The PHILLIPS FIT Method™

Making Personal Training Truly Personal.

The PHILLIPS FIT Method™ is the decision-making framework behind Neuro-Personalised Training at PHILLIPS FIT.

It brings together more than two decades of Personal Training experience with resistance training principles, biomechanics, Muscle Activation Techniques® (MAT®), Neuro Reset Technique (NRT), and Feedback-Informed Training (FIT).

The aim is not simply to create a personalised exercise programme.

It is to continually determine what exercise, intervention and level of demand is most appropriate for you, based not only on your goals and biomechanics, but also on what your body and nervous system can successfully handle and tolerate right now.

Never assume capacity. Assess it!
Train to your capacity. Expand what's possible.

Why the PHILLIPS FIT Method™ exists

Traditional Personal Training already considers many important things.

• Your goals

• Your exercise technique.

• Your biomechanics.

• Your current strength and fitness.

• Your training history.

All of those things matter.

But there is another question that traditional Personal Training is not designed to ask:

How is your nervous system responding to the demand?

An exercise can be biomechanically appropriate, look technically correct and consciously feel completely fine, while deeper assessment reveals that your nervous system is responding unfavourably in a way that might otherwise go unnoticed.

That additional information can change the training decision.

Rather than assuming that completing an exercise means it was successfully tolerated, the PHILLIPS FIT Method™ uses your response to help determine what happens next.

The response informs the decision.

Putting the "personal" into the training decision

Personalisation should involve more than choosing exercises that suit your goals, conscious preferences and biomechanics.

All three are important and form part of the PHILLIPS FIT decision-making process. But two people can perform the same exercise with similar technique and experience very different nervous-system responses.

Even the same person can respond differently to the same exercise on different days, or after the level of demand changes.

That is why the programme is never treated as an instruction that must be followed regardless of what your nervous system is demonstrating.

Instead, the PHILLIPS FIT Method™ continually asks:

• What are you ready to handle now?

• What exercise or intervention is most appropriate?

• How much demand should we apply?

• How did your nervous system respond?

• Should we continue, progress, reduce, modify, or investigate something else?

The programme provides structure.
Your response helps determine what we do with it.

Assess → Match → Expand

At the heart of the PHILLIPS FIT Method™ is a simple three-stage process:

Assess

Find out what your body and nervous system are ready to handle today, based on assessment, not assumption.

Assessment can consider movement, force production, exercise response, sensory demand, state regulation and other factors relevant to the training decision.

The purpose is not to search for problems.

It is to establish useful information before deciding what to do next.

↓

Match

Match the most appropriate exercise, intervention and level of demand to you and your current nervous-system capacity.

That may mean changing the exercise.

It may mean changing the load, range of movement, stability requirement, repetitions, tempo or another aspect of the training dose.

Sometimes it may mean continuing exactly as planned.

And sometimes assessment may suggest that exercise is not the most appropriate intervention at that moment.

↓

Expand

Determine the most appropriate strategy for increasing what you are able to successfully access and tolerate.

Sometimes that means progressive resistance training to develop strength, muscle, fitness and physical capacity.

At other times, a nervous-system limitation may need to be investigated before greater training demand is appropriate.

Expansion therefore does not simply mean "do more".

It means determining what needs to change in order for you to successfully access and tolerate greater levels of movement, force, load, complexity or other forms of demand.

Progression is demonstrated, not presumed

Traditional progression often focuses on externally visible performance.

Those are important measures of progress, but they only tell us about the externally visible outcome.

• Can you lift more weight?

• Can you perform more repetitions?

• Can you use a greater range of movement?

• Can you complete a harder exercise?

Those are important measures of progress, but they do not necessarily tell us everything about how your nervous system responded to the added demand.

The PHILLIPS FIT Method™ also considers performance at a less visible, nervous-system level:

how successfully your nervous system is able to organise and tolerate the increased demand.

With the PHILLIPS FIT Method™, progression can be introduced and then reassessed.

That allows us to distinguish between:

"You managed to do more."

and:

"Your nervous system successfully handled and tolerated more."

If the additional demand continues to be well tolerated, we have useful evidence for progressing further.

If it produces a defensive response, the training decision must change.

Progression is therefore demonstrated through your response rather than simply presumed because a programme says it is time to advance.

What does that mean for you?

Train with greater confidence

Your programme is not something you simply have to keep up with.

Training is adapted according to what your body and nervous system are actually demonstrating rather than forcing you to continually conform to a predetermined plan.

Reduce unnecessary setbacks

If a particular exercise, load, range of movement or other demand is not being well tolerated, we can identify the response and change the training decision and/or intervention accordingly.

That means not simply pushing through it, or automatically assuming that tightness needs stretching and weakness needs strengthening.

Make progress you can actually sustain

Getting stronger and fitter is only useful if each step forward does not repeatedly end in another setback or enforced break from training.

The aim is to keep moving you forward without repeatedly knocking you backwards.

Build strength and fitness you can maintain

The goal is not simply to achieve a short term result.

It is to build the strength, fitness and physical capability that allows you to keep training, keep progressing and keep doing the things you want your body to be capable of for years to come.
Fewer unnecessary setbacks and injuries. More sustainable progress. A better way to stay FIT for life.

Built on 6 Principles. Guided by 11 Decision Points™.

Behind Assess → Match → Expand sits a structured framework for making better informed training decisions.

The PHILLIPS FIT Method™ is built on 6 guiding Principles that shape how I approach your training, and 11 Decision Points™ that help determine what information should be considered before deciding what happens next.

The 11 Decision Points™ consider:

• Daily Readiness

• Training Demand

• Exercise Selection

• Training Dose

• Exercise Response

• Progression

• Movement Capacity

• Strength & Force Production

• Sensory Demand

• State Regulation

• Intervention Choice

The Principles guide how PHILLIPS FIT thinks.

The Decision Points guide what PHILLIPS FIT considers.

The Method brings them together to determine what happens next.

Exercise isn't automatically the right intervention

One of the most important parts of the PHILLIPS FIT Method™ is Intervention Choice.

If something feels tight, the conventional approach is to stretch or "release" it.

If something appears weak, the conventional approach is to strengthen it.

And if an exercise repeatedly causes problems, the solution may simply be to avoid it and find another one.

PHILLIPS FIT does not automatically make those assumptions.

Feeling tight doesn't mean "too short"

The sensation of muscular tightness is produced through the nervous system. It does not, by itself, mean that a muscle is physically "too short" and therefore needs to be stretched.

Tightness is a protective response produced by the nervous system.

Simply forcing more range through stretching or "releasing" does not tell us why that protection was there, or whether the nervous system can successfully control and tolerate the additional range that may temporarily become available after the stretch.

Within the PHILLIPS FIT Method™, stretching is therefore not viewed as a way of correcting tissue tightness.

The more useful question is:

Why is the nervous system limiting this movement through protective tightness, and what does that tell us about the most appropriate next step, if any?

Weak doesn't automatically mean "needs strengthening"

Reduced force output does not automatically mean a muscle simply needs strengthening.

If the nervous system is inhibiting a muscle's contribution to a movement, repeatedly loading the movement in an attempt to strengthen it does not necessarily remove that inhibition.

The body still has to complete the task, so the nervous system may redistribute the work to other muscles and movement strategies it currently trusts more.

Repeatedly training that pattern can therefore make the body better at compensating rather than restoring the contribution that was limited in the first place.

When another muscle keeps taking over

You may have experienced this yourself.

You perform an exercise intended to challenge one area, yet consistently feel another area doing most of the work... such as your upper traps taking over during an exercise intended for your shoulders or back.

That does not automatically prove that another muscle is inhibited.

But it can be useful information suggesting that your nervous system may be organising the movement through a compensatory strategy.

And simply being told to "focus harder on the muscle you're supposed to be using" may not solve the problem.

If your nervous system is already struggling to use that muscle effectively, deliberately trying to "feel" it more can focus your brain's attention on the very weakness your body is already trying to compensate around.

The more useful question becomes:

Why is your nervous system choosing that compensation in the first place, and what is the most appropriate next step, if any?

Find out why before deciding what to do

Rather than immediately asking:

"How do we stretch this?"

or:

"How do we strengthen that?"

the PHILLIPS FIT Method™ asks:

Why is the nervous system producing this response in the first place?

Assessment then helps determine the most appropriate next step.

That may be to:

• Continue training.

• Modify the demand.

• Change the exercise.

• Alter the training dose.

• Investigate the nervous-system limitation itself.

• Or do nothing at all*

Where a protective response appears to be constraining movement, force, sensory tolerance or another aspect of capacity, Neuro Reset Technique (NRT) provides another option.

*Sometimes the most appropriate intervention is non-interference. Not every compensation needs to be immediately corrected. A compensation may represent the nervous system's most appropriate available strategy for completing the movement task while working around a current capacity limitation.

In these situations, immediately trying to remove or 'correct' the compensation through coaching could be less appropriate and may even trigger a defensive nervous-system response, compared with allowing the compensation to remain while deciding whether the underlying capacity limitation needs to be addressed.

Neuro Reset Technique within the PHILLIPS FIT Method™

Neuro Reset Technique was developed by Simon Frost and is an important influence within the PHILLIPS FIT Method™.

NRT uses specific assessments and controlled probes to investigate how the nervous system is responding to different demands.

Where appropriate, a dedicated NRT intervention can be used to address the response before reassessing what has changed.

NRT is therefore not the PHILLIPS FIT Method™ itself.

It is one of the assessment and intervention systems available within the wider framework.

• Sometimes exercise is the right intervention.

• Sometimes the exercise needs to change.

• Sometimes the level of demand needs to change.

• And sometimes a nervous-system limitation needs to be addressed before returning to appropriately matched exercise.

Right intervention. Right level of demand. Right time. Right person.

The PHILLIPS FIT Method™ is more than one technique

The PHILLIPS FIT Method™ has developed through more than two decades of working with people whose bodies, goals and training histories are all different.

My approach has been influenced by:

• Personal Training since 2004

• Resistance training principles

• Biomechanics

• Resistance Training Specialist (RTS) education

• Muscle Activation Techniques® (MAT®)

• Neuro Reset Technique (NRT)

• Feedback-Informed Training

Each provides useful information, principles or tools.

But none of them individually is the PHILLIPS FIT Method™.

The Method is the framework I use to determine which information matters, which intervention is appropriate, how much demand should be applied, and what should happen next.

Who is the PHILLIPS FIT Method™ for?

The Method is not designed only for people with injuries or movement problems.

It can be applied whether you are:

• Starting resistance training for the first time.

• Returning to exercise after injury or repeated setbacks.

• Looking to become stronger, fitter or build muscle.

• Finding that certain exercises repeatedly cause problems.

• Experiencing persistent tightness, weakness or compensation.

• Concerned about progressing too quickly.

• Looking for a more informed approach to long term training.

• Or simply wanting Personal Training that considers more than whether you completed the exercise.

You do not need to understand your nervous system before you begin.

That is what the assessment process is there for.

The PHILLIPS FIT difference

Traditional Personal Training and the PHILLIPS FIT Method™ may use many of the same exercises.

The difference lies in how the training decisions are made.

PHILLIPS FIT continually considers your goals, biomechanics, physical ability, current nervous-system capacity and response to each demand.

The programme therefore remains a tool, not the authority.

The person in front of me remains the reference point.

Never assume capacity. Assess it!
Train to your capacity. Expand what's possible.

Train Smarter. Get Stronger. Stay FIT for Life.

Whether you are starting for the first time, rebuilding after previous setbacks or simply looking for a more intelligent way to train, the aim is the same:

To help you build strength, fitness and physical capability through training that continually responds to the person actually doing it.

Ryan Phillips

Neuro-Personalised Training Specialist

Creator of the PHILLIPS FIT Method™

Established in 2004, PHILLIPS FIT provides one-to-one Neuro-Personalised Training, Muscle Activation Techniques® and Neuro Reset Technique in Brighton, alongside online coaching worldwide.