The line is slightly mischievous, but the thinking is serious. He is not selling punishment. He is selling consistency, coaching, and a training environment that people can tolerate long enough to see results.
Lacey’s first move is to take the mystique out of progress. The fitness world, he argues, is crowded with rules that sound scientific but do not hold up over time. He uses the “anabolic window” as an example, the belief that you must eat within a narrow timeframe after training to build muscle.
“When they start doing long-term studies, like six months to a year, the discovered it made no difference whatsoever,” he said. His advice is steadier and more achievable: focus on regular meals across the day, and hit an overall calorie and protein target that matches your goal.
The same simplicity applies to fat loss. January often drives people towards long cardio sessions because sweat feels like proof. Lacey is blunt about what actually shifts the dial.
“It doesn’t really make any difference what you do,” he said. “What really matters for weight loss and body composition is calorie balance.”
Cardio can help. So can strength training, sport, walking, and building more movement into the day. What matters is the energy equation over weeks, not the drama of any single session.
He is equally sceptical about diet fashions, particularly the annual return of low carb evangelism. “Low carb diets, nonsense,” he said, arguing that many approaches work mainly because they reduce intake, not because they unlock special metabolic effects. Intermittent fasting, he added, can also work, but largely because it shortens the eating window and makes it harder to overconsume, rather than because it triggers something uniquely powerful.
On training, Lacey pushes against two common fears: that weights are intimidating, and that strength training will make people bulky. Most people do not become visibly muscular by accident.
Sean Lacey, who runs Granite City Strength and Conditioning gym in Aughrim, showing a client some data.
News in 90 seconds Friday, January 23
For many clients, strength work delivers benefits they feel quickly: better posture, stronger joints, and more confidence moving through everyday life. He also likes simple impact work, including skipping and small jumping drills, because he sees bone health and resilience as part of fitness, not an optional extra.
His strongest New Year advice is structural: remove decisions, reduce intimidation, and make attendance easier than avoidance. Group training, he argues, helps because people do not have to design their own programme and they are coached through the work.
“They’re held accountable by a coach,” he said. At Granite City, session groups are capped at 10, a deliberate choice to keep the experience personal. “I keep the number small so that everyone gets loads of attention,” he said. That may be the real differentiator: fewer myths, more guidance, a “burpee free zone”, and a plan you can sustain.