Hello, I'm Dr. Louise Newsome and welcome to my podcast. I'm a GP and menopause specialist and I run the Newsome Health Menopause and Wellbeing Centre here in Stratford-Bron-Avon. I'm also the founder of the Menopause charity and the Menopause support app called Balance.

On the podcast, I will be joined each week by an exciting guest to help provide evidence-based

information and advice about both the perimenopause and

the menopause. So today I'm very excited and delighted to introduce to you James Smith, who I

met recently when I recorded a podcast for his series, actually, which was a real

honour. And we had the most amazing response from it, both on my social media and his social media.

And so James would explain more about who he is and what he does. And so we thought in the new year,

new start and all that, that we would talk a bit more today

about the importance of exercise as something that we all should be considering, actually.

So welcome, James today.

Thank you very much for having me.

So before we get started, James, for those of you, I'm sure most people will know who you are,

but some might not.

Do you mind just talking a bit about who you are

and how you've got to who you are, really, if that's okay? So I'm an English personal trainer.

I grew up in Berkshire, and for years on end, I just administered personal training sessions

with very much general populations, just normal men and women that had normal jobs in a normal part

of the UK. And I accrued probably close to 5,000 hours of personal training in that time. And

when I was training people, I would always keep in mind the questions they would ask me. And at

the end of the day, I would turn that into a social media post. And I thought that if the people that are paying me have that question, the people that could be

paying me probably want that question. And that kind of took off and went a little bit crazy

in the last few years to the point that I now work online and I turned my face-to-face service

...