Hunter Thompson

I started out coaching group fitness at a local gym while also running one-on-one PT sessions through my brother Cooper’s business, CT Fitness Performance. Mornings were group classes, afternoons were PT clients, and I was learning pretty quickly that coaching was exactly where I wanted to be.

After a couple of years, I moved into gym management and spent the next three years developing not just as a coach, but as a leader. It taught me a lot about working with different people, building a strong gym culture and understanding what it takes to create an environment people genuinely want to be part of.

Eventually, the opportunity came to join FCA full-time.

I’d watched my brother build FCA from the ground up, from coaching clients in Mum’s garage to opening his first facility and creating a community around it. Seeing where the business was heading made the decision to come across pretty easy.

Now, having the opportunity to help lead FCA alongside him is something I’m incredibly proud of.

As a coach, I genuinely care about the people I work with. I love pushing people and getting the best out of them, but I also think coaching is about understanding the person in front of you. Everyone has different goals, personalities and motivations, and getting to know what makes someone tick is a massive part of helping them progress.

Sometimes that progress is losing weight, building muscle or getting stronger. Other times, it’s someone becoming confident enough to walk into the gym without feeling uncomfortable, or a young bloke developing the confidence to shake someone’s hand and look them in the eye.

Those changes are what make coaching so rewarding for me.

A lot of the way I approach coaching comes from my Pop, Wally Warner. He was like a father figure to me growing up and spent more than 30 years volunteering his time coaching athletics and helping young athletes improve.

He genuinely wanted to see everyone succeed, no matter who they were or what success looked like for them.

Looking back, I think watching him had a much bigger influence on me than I probably realised at the time. It taught me that helping someone improve isn’t just about the result. It’s about giving them your time, believing in them and helping them become more confident in themselves.

I try to bring that same mindset into FCA today.

And getting to do it alongside my brother makes the whole journey even more special.

Cooper was one of the biggest reasons I got into training in the first place. I looked up to him growing up, and we’ve worked alongside each other at different stages throughout our coaching careers. I still remember us training PT clients side by side in Mum’s garage, with him coaching one person while I coached another.

To go from those days to now working together full-time and building FCA is pretty cool.

For me, FCA has become much more than a gym or a workplace. It’s something I genuinely care about and something I want to see continue growing into a place Tamworth can be proud of.

The vision is to keep building FCA into the ultimate one-stop shop for fitness, with everything from 24-hour gym access and group training to Pilates, recovery services, a protein bar and more.

But no matter how much FCA grows, I never want us to lose what makes it special.

The community. The people. The feeling that when you walk through the doors, you’re part of something.

If we can continue growing FCA while holding onto that, I’ll be incredibly proud of what we’ve built.

And I’m pretty excited to see where we can take it next.