Connecting the Dots by The Collective

Elite coaching has always been limited by the coach's calendar. Dania Valladares, founder of Agora Fitness and one of the top 20 startups selected at the AI Powered Women 2026 conference at MIT, is building AI agents trained on each coach's own methods. Her aim is for that expertise to reach clients who would never get a slot. Jen Halsall co-hosts with Nathan Hyland of The Collective. Thei...

In the second of two episodes on the fitness professional career path, part of The Collective's What Good Looks Like series, Jen Halsall continues playing boss of the world with Aimee Barry, Chief Operating Officer of Les Mills UK. Aimee began on the operator side, working in women-only clubs in Australia, before moving to the UK and the supplier side of the industry. Her focus today is bringing m...

In the first of two episodes on the fitness professional career path, part of The Collective's What Good Looks Like series, Jen Halsall plays boss of the world with Rosanna Tucker, founder and CEO of CoverMe, the workforce operating system built for health and fitness. Rosanna has worked across the industry as a personal trainer, in sales, as a studio owner and now as a technology founder. She...

Rhea Serna trained in management accounting and spent her early career in bookkeeping and tax. When remote working opened up in 2020 she started picking up operations, systems and communications alongside the admin she had been hired for, and ended up in strategy. She is now a core team member of The Collective, working across several time zones at once. In this episode she walks Jen Halsall de Wi...

Thomas Weidlich is the founder of Noēsis, the Longevity Collective, a peer mastermind for people building in longevity. He returns to Connecting the Dots almost a year after his first appearance to talk about what the collective has become, what he has failed to hand over, and why he is putting 40 people in a room in Budapest with no stage and no keynote speakers. The middle of the episode is powe...

A doctor can lose her licence for answering a question she is not qualified to answer. On a gym floor, the same answer costs nothing until someone gets hurt. Dr Ritva Mettänen is an obesity medicine doctor and the founder of the Obesity Coaching Academy. She has been watching conversations happen between trainers and clients that would end a medical career, and she thinks this industry is sitting...

Moritz Wessely studied law for four years knowing he would never practise. Then COVID took him out for eighteen months, and the doctors told him chronic was his new baseline. He refused it, went looking for another answer, and found the gut microbiome. The protocol that brought him back became the company he now runs. In this episode Jen and Moritz get into what the microbiome does beyond digestio...

Lisa Greenbaum started as a competitive dancer, drifted for a couple of years after university, then got pulled onto a Body Flow training by a group fitness manager who would not take no for an answer. Yoga arrived properly a few years later, when a philosophy text landed in her lap the same season her dad was diagnosed with cancer. Twenty five years on she is an award winning educator, a certifie...

𝗕𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗲. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗛𝗢 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗰𝗰𝘂𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗵𝗲𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻𝗼𝗻. Joanne Groves started out as an actress and has spent the last 30 years working every part of the gym floor. She is a master trainer, educator and one of the industry's most persistent challengers of myth and pseudoscience. Today she builds education for trainers and helps clubs around the world build better busine...

Boxology: The Business Behind the BarbellGemma Webster spent 20 years in the fitness industry before working out that loving the job and running the business are two different jobs. She started as a sprinter, moved into judo, and found CrossFit in London in 2011 when there were barely three boxes in the city. In 2015 she opened her own. Then she lost the building, moved from 7,000 square feet to u...

The Longevity Economy: Built on Ecosystems with Ekatherina Pajic The longevity market is maturing, and the companies scaling fastest are not the ones with the best product. They are the ones with the best ecosystem around it. Ekatherina spent a decade structuring capital before building one of Europe's most complete longevity clubs from the ground up. She joins Jen to connect the dots between...

Gender balance at the top is still stagnant, and three skills decide who breaks through: conflict, negotiation, and assertiveness. Executive coach and accredited mediator Pinky Ghadiali returns to Connecting the Dots to make each one practical. Her reframe: the problem is not that women do these things wrong. We were trained to keep the peace, ask politely, and absorb tension for our reward, and t...

We spend so much time looking after our bodies, our strength, our nutrition, our fitness, and we completely forget the organ running the whole show. This week Jennifer Halsall sits down with Tanja Guigon-Rech: adventurer, polyglot, mother, twin, and self-taught neuroscience nerd who turned her curiosity into a business. Tanja calls herself a translator of the science rather than a researcher in it...

Connecting the Dots: Luke Olley on Football, Gambling, and Building Resonance What do a fractured pelvis, eight years of professional gambling, and a handful of stones at a children's event in Mallorca have in common? They're all dots on the path that led Luke Olley to found Resonance, a performancewear brand pioneering mineral-infused clothing. Luke's story is one of constant reinvention. He left...

What would fitness look like if it were designed for the people who need it most? In this episode, Jennifer Halsall continues the GLP-1 conversation with Dr. Ritva Mettänen and Dr. Lou Atkinson, moving past the challenges and into the blueprint. Together they define what good looks like for people living with obesity, on or off medication, and map the bridge into physical activity that the fitness...

Ability, not age. That's the message Laura Dow has spent more than 20 years putting into practice, helping older adults move better and stay strong across health clubs, yoga studios, and continuing care communities. Laura is an award-winning fitness professional, founder of Stiff to Fit, author of Mind Your Movement, and co-author of the Ability Not Age position paper. In this episode, Laura c...

Dr. Ritva Mettänen has lived obesity from every angle: as a child, as a teen, as a patient whose BMI peaked at 40, and now as an obesity medicine physician whose own BMI sits at 24. In this episode of Connecting the Dots , she joins Jennifer Halsall to unpack what the fitness industry gets wrong about obesity, and how to fix it. Ritva explains why obesity is a chronic, multidimensional disease rat...

The Longevity Playbook | Beyond Botox: Peptides, Exosomes & What Actually Works The conversation around longevity has moved far beyond diet and exercise. Today it includes skin health, regenerative medicine, hormones, aesthetics, and a growing list of treatments that promise to help us look and feel younger for longer. But which ones are backed by science, which are simply trends, and where sh...

From Solo Flight to Fit-Tech Founder: Amina Kurbanova on Building Through Resistance At 22, Amina Kurbanova boarded a plane to Kuwait alone, against her entire family's wishes, to build a career in women's fitness. Today she's the Fitness Director of four mega gyms and the founder of Move Mentor, a fit-tech startup bridging human coaching and technology. In this episode of Connecting t...

SelfPowered: Understanding the Inner Shift for High-Achieving Women 📖 Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/SelfPowerment-Inner-Shift-High-Achieving-Success/dp/1636989985 🌐 Deb's website: https://www.selfpowerment.com/ 🔗 Connect with Deb: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deb-smallwood/ Most careers look clean from the outside. The promotions, the titles, the wins. But what about the costs? The do...

🔗 Jon Nasta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonnasta90210/ 🌐 Cryotech Nordics (Recovery Studio): https://ctn.fi/en/recovery-studio-product/ In this episode of Connecting the Dots , Jennifer Halsall sits down with Jon Nasta (Cryotech Nordics) to unpack one of the fastest-growing areas in health, fitness, and longevity: recovery. From elite sport to everyday consumers, recovery is shiftin...

In this episode of Connecting the Dots, Jennifer Halsall sits down with three guests at the forefront of a major shift happening inside fitness clubs — the integration of sports nutrition as a strategic pillar of the member experience. Roberto Coda-Zabetta, who spent a decade in expert systems and AI before launching Spinning globally in 1995, brings his journey full circle with Enervit's new...

What does it actually mean to lead from the inside out? In this episode, Jennifer Halsall sits down with executive coach Martina Buchal and leader and entrepreneur Susanne De Schepper for an honest, heartfelt conversation about the courage it takes to pause, get to know yourself, and ask for help — especially when the world is rewarding you for never slowing down. Together they unpack the real dif...

AI is no longer a side conversation in fitness. It’s a leadership decision. In this episode of Connecting the Dots , Jennifer Halsall and Rachel Young sit down with Karl Foster, Head of AI at Sport Alliance and keynote speaker at the Women’s Leadership Summit at FIBO. Karl started his career on the gym floor and now works at the intersection of AI, operations and strategy. Together, we unpack what...

In this episode of Connecting the Dots , we sit down with Fabrizio Colciago, founder and CEO of Uptivo, to explore what happens when deep tech experience meets one of the world’s most under-digitised industries: fitness. Fabrizio’s journey starts well before the internet went mainstream — from early networked systems and video analytics to building and exiting a surveillance technology company acq...