Dan Roberts, CSCS
Strength, Conditioning & Performance Coach
- Conducted nearly 40,000 hours of coaching over the past three decades.
- Founding Director of The Dan Roberts Group.
- Creator of MX™, NUK SOO™, and The Dan Roberts Academy.
- Internationally recognised for training elite athletes, Academy Award-winning actors for action films, fashion models for the runway, and designing long-term wellness strategies for three different Royal families.
- Trusted advisor to luxury hotels, wellness brands, and Hollywood film productions.
- Educator, mentor and business advisor to coaches and wellness entrepreneurs.
Overview | A Life Dedicated to Coaching
Dan Roberts completed his first coaching qualification in 1993. Over the past three decades, he has devoted his career to understanding human performance at the highest level, refining movement, physical transformation and athletic development across the worlds of sport, film and fashion.
During that time, he has delivered more than 2,000 hours of group coaching and over 35,000 hours of private one-to-one coaching.
His work spans human performance, movement, physical transformation, rehabilitation, athletic development and long-term wellbeing. At the heart of his philosophy is Athletic Living—a synthesis of exercise science, Zen philosophy, holistic wellbeing, mental discipline, intelligent adaptation and playfulness, designed to create lasting change in both body and mind.
His coaching journey has taken him around the world, with professional residencies in New York, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro and London, where he is now based.
Fun Facts
- Born: Manchester, England.
- Home Life: Surrey with his wife (a Classical Musician) and pet (an Iguana).
- Fave Book: Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.
- Fave Films: Lost in Translation, Fight Club, Big Lebowski & Wild at Heart.
- Sporting Heroes: Eric Cantona, Bruce Lee & Kenny Powers
- Favourite Artist: Mark Rothko
- Favourite Snack: TruFru Frozen Chocolate covered Blueberries.
- Favourite Exercise: Barefoot running on a long sandy beach
- Character Flaws: Too many to mention
Key Experiences & Achievements in 30+ years of Coaching
An Athletic Life
Dan Roberts’ competitive sporting life began at university, where he captained both the (Division 1) Tennis 1st Team and the Lacrosse Team. He also founded their roller-hockey club and was awarded university colours for his contribution to sport.
In his twenties and thirties, he continued to pursue an active athletic path, representing England in lacrosse, competing in Muay Thai, and undertaking endurance challenges including ultra-marathons and mountain expeditions around the world.
In his forties, his focus expanded into strength and movement disciplines including powerlifting, gymnastics, and martial arts weapons training, alongside a deeper commitment to long-term physical health and performance longevity.
Today, Dan continues to explore and refine his approach to training and wellbeing, guided by a simple belief: an athletic life is the foundation for a long, capable, and fully engaged life.
Early Coaching Years
Dan’s coaching journey began at the age of 15 when he completed his first coaching qualification. A year later, he was working as an assistant tennis coach at his local club in Manchester. He loved it. It was here that the seeds of two lifelong passions were planted: helping others learn new things, and exploring the relationship between movement, performance and human development.
While studying for a Business degree at the University of Kent, Dan supported himself by coaching tennis and lacrosse at The King’s School, Canterbury and Christ Church College. During the university holidays, he travelled to the Catskills in upstate New York to coach at Kutshers Sports Academy, gaining valuable international experience while working with athletes from a wide range of backgrounds.
By the age of 21, he had already accumulated more than 1,000 hours of coaching experience—laying the foundations for what would become a lifelong commitment to the art and science of coaching. Even then, he was fascinated not just by helping people improve their performance, but by understanding how movement, learning and physical confidence could help people become more athletic, more capable and more connected to their bodies.
Travelling, Independence & Early Philosophy
After graduating in the 1990s, Dan suffered the consequences of reading too much Hemingway and Kerouac and spent several years travelling the world—a bohemian chapter that profoundly shaped both his worldview and his later approach to coaching and human performance.
During this time, he lived and worked in more than 50 countries, funding his travels through an eclectic range of jobs, from cleaning toilets and working on farms to construction, washing dishes, door-to-door sales, B2B sales, hostel management, and even hosting pub crawls for backpackers.
Alongside his travels, Dan immersed himself in literature and philosophy, developing a lasting interest in Eastern thought. This eventually led him to live, work and study at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, and to visit His Holiness the Dalai Lama at his home in the Himalayas.
These experiences fostered a lifelong belief that the greatest education comes from the interplay of contemplation, lived experience and an endlessly curious mind.
Fitness Coaching in Sydney, New York & London
Dan’s professional coaching career began in 2001 when he qualified as a Personal Trainer with the Australian Institute of Fitness while living on Australia’s Gold Coast. It was during this period that his lifelong interests in movement, learning and teaching came together, and he realised that coaching wasn’t simply a job—it was his vocation.
Returning to Sydney, he began building his coaching practice, working with competitive triathletes while creating early running and performance communities around Bondi. These years taught him the importance of balancing technical knowledge with motivation, accountability and genuine human connection.
He then went back to live in America. Time spent in New York exposed him to the world of Strength & Conditioning, where he worked within school and collegiate basketball and American football environments, broadening his understanding of athletic development and performance.
After relocating to London, Dan worked within the sports and exercise industry before making the decision to leave the commercial gym environment and focus exclusively on private coaching. This proved to be a defining moment. Free from the constraints of conventional fitness models, he was able to develop a more individual, holistic and long-term approach to coaching—one that would eventually evolve into the Dan Roberts Method.
Training Professional Athletes
Between 2003 and 2007, while based in London, Dan specialised in the one-to-one physical preparation of professional athletes across a wide range of sports. These years immersed him in the world of elite performance, where every training decision had to contribute to a measurable outcome.
His clients included athletes from American football, skiing, basketball, boxing, mixed martial arts, tennis, surfing, athletics and dance. Working across such diverse disciplines reinforced an important lesson: while every sport has its own demands, the principles of intelligent movement, strength, resilience and preparation remain universal.
During this period, Dan also worked internationally with sporting organisations, including designing and implementing a national strength and conditioning programme for Indian tennis in Mumbai, supporting coaches and ATP-ranked players.
Elite sport taught Dan to think systematically, adapt quickly and coach with absolute precision. Many of the principles he refined during these years continue to underpin his work today. – not only with pro athletes, but also with actors, fashion models and private clients seeking exceptional physical performance.
A Life of Learning
Around 25 years ago, Dan made a conscious decision to dedicate his working life to becoming the best coach he could be. Since then, his professional life has been guided by a simple philosophy: never stop learning.
His understanding of strength and conditioning, movement, nutrition, wellbeing and performance psychology has been shaped not only by formal education, but by decades of practical coaching, specialist workshops around the world, and collaboration with leading practitioners across sport, medicine and human performance.
Alongside nearly 40,000 hours of hands-on coaching, Dan has completed a broad range of professional qualifications. These include the prestigious Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) certification from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (USA), qualifications through the CHEK Institute, AIF, ACSM and YMCA, together with specialist education in Olympic lifting, athletics, nutrition, weight management, NLP, stress resilience, and life coaching.
His belief in the importance of formal coach education also led him to develop a few nationally accredited coaching qualifications of his own, helping the next generation of fitness professionals build stronger technical foundations.
Learning remains central to his work today. Rather than viewing expertise as a destination, Dan sees it as an ongoing process of refinement. He continues to study emerging ideas, test them in practice and integrate what proves effective. In 2026, for example, his professional development included advanced study with the Weck Method Institute™ and Westside Barbell™.
Educating new Coaches & Teaching the Educators
In 2006, Dan was invited to join a London-based coaching education provider as Head Lecturer and Assessor, where he delivered nationally accredited Active IQ qualifications in Level 2 Fitness Instruction and Level 3 Personal Training.
Alongside teaching aspiring coaches, he designed and authored two nationally accredited qualifications of his own—one in Kettlebell Training and another in Muay Thai Fitness. He also trained lecturers and assessors to deliver these programmes, helping to raise teaching standards and expand applied performance education within the fitness industry.
This experience reinforced Dan’s belief that great coaching begins with great coach education. In the years that followed, he continued to develop educational programmes, including the Methodology X™ Group Instructor Certification, and today delivers specialist workshops and masterclasses covering coaching methodology, communication and the business of coaching.
Coaching Fashion Models in Brazil
In 2007 and 2008, Dan lived in Rio de Janeiro, where his coaching career took an unexpected turn into the world of fashion. During this time, he became the recommended coach for Elite Model Agency, working with some of Brazil’s leading fashion models and discovering that coaching for the runway required an entirely different philosophy from coaching elite athletes.
Success wasn’t measured by strength, speed or endurance alone. Models needed physiques that were strong, lean and naturally elegant – capable of meeting the demands of bikini campaigns across Latin America while remaining refined enough for the fashion capitals of Europe. Traditional bodybuilding methods and endless cardio rarely achieved this balance. Dan’s goal was different: to help his clients look exceptional while feeling athletic, capable and physically confident, rather than simply becoming clothes hangers.
Through his popular model-only training sessions on Ipanema Beach and, later, his exclusive one-to-one coaching after returning to London, Dan worked with an increasing number of professional models. Along the way, he became concerned by the poor advice many were receiving. Extreme dieting, ineffective training programmes and unhealthy industry myths had become widely accepted, often at the expense of both performance and long-term health.
Determined to offer a better alternative, Dan combined principles from strength and conditioning, movement training and body composition to develop a more integrated approach to physical transformation. The result was a coaching system that delivered the lean, elegant aesthetic demanded by the fashion industry while improving movement quality, athleticism and overall wellbeing. These principles would later become the foundations of the MX™ brand.
Since then, Dan has coached hundreds of professional fashion models, helping clients prepare for Vogue covers, major international advertising campaigns and Fashion Weeks in New York, Paris, Milan and London. Throughout his career, he has remained committed to promoting a healthier, more ethical and more athletic approach to aesthetic coaching—one that prioritises long-term health and performance alongside exceptional physical results.
What is MX™
MX™ – originally known as Methodology X was created by Dan Roberts in 2013 as a concise training guide for developing lean, balanced and performance-ready physiques.
It grew directly from Dan’s experience coaching professional fashion models. The popular methods for model training at the time were often either ineffective or unethical, so his aim was to go far beyond simply making women thinner or fitter, instead helping them succeed in their careers as models. MX was designed as a solution: to develop elegant, athletic (yet unbulky) physiques, smaller hips and waists, yet stronger, more powerful bodies, all while improving posture, movement quality and physical confidence.
Dan drew inspiration from ballet, Pilates, yoga, movement drills he developed in Brazil to prepare Victoria’s Secret Angels, and even exercises he had previously used with American football players and cage fighters. He always believed the biggest sin in fitness was to make exercise boring.
Over the years, MX evolved through several iterations into a comprehensive training system and a distinct holistic philosophy. Today, it operates as an international online membership platform and live group training programme, designed primarily for fashion models and others seeking structured aesthetic conditioning without sacrificing health or athleticism.
The wider MX world also includes an educator certification for coaches and trainers, alongside a podcast exploring training methodology, performance, physique development and life within the fashion industry.
Described by Women’s Health as “the workout bible for models,” MX has become one of Dan’s best-known creations and the first of his Signature Programmes.
A Year in Asia: Life as a Full-Time Fighter
While continuing to coach clients in London, Dan began studying for a Master’s degree in Philosophy and developed a deep fascination with Muay Thai. What started as an interest soon became a life-changing pursuit.
In 2009, he relocated to Thailand, where he spent a year immersed in the life of a full-time fighter. Training under former champions, his days revolved around roadwork, pad work, sparring, conditioning and the disciplined routines of a traditional Muay Thai camp. During this period, Dan competed successfully in several fights across southern Thailand.
The experience profoundly shaped his approach to coaching, reinforcing the values of discipline, resilience, humility and purposeful movement that continue to underpin the Dan Roberts Method today. It also deepened his appreciation for the relationship between physical training, mental composure and personal character.
Following his final fight, Dan was invited to Abu Dhabi to become the private Muay Thai and kickboxing instructor to a senior member of the Emirate’s Royal Family, marking the beginning of another distinctive chapter in his international coaching career. Dan also learned a life lesson – that spending his days hanging out with a Princess in a Palace is more fun than being repeatedly kicked in the face every afternoon in smelly, blood soaked Thai gym.
Luxury Fitness Concierge
Following his time in the Middle East, Dan’s coaching work evolved beyond traditional personal training into a more holistic, advisory and long-term fitness and wellbeing concierge role, supporting individuals and families around the world.
Since 2011, he has worked privately with high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients, providing tailored coaching, strategic wellbeing advice and long-term physical development. As relationships deepened, his role naturally expanded beyond delivering training sessions to helping clients build sustainable environments that supported lifelong health and performance.
This has included advising on private training spaces, coordinating trusted networks of coaches and health professionals, and helping families establish integrated approaches to wellbeing that continue whether he is present or not. Over the past decade, Dan has worked with multiple high-profile family offices, including four Royal households, through discreet long-term engagements built on trust, consistency and complete confidentiality.
Alongside this private work, he has designed and led immersive one-to-one and small-group fitness retreats across Miami and Europe, several of which have been featured in How to Spend It and The Times Travel.
Today, Dan’s private clients are based around the world. While much of his coaching is delivered remotely, he regularly travels internationally to see them via “private bootcamps” which are intensive in-person coaching experiences lasting a few days allowing his clients to reconnect, refine their training and accelerate their progress.
Launching NUK SOO™
Following his return to London in 2011, Dan began integrating the lessons he had learned through martial arts more deliberately into his coaching. Drawing upon years of studying combat sports, traditional martial arts, movement, philosophy and athletic performance, coupled by his new foray into training Actors for Hollywood action films, he gradually developed a training system that extended far beyond just physical conditioning.
Rather than treating exercise as simply a way to change the body, Dan wanted to create a programme that also cultivated discipline, resilience, focus and self-awareness. His goal was to combine the physical demands of athletic training with many of the mental principles that had shaped his own coaching journey.
This philosophy eventually evolved into NUK SOO™—a 90-day body and mind transformation system inspired by martial arts, structured performance training and the belief that developing the body and developing the person should never be separated.
Launched in 2019, NUK SOO™ continues to evolve as an online training programme and membership community, bringing together physical training, martial arts, mindset development and the principles of Athletic Living.
Role Preparation & Performance Coaching
In 2011, Dan was invited to physically prepare the lead cast of his first major studio production, Snow White & the Huntsman, marking the beginning of a long-standing career working behind the scenes in film and television.
Preparing actors demanded a different kind of coaching. It was no longer enough to simply transform a physique; every movement had to feel authentic to the character. This led Dan to combine body transformation, athletic conditioning, movement coaching, screen combat and performance psychology into a more integrated approach to role preparation.
Working closely with actors, directors, producers and stunt teams, he helps performers not only look the part, but move with the confidence, physicality and presence their characters demand. His work is valued for its discretion, adaptability and ability to translate elite athletic training into believable on-screen performance.
Today, Dan continues to work selectively across major film, television and theatre productions, collaborating with leading talent and production teams around the world.
The Dan Roberts Group Takes Shape (2012–2026)
By 2012, Dan was leading a team of eight full-time trainers operating from his coaching facility in London’s West End. As the business matured, he made the unusual decision to build a smaller organisation with a much bigger footprint. Rather than continuing to manage an expanding team, he chose to devote his time to refining his coaching philosophy, distilling his eclectic coaching experience into practical methods, and building partnerships with a select group of brands.
This shift led to the continued evolution of his two signature programmes, MX™ and NUK SOO™, which have since supported clients in more than 60 countries. Alongside these programmes, Dan’s work naturally expanded into mentoring, consulting and advisory roles across the wellness and performance industries, while continuing collaborations with film productions, luxury hotels and international partners.
During this period, he also launched The Collective—a curated library of complimentary articles, guides and educational resources created to make the principles behind the Dan Roberts Method accessible to anyone interested in living a more mind-body connected, healthier, longer, fun and athletic life.”
Mentoring, Media & Consulting
Alongside his coaching practice, Dan has mentored coaches and wellness entrepreneurs since 2007, helping them develop their technical expertise, leadership and business skills.
He has also worked as a consultant to media organisations, film productions and wellness brands, advising on physical preparation, movement and performance.
Away from coaching, Dan has written for Men’s Fitness, Women’s Running and Men’s Running, hosted two podcast series, served as a business mentor for Virgin Start-Up, delivered talks to schools, businesses and national wellness events, and serves as a judge for the annual TPP National Wellbeing Awards.
He is currently writing his first book and is represented by Dorie Simmonds Agency Ltd.
Global Recognition & Awards
Over the past two decades, Dan Roberts has become one of the UK’s most widely quoted fitness and performance experts. His advice on fitness, movement, wellness and human performance has appeared on TV, Radio, Podcasts and in hundreds of newspapers & magazines.
His work, programmes and brands have also received industry recognition for innovation in coaching, digital education and wellbeing, earning multiple awards and nominations across the fitness, wellness and beauty sectors.
The Future | Looking Towards 2027
The Dan Roberts Group continues to evolve organically as a boutique international wellness house devoted to the art of human performance. Alongside private coaching, retreats, mentoring, coach education, consulting on Hollywood film productions, and the continued evolution of NUK SOO™ and MX™, Dan continues to study, coach, experiment and refine his work.
Although the methods continue to evolve, the mission remains unchanged: to help people build extraordinary bodies, resilient minds and healthier, happier, athletic lives.
