Hey everyone I’m Sophie!

I’m a 25 year old ex-gymnast,  personal trainer, calisthenics athlete and flexibility coach living in London.

I started gymnastics when I was 7 years old and it was my whole life until I was 17. However, growing up in competitive sport was hard and filled with many physical and mental challenges. As a result, when I was 17 I had fallen out of love with the sport I adored so much.

I decided to take a break, focus on my studies, and try and figure out who I was aside from being an athlete, but no matter how hard I tried to forget gymnastics, I felt like I was missing a huge part of myself without it.

After a long 3 year break, I started to attend open gymnastics sessions at my local gymnastics club on my weekends home from uni. I started training by myself without the pressure of competition, I spent time relearning old skills and trying new ones and I started to re find the love I had for this way of training. I realised that just because I wasn’t a competitive gymnast anymore didn’t mean I had to stop doing the sport I loved. In fact, I could still learn more and more new skills like calisthenics and hand balancing even in my 20’s.

I started documenting my return to skill based training on my instagram to show people that you could go back to the sports you did when you were younger as an adult, you could learn new things in your 20’s and that training could be focused on what you can do rather than what you look like.

Over the years my social media platform’s grew and I started to have more and more conversations with people who like me wanted to get back into their sports or who wanted to challenge themselves by learning new skills such as the splits or handstands as an adult. The main issue the people I spoke to were facing was that they just did not know how and where to start. They explained that the information they found online was confusing and they struggled to understand what they actually needed to do to start working towards their goals. I decided I wanted to help people to start achieving the goals of their dreams and show them exactly what they were capable of. Therefore, after graduating I qualified as a personal trainer and took additional courses to specialise in coaching flexibility. I paired my new knowledge with my 15 years gymnastics experience and I’ve been coaching now for the last 4 years.

I decided to set up Embrace Movement 2 years ago during the pandemic to help even more adults have a safe and fun space to learn new skills. I aim to bring a fun, challenging and informative approach training and everyone is welcome in my classes. I want you to have fun, I want you to push yourself and become part of a community where you can be proud to share every step of your journey!