About
It stands to reason that if you are going to seek someone’s opinion on a particular subject, you’ll want to know a bit about how qualified they are to do so. This section will give you an insight into all of David Heard’s activities and projects over the years, and the relevance they now have for the Fitness Consultancy.As chief executive of health and fitness group The Fitness Consultancy, which includes professional sportsmen and woman under the Team Fitness banner and exercise for the ‘grey’ generation under Agex, David has a rare combination of skills.
A long involvement with sport, which started with selection as a schoolboy international cross-country runner and continues to this day through extreme skiing, mountain hiking and testing gym work, has kept him aware of the needs and drives of elite athletes.
His almost obsessive interest in all aspects of fitness training, physical and mental development embraces qualifications in coaching (skiing and weight-training), specialist soft tissue work - Bowen Therapy (Australia and Europe) - sport and remedial massage, exercise therapy and sports rehabilitation, psychometrics and nutritional consultancy.
Add an experience of the ancient disciplines of yoga and ayurvedic medicine with an easy familiarity with the modern technology of high performance training and the result is a very experienced and innovative exercise physiologist.
He is also one of only a handful of British people to work in the world-famous rehabilitation clinic, the Dikoul Institute in Moscow. This pioneering work lead David to open the National Rehabilitation Centre for the Paralysed in Gloucestershire. There he was chief executive for nine years working with a team of ten specialist therapists (mostly from a sports science background) and using sports training in the rehabilitation of people with chronic paralysis. It was this innovative work that provided the research material that earned David his Masters’ degree (with distinction) in Exercise Therapy, closely related to mental well-being.
From all this he has evolved a unique approach to performance enhancement, and through his company - the Fitness Consultancy - bringing this whole range of skills to sports specific applications.