I'm overweight. Where do I start?

You start where you are. That is not a slogan, it is the only way this works, and I have started a lot of people from a long way back.

The reason a private hour suits this is that nobody is watching. No mirror wall. No class of twenty. No rep count you have to keep up with while a room full of people hears you breathing. It is you and me, in your garage or on your lawn, and the pace comes from your lungs rather than from the fittest person in somebody else’s class.

Here is what the first few actually look like. We talk for a few minutes about what you want and what your body is doing. Then movement: how to stand, how to move your feet, hands on the pads, positions on the ground. That is real work and your heart will know about it. It is not a bootcamp punishment designed to break you, and I am not interested in leaving you unable to walk on Tuesday, because the people who get wrecked in week one do not come back for week three. Conditioning arrives out of the training over months. It is a side effect, not the lesson.

A few things I watch for. Grappling puts load through knees, hips and shoulders in ways your body may not have felt in years, so say something the moment anything hurts and I will change it. Plenty of ground work can be taught from positions that are kind to your knees, and there is no rule that says you have to get up and down off the floor forty times in an hour to learn something. Warm-ups run longer than you expect. That is deliberate and it is where most of the protection comes from.

The other thing worth knowing before you start: grappling is one of the few physical skills where being heavy is an advantage instead of a handicap. Pressure is weight, and weight is what you already have. Big beginners are genuinely difficult to move within a couple of months, and that is a real and slightly ridiculous pleasure when it lands. See do you need to be strong to do jiu-jitsu.

Now the part I will not do. I am a coach, not a doctor and not a dietician. No meal plan, no promises, no number, no date. If you have blood pressure, heart, joint or breathing issues, see your doctor before you start and then tell me what they said, and I will build the hour around it. One member here lost over fifty pounds training this way. Slowly, by turning up. See whether this helps you lose weight for the honest version of that, including what food has to do with it.

And you are not signing up to anything. One hour, at your house, with nobody else there, and you decide afterwards whether there is a second. See booking one session just to try it.

Look at what you can train, then book a first session.