Foundations

Read This First

You're not broken. You're knackered.

You're in your 40s or beyond. You earn well. You work too much. You drink more than you say you do. You sleep badly. You're carrying a stone or two more than you'd like. Your wife notices. Your kids notice. You notice.

You've probably been promising yourself for a while that you'll "sort it out" — after the next quarter, after the holiday, after the kids are a bit older. The promise keeps moving and you keep getting heavier, tireder, more numbed.

Foundations is for the man who's finally ready to stop moving the goalposts. Not because something terrible has happened — but because something quiet inside you has said enough.

Why This Exists

I built this protocol on myself first.

A few years ago I was 100kg, sleeping six hours on a good night, drinking three nights a week to numb the stress of a corporate job that was eating me alive. My home life was suffering. I was earning well on paper. Off paper, I was somewhere between knackered and broken.

Then I had a health wake-up call I couldn't ignore. The kind that doesn't let you keep pretending the road you're on goes somewhere good.

What followed wasn't dramatic. I walked outside every morning. I lifted heavy things three times a week. I ate food my grandfather would have recognised. I cut the drinking down — slowly, honestly. I went to bed at a sensible hour and put the phone in another room.

Today I'm 84kg, leaner and stronger than I've been in twenty years. I've put real muscle back on my frame and I'm lifting weights I haven't seen since my youth. I sleep eight hours most nights. I drink twice a month at most. I train four times a week. I'm up at six in the morning. And I've built a life that doesn't need numbing at the end of it.

That's the protocol. Refined into something I can take another man through.

Foundations is what I wish I'd had ten years ago — when I was the man this is built for.

The Architecture

What Foundations Is

Twelve weeks. Five men. Built on five fronts — body, food, sleep, drink, mind — coached day-to-day through MyPTHub, with the cohort meeting weekly on Zoom for the deeper conversations.

The structure stays the same throughout. The intensity, depth and accountability build across three phases.

Phase One

Clear the Ground

Remove the noise. Build the baseline. Anchor the habits. Move daily. Cut the obvious crap from the food and the drink.

Weeks 1–4

Phase Two

Lay the Stones

Build real strength. Eat for hormones. Face the harder stuff — the stress, the home life, the identity work.

Weeks 5–8

Phase Three

Live It

Integrate. Make it permanent. Become the man your family already needs you to be.

Weeks 9–12

The Five Fronts

Everything holds each other up.

Change one front in isolation and it doesn't stick. Change all five together and the change becomes who you are.

Front One

Body

Three sessions a week. Home or gym. Strength, not punishment.

Front Two

Food

Wholefoods. Built for the body of a man 40+. No macro spreadsheets.

Front Three

Sleep

Protected, prioritised, treated like the cheat code it is.

Front Four

Drink

Tracked. Reduced. Honestly examined. Without judgement.

Front Five

Mind

Daily anchors. Weekly teaching. Brotherhood that keeps you accountable.

What You Get

What's included.

12 weeks of structured coaching delivered through the MyPTHub app
3 weekly training sessions with home and gym variants for every exercise
A wholefoods nutrition framework built for men's hormones, energy and muscle
The Eight Daily Anchors — habits tracked and reviewed each day
Weekly cohort Zoom call (60–90 minutes) — the deeper conversation
Direct messaging access to me throughout the programme
Weekly check-ins covering weight, sleep, drinking, training and habits
Before, mid-point and end-of-programme measurements and photos
The full Foundations handbook (printable PDF) to keep for life
The Lock-In list — the eight habits the rest of your life is built on
Brotherhood with four other men walking the same path at the same time

The Receipts

What success looks like.

Honest ranges based on the protocol I built on myself, scaled for a man starting from where most of my applicants are starting. Not guarantees — averages for men who do the work.

Metric	Likely	Strong outcome
Weight loss	4–6 kg	7–10 kg
Sleep gained	+45 mins / night	+1.5 hrs / night
Drinks reduced	50% cut	80%+ cut or fully off
Training frequency	1–2 → 3 sessions / week	Locked at 3+ sessions / week
Money saved	£100–200 / month	£300+ / month
Energy (self-rated)	+2 points out of 10	+3–4 points out of 10

Results vary. The work is yours. My job is to give you the structure, the protocol, and the men around you so you don't do it alone.

The Deeper Why

A word about why I'm doing this.

There's a lot of noise out there aimed at men right now. Most of it is loud, angry, and dressed up as strength. It tells you the answer to feeling lost is to dominate something — your body, your business, your wife, the next man in the room.

Foundations is not that. This is the quiet version. The one that says you're not lost because you're not enough — you're lost because you've spent too long performing instead of living. Working instead of being. Numbing instead of feeling.

When I came out the other side of my own rebuild, something else happened that I wasn't expecting. The body work cleared the noise — and underneath the noise was a man who actually knew what he wanted his life to be about. Not a five-year plan. Not a vision board. A genuine sense of purpose that had been waiting under the weight, the booze, and the corporate grind for fifteen years.

That's the thing nobody tells you about doing this work properly. You don't just get a leaner body and better sleep. You get yourself back. And once you've got yourself back, the question of what you're here for stops being a midlife crisis and becomes a quiet certainty.

The work isn't about becoming a different man. It's about coming back to the one you already are, underneath the years of grind, the bad sleep, the third pint on a Tuesday night.

You won't find six-pack guarantees here. You won't find motivational shouting. What you'll find is a path I've walked myself, in the company of other men walking it with you — built around the body first, because the body is where everything else lands. Purpose included.

Lean. Slept. Sober enough to be present. Clear about who you are and what you're here for. Back in your own life.

That's the promise. That's the work.

The Investment

The pilot price, and why.

This is the first formal Foundations cohort. I'm pricing it substantially below what future cohorts will cost, because the value to me of running this with the right five men — and documenting their transformations honestly — is worth more than the revenue.

Pilot Cohort · First 5 Men Only

£600

Future cohorts: ~~£2,000+~~

£50

Deposit on acceptance

£275

By July 1st (start)

£275

By Week 6

Deposit is non-refundable. It secures your spot and shows you're in. In return for the early-bird pricing, I'll ask you to commit fully, track your data honestly, and allow your results to be shared (named or anonymously, your choice) so I can help the next men who come looking.

The Process

How it works.

I'm not running a self-checkout. Every man who joins this cohort has a conversation with me first. That's how it should be.

Submit your application

Complete the short application form. Takes 5–10 minutes. Answer honestly — the depth of your answers tells me whether this is the right fit.

I review every application personally

Within 48 hours I'll reply. If it looks like a fit, we book a short discovery call.

The discovery call

15–20 minutes on the phone or Zoom. No sales pitch. We make sure this is the right thing for you at the right time. If it's not, I'll say so.

£50 deposit secures your spot

If we both agree it's a fit, I send you a secure payment link for the deposit. That's the moment you're in.

Onboarding before July 1st

You're set up on MyPTHub, sent your handbook, and the cohort meets virtually for an opening session before the programme officially begins.

The work begins

July 1st. Twelve weeks. Five men. Body, food, sleep, drink, mind. You and the men around you.

Honest Filter

Is this for you?

Foundations is not for everyone. It's not designed to be. The men who get the most from it are the ones who genuinely fit the shape below.

This is for you if

You're a man in his 40s or beyond, white-collar or self-employed
You're carrying weight you're not happy with
You're drinking more than you want to and you know it
You're sleeping badly and feeling tired most days
You're stressed at work and distant at home
You're ready to actually do the work — not just talk about it
You're open to a small group of other men walking it with you

This is not for you if

You're looking for a quick fix or a six-pack in eight weeks
You want motivational shouting and supplement stacks
You're not willing to look honestly at the drinking
You can't commit to weekly Zoom calls for 12 weeks
You're already exactly where you want to be — godspeed

The Man Leading It

About Ben.

Ben Shotton

Personal Trainer · Mindset Coach · Founder of Wild North

I'm Ben — 47, based in Gateshead, in the North East of England. Twenty-five years in the commercial vehicle and transport world before I left corporate life to build this work. I've trained as a personal trainer, a mindset coach and a meditation instructor through the Mindvalley programme.

I also run Bro's & Brews — a free monthly walk-and-talk men's community in Gateshead — which is where most of the men I now coach first met me.

I'm not interested in being a guru. I'm interested in helping the man I was a few years ago come back to himself, because that man matters — to himself, to his wife, to his kids, and to a culture that needs more of him present and fewer of him numbed out.