was wrong, but physicians were systematically thinking about the relationship between what somebody ate and what happened to their health.
Eventually science began discovering what.
One of the great turning points came aboard a British warship in 1747.
Scurvy was one of the horrors of long-distance sailing. Sailors could become exhausted and weak; their gums deteriorated; old wounds could reopen; and eventually the disease could kill them.
Scottish naval surgeon James Lind, serving aboard HMS Salisbury, decided to compare some of the treatments then being recommended. He selected twelve sailors suffering from scurvy and divided them into six pairs. They shared the same basic conditions and diet, but each pair received a different additional treatment.
Some received cider or vinegar. Others received seawater or a medicinal mixture. Two men were given oranges and lemons.
The difference was striking. The citrus group improved far more rapidly than the others; one man recovered sufficiently to return to duty after only six days.
Lind had no idea about vitamin C. Nobody did. But he had demonstrated something extraordinarily important: there was something in those fruits that the sick sailors desperately needed.
And then comes the wonderfully human part of the story. The Royal Navy did not immediately announce, 'Excellent work, Dr Lind,' fill every ship with lemons and solve the problem.
It took decades.
Lind published his findings in 1753, but arguments continued about scurvy, preservation and its causes. It was not until 1795 that lemon juice was routinely introduced aboard British naval vessels.
Knowledge had arrived before bureaucracy was ready for it.
By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mysterious substances hidden inside food were finally beginning to reveal themselves. Scientists knew that food contained proteins, fats and carbohydrates, but those alone could not explain everything. People could consume what appeared to contain adequate energy and still become ill.
Researchers gradually discovered substances required in tiny quantities but capable, when absent, of producing devastating disease. They became known as vitamins.
Suddenly the old sailors and their lemons made sense. Scurvy resulted from vitamin C deficiency. Other deficiency diseases began yielding their own secrets: vitamin D and rickets; thiamine and beriberi; niacin and pellagra.
Food was no longer simply something that stopped hunger. It was chemistry.
At the same time, industrialisation was changing the way food was produced, preserved, transported and sold. Refrigeration made previously seasonal foods available for longer. Canning extended storage. Railways and ships carried food enormous distances. Later came supermarkets, frozen foods and highly processed products engineered for convenience, shelf life and taste.
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These developments brought enormous benefits. They also created new problems. In numerous Indigenous communities, colonisation and displacement disrupted traditional access to land and food. Elsewhere, lifestyles became less physically demanding while inexpensive energy-dense foods became increasingly available.
Human beings who had spent much of their history worrying about obtaining enough calories increasingly found themselves living in societies where calories were everywhere.
Nutrition had acquired a new challenge.
Today we know vastly more about food than any Egyptian physician, Ayurvedic healer, Indigenous farmer or eighteenth-century naval surgeon could have imagined. We can measure protein requirements, identify essential fatty acids, detect micronutrient deficiencies and study blood glucose, cholesterol, metabolism and the microorganisms inhabiting the human digestive system.
That does not mean ancient diets were automatically healthier, nor that every traditional belief about food was correct. Human history contains famine, deficiency, contamination and dietary mistakes alongside its accumulated wisdom.
But nutrition is not a modern invention or simply a procession of fashionable diets. It is an extraordinarily long human experiment.
From an Aboriginal family gathering food from Country, to an Egyptian baker feeding a workforce; from the Three Sisters growing together in an Indigenous American field, to an Andean family preserving potatoes against future need; from fermented African foods to twelve desperately ill sailors aboard HMS Salisbury—people have continually observed the relationship between what they eat and what happens next.
Science has given us increasingly powerful ways of understanding that relationship.
But the question itself is ancient:
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What should we put into the body if we want the body to serve us well?
Exercise & Body Toning
Exercise and body toning have been part of human survival and self-expression for as long as people have had to run, lift, climb, carry, throw, swim and endure.
For most of human history, of course, nobody went to the gym. There was no 'leg day', no step counter and certainly nobody standing in front of a mirror wondering whether their abdominal muscles were sufficiently defined. Strength, stamina, balance and mobility developed because daily life demanded them. If food had to be hunted, dug from the ground or carried home; if water had to be fetched; or if the next place you needed to reach was several miles away, physical fitness was not a hobby. It was simply part of being alive.
Traditional Aboriginal Australian life provides a particularly good example. Hunting, gathering and moving across Country could involve considerable walking, together with running, climbing, digging, carrying, swimming and other forms of physical work according to environment, season and community. Nobody was isolating a particular muscle group because it was Tuesday. The body was being trained by the job it had to do.
That distinction is worth remembering, because much of what we now call 'functional exercise' is really a sophisticated return to something human bodies have always done: push, pull, squat, lift, carry, balance and move efficiently through the world.
High in the Andes, the Inca Empire turned one particular human ability—running—into an extraordinary communications system. The Chasqui were young men selected for their running ability and stationed along the enormous network of Inca roads. Working in relays, they carried messages and small parcels across steep mountain terrain and through thin, high-altitude air.
The Chasqui had never heard of cardiovascular conditioning or interval training. Nevertheless, their bodies were being prepared for something a modern trainer would recognise immediately: repeated bursts of demanding exercise, recovery, and readiness to perform again.
Statue of a Chasqui relay runner of the Inca Empire, depicted in traditional attire, from the post office museum in Centro Lima, Peru. By Hires an editor — own work, Wikimedia Commons.
Ancient China approached physical conditioning from a different direction. A remarkable silk exercise chart excavated from a Han Dynasty tomb at Mawangdui depicts 44 human figures—men and women of different ages—performing an assortment of movements. Some bend or twist; others stretch their limbs, squat, breathe deliberately or use simple equipment. Some imitate the movements of animals.
Nearly two thousand years before the modern exercise class, somebody had thought it worthwhile to illustrate people deliberately moving their bodies in different ways for health.
India developed another enormously influential relationship between body and mind. The history of yoga is far more complicated than the convenient claim that somebody invented a collection of modern yoga poses five thousand years ago. Early yoga was deeply concerned with philosophy, meditation, discipline and control of the mind and breath. Over centuries, physical postures became increasingly important. That evolution eventually produced something with obvious modern relevance: the deliberate use of posture, controlled movement, balance, flexibility and breathing—not simply to build a visibly muscular body, but to develop control over it.
Ancient Greece made the trained body considerably more public. Physical training was closely connected with education, military preparation and athletics. Young men ran, wrestled, jumped and threw; athletes trained for competitions in which the human body itself was the spectacle.
Greek medicine was also asking a strikingly modern question: could exercise itself be used as treatment?
Herodicus, a fifth-century BC physician and former athletic trainer, certainly thought so. He became such an enthusiast for combining diet and exercise that one historical account has him prescribing patients a walk from Athens to Megara—a journey of roughly 40 kilometres. His probable pupil Hippocrates apparently thought his teacher sometimes overdid things and criticised exercise prescriptions that were too strenuous for sick patients.
There is something wonderfully modern about that disagreement. More than two thousand years ago, one practitioner was effectively saying, 'You need more exercise,' while another was replying, 'Yes—but perhaps not quite that much.'
Elsewhere, physical strength acquired cultural meanings of its own. In ancient Egypt, princes were expected to run, swim, row, wrestle, shoot and ride. The Persian tradition that eventually developed into Pahlevani and the Zoorkhaneh, or 'house of strength', combined physical conditioning with martial tradition, ritual and moral discipline. Men swung heavy wooden clubs, lifted weighted shields and performed bodyweight and rotational exercises. The objective went beyond developing large muscles: strength was associated with discipline, character and identity.
As centuries passed, exercise became increasingly organised. During the Renaissance and early modern period, European thinkers rediscovered classical writing about gymnastics and health. By the nineteenth century, organised gymnastics, military drill and physical education were appearing in schools and institutions across Europe. People climbed ropes, swung from apparatus, lifted simple weights and used their own bodies for resistance.
Gradually, exercise ceased to be something performed only because work, military service or survival demanded it. People began exercising because exercise itself was good for them.
The twentieth century transformed that idea. Weights became more sophisticated, resistance equipment developed and exercise science began examining what actually happened when muscles were repeatedly challenged and allowed to recover. At the same time, influential figures were determined to bring exercise out of the specialist gym and into ordinary homes.
One of the great characters in that story was Jack LaLanne. In 1936, at just 21, LaLanne opened one of America's earliest modern health clubs in Oakland, California. At a time when weight training was still regarded with suspicion by many people, he encouraged men and women to exercise, lift weights and take physical fitness seriously.
From the 1950s onwards, The Jack LaLanne Show took that message into people's living rooms. Exercise no longer required an expensive gym full of equipment. Ordinary people could become stronger and fitter at home.
Another man was developing a rather different approach.
Joseph Pilates was born in Germany in 1883 and eventually became a gymnast, boxer and physical trainer. When the First World War began, his German nationality resulted in his being interned in Britain as an enemy alien. An internment camp seems an unlikely place for the development of an exercise system that would eventually spread around the world, but Pilates continued experimenting with physical conditioning and taught exercises to fellow internees.
Later, while working with hospital patients on the Isle of Man, he experimented with springs attached to hospital beds so that people with limited mobility could exercise their limbs against resistance. Look at a modern Pilates Cadillac or Reformer and that history suddenly becomes visible: springs, resistance, controlled movement and a body being asked to work precisely rather than violently.
Pilates eventually moved to New York and opened a studio with his wife Clara. By coincidence, they found themselves in the middle of the city's thriving dance world. Dancers routinely pushed their bodies to extraordinary limits and injuries came with the territory. His studio developed a reputation as somewhere an injured or physically struggling dancer might rebuild strength and control.
Pilates called his method Contrology. The name tells us something important. The objective was not simply to exhaust a muscle until it hurt. Precision, breathing, concentration, alignment and control mattered. A movement performed ten times carelessly was not necessarily better than one performed properly.
That philosophy helped Pilates move far beyond the dance studio. Today it is practised by elite athletes, older adults maintaining mobility, people rebuilding physical capacity and those who simply want to become stronger and more controlled in the way they move.
Other forms of exercise continued developing alongside it. Aquatic exercise exploited the fact that water supports the body while simultaneously resisting movement. Aerobics filled halls in the 1970s and 1980s. Exercise videos brought instructors into millions more homes. Dance and fitness borrowed from one another, while programmes such as Zumba demonstrated that music, rhythm and enjoyment could keep a body working remarkably hard.
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Zumba at People's Park Davao City. Bro. Jeffrey Pioquinto, via Wikimedia Commons.
Yoga travelled internationally and developed countless modern forms. Resistance bands made strength work portable. Free weights remained gloriously simple. Circuit training combined different physical demands, while gyms acquired machines capable of exercising almost every muscle imaginable.
A modern gym space with cardio machines, strength equipment and mirrored walls. Photo by www.localfitness.com.au via Wikimedia Commons.
And yet, after all that invention, modern exercise has arrived at a rather interesting place.
Some of today's most fashionable training looks remarkably like what human beings were doing before gyms existed. We squat, push, pull, lift things from the ground, carry weight, balance, bend, rotate, walk and run. Sometimes we even crawl.
We have given these things names such as functional training, resistance exercise, mobility work and cardiovascular conditioning, and modern science has given us an enormously better understanding of how and why they affect the body. But the movements themselves are ancient.
From an Aboriginal hunter moving across Country, a Chasqui racing towards the next relay station, a Chinese practitioner imitating an animal, a Greek wrestler, a Persian athlete swinging heavy clubs, Joseph Pilates attaching springs to a hospital bed, or somebody today performing controlled resistance exercises in their own living room, the equipment and explanations may change—but the body is still responding to the same fundamental challenge.
Ask it regularly and sensibly to do a little more, and it adapts. Muscles can become stronger. Movement can become more controlled. Balance, endurance and mobility can improve. Tasks that once felt difficult can become easier.
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That is the real history of Exercise & Body Toning: not the pursuit of a fashionable shape, but the continuing human effort to build a body capable of doing what we ask of it.
Counselling
Counselling, in one form or another, has probably existed for as long as one troubled human being has turned to another and said, in effect, 'I need to talk.'
Long before anyone used terms such as 'mental health', 'psychotherapy' or 'counselling', people experienced grief, fear, relationship difficulties, uncertainty, anger, guilt and the simple bewilderment that can accompany major changes in life.
And they talked about them.
Sometimes they turned to family. Sometimes to elders, healers, priests, philosophers or trusted members of their community.
​A counselling session, providing a supportive space for discussion and guidance. tiyowprasetyo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The explanations those people offered might be very different from those of a modern counsellor, but something fundamentally human was already taking place: one person was trying to make sense of what was happening inside them with the help of another.
Different cultures created their own ways of making room for those conversations.
Among a number of Indigenous peoples of North America, circle practices developed in which speaking and listening followed particular rules. In some traditions a talking piece could be passed around the circle, giving the person holding it the opportunity to speak while others listened.
The precise customs and meanings differed enormously between nations, so it would be wrong to describe this as one universal 'Native American counselling method'. But there is something strikingly recognisable in the underlying experience: speaking, being heard and listening properly to another person.
In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditions of yarning offer another example of conversation carrying far more significance than casual chatter. Yarning can be a way of sharing knowledge, stories, experiences and relationships.
There is also the concept of deep listening, sometimes described in parts of Aboriginal Australia by the word dadirri: listening not simply while waiting for your own opportunity to speak, but with patience, attention and respect.
These traditions are not Western counselling transported backwards into Indigenous history. They belong to their own cultures. But they remind us of something counselling would later formalise: sometimes helping begins with being quiet enough to hear what another person is actually saying.
Ancient societies found other ways of dealing with troubled minds. In Egypt and elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world, religion, dreams and healing were closely intertwined. Later Greek healing sanctuaries associated particularly with Asclepius used a practice known as incubation, in which people slept within the sanctuary hoping for a significant or healing dream.
A priest might subsequently help interpret what had been experienced. This was certainly not counselling in our modern sense, but the human situation is intriguing: someone is troubled; they reflect upon an intensely personal experience; and another person helps them search for meaning in it.
The Greeks also developed a very different kind of conversation.
Socrates became famous—or irritating, depending upon which unfortunate Athenian happened to be talking to him—for asking questions. Rather than simply telling people what to think, persistent questioning encouraged them to examine what they believed, why they believed it and whether their reasoning actually made sense.
A conversation could therefore become a tool for examining oneself.
Socrates Looking in a Mirror — Bernard Vaillant, after Jusepe de Ribera, 17th century. Mezzotint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.
Stoic philosophers took the principle in another direction. Epictetus taught that people are disturbed not simply by events themselves but by the judgements they make about those events. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly examined his own thoughts and reactions in the private writings we now know as his Meditations.
Neither man was practising cognitive behavioural therapy. But the resemblance to one of its central ideas is fascinating: what happens to us matters, but how we interpret and respond to what happens also matters.
For centuries, emotional suffering remained intertwined with philosophy, religion and medicine rather than belonging to a separate profession called counselling.
Then, during the nineteenth century, something began to change.
Doctors and researchers became increasingly interested in psychological explanations for symptoms that could not easily be explained by obvious physical disease.
In Vienna, Sigmund Freud began exploring the possibility that experiences, memories and conflicts outside conscious awareness could influence behaviour and psychological distress.
​Clark University, Massachusetts, September 1909. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall and Carl Jung. Back row: A. A. Brill, Ernest Jones and Sándor Ferenczi. Photographer unknown. Wikimedia Commons.
The expression 'talking cure' actually came from one of the most famous patients associated with the origins of psychoanalysis.
Bertha Pappenheim, described in the medical literature under the pseudonym Anna O., was treated by Freud's colleague Josef Breuer. During treatment she discovered that talking about troubling experiences and symptoms sometimes appeared to bring relief. She reportedly described the process as the talking cure—and, rather wonderfully, also called it 'chimney sweeping'.
The image is difficult to forget. Something troublesome had accumulated inside; talking was a way of clearing it out.
Freud subsequently developed psychoanalysis into an elaborate theory and method. Patients were encouraged to speak freely while the analyst listened for patterns, conflicts, memories and meanings that might lie beneath what was being said.
Many of Freud's particular theories would later be disputed, modified or rejected. But something fundamental had changed:
Conversation itself had become treatment.
Others took the idea in different directions. Carl Jung became fascinated by dreams, symbols, mythology and the individual's search for meaning. Alfred Adler placed greater emphasis upon social relationships, feelings of inferiority, belonging and the ways people strive to find significance in their lives.
Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, Carl Rogers changed the relationship between the helper and the person seeking help.
Rogers questioned the assumption that the professional should always be the expert who interprets another person's life for them. What if the person sitting opposite possessed considerable capacity to understand themselves? What if the counsellor's task was not primarily to tell them what was wrong, but to create the conditions in which they could explore it honestly?
From those questions grew what became known as person-centred counselling.
Rogers emphasised three conditions that became enormously influential: empathy, congruence or genuineness, and unconditional positive regard.
The counsellor was not there to sit in judgement or to say, 'I know your life better than you do.' The relationship itself became part of the work: listening carefully, trying genuinely to understand the client's experience and creating an environment in which difficult thoughts and feelings could be examined without immediate condemnation.
Other schools developed alongside it.
British psychotherapist Paul Newham using dramatic techniques to facilitate an Expressive Arts Therapy session with a client. Paul Newham, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Behavioural psychologists concentrated on what people actually did and how behaviour could be learned and changed. Cognitive approaches turned attention towards patterns of thought: the assumptions people make, the conclusions they jump to and the internal conversations that can sometimes intensify anxiety, anger or low mood.​
Those strands eventually helped produce Cognitive Behavioural Therapy—CBT—which examines relationships between thoughts, emotions and behaviour and explores different ways of responding.
Family and systemic approaches widened the lens again. Instead of asking only 'What is wrong with this person?', they also asked 'What is happening around this person?'
A difficulty experienced by one family member might be connected with communication, expectations, relationships, roles or repeated patterns involving several people. The individual had not disappeared, but was no longer being viewed as though they lived alone on an island.
Meanwhile, the much older idea of healing through community and shared conversation never disappeared. Talking and healing circles continue to be used within some Indigenous communities, while restorative practices provide structured opportunities for people affected by harm to speak, listen and consider what might be needed to repair some of the damage.
Perhaps the most dramatic modern example of creating public space for previously suppressed experiences came from South Africa. After apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 1995 and chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, held public hearings at which victims and survivors described killings, torture, disappearances and other abuses.
It was not a national counselling session and should not be romanticised as one. Giving testimony could itself be extraordinarily painful, and reconciliation was neither automatic nor complete. But people whose suffering had previously been denied, hidden or ignored were given a public space in which their experiences could be spoken aloud and officially heard.
The circumstances could hardly have been further removed from the privacy of a counselling room. Yet one principle connects them: being heard matters.
Today, counselling contains many different schools, theories and techniques. Some counsellors work primarily through person-centred principles. Others draw upon cognitive, behavioural, psychodynamic, solution-focused, systemic or other approaches. Many work integratively, selecting ideas and methods according to the individual rather than insisting that every person must fit one theory.
Modern counselling is also clearer about its limits. It is not friendship, although the relationship matters. It is not simply giving advice or telling somebody how they ought to live. And it is not a substitute for psychiatric or other medical care when those services are required.
At its best, counselling provides something both highly structured and remarkably simple: protected time in which another human being can speak honestly, examine what they think and feel, recognise patterns, consider alternatives and reach their own decisions with the support of someone trained to listen and respond constructively.
Which brings the history almost back to where it began.
The setting may be a modern counselling room rather than a circle, temple or philosopher's courtyard. The language is different. The ethical standards, professional boundaries and psychological understanding are vastly more developed.
But underneath all of that lies an extraordinarily old human intuition:
Sometimes we understand ourselves better when we are able to speak. Sometimes another person's questions help us see something we had missed.
And sometimes the most useful thing another human being can do is give us enough time, attention and safety to hear ourselves think.