Syed Akram

Seven years on the floor have made Syed the coach most first-timers end up with, and that is deliberate: he is the one who will spend a full session on how a movement should feel before he cares what is loaded on the bar.

His own training is aesthetics-led — symmetry, proportion, the physique that reads well in a t-shirt — and that is what he programs for. Fat loss and muscle gain run in blocks rather than all at once, which is slower to talk about and considerably faster to see.