About Coach Paul

Paul Kuck is one of Singapore’s Most Experienced Personal Trainers / Coaches with over 25 years of coaching and transforming clients. Highly versatile and excellent communication skills are some of personal traits that differentiate him. Being the leading expert in the field of fitness and nutrition, he’s authored or appeared in countless articles published locally and internationally (eg Menshealth, Straits Time, Shape, AsiaFit, Zaobao, Law Gazette).

As a Medical Personal Trainer, he develops safe and effective fitness and conditioning programs for clients with health challenges like musculoskeletal (eg back pain), neurological (eg muscle weakness), metabolic (eg diabetes) and cardiovascular conditions (eg heart diseases).

As a speaker, he only delivers most updated nutrition and fitness contents, not run-of-the-mills or outdated/misleading information like ‘food cholesterol is bad for health’ [1,2,3,4,20,21,22] messages. 

As an avid athlete, he has competed and won top places in different sports, from soccer to track and field to bodybuilding, making him an all-rounder.

Professional Credentials

• Master’s Degree in Exercise and Nutrition Science from the University of Chester (UK) / Liverpool (UK). Top in the cohort.

• ‘Gold’ Certified Medical Exercise Specialist from American Council on Exercise (only Singaporean with this prestige credential). First S’porean to be earn this. (Note: ACE is an NCCA-accredited fitness certifying body. This is an important differentiation between various fitness certifications, only the highest quality ones bear this distinctive mark.)

• Certified Weight Loss / Weight Management Specialist by the American Council on Exercise

• Certified Scrum Master (NUS/ISS/SA).

  • Note: A scrum master is a facilitator for a product development team that uses scrum, an agile development methodology that allows a team to self-organize and make changes quickly. As the only fitness trainer globally with this specialised skill, he can design, quickly adapt and make an alteration to a client’s routine on the spot, rather than rigidly following a routine. Why is this important? A human’s body capability fluctuates on a constant basis, without making appropriate adjustments, the body could be over or under-pushing itself.

• Lecturer, Sports Singapore’s Fitness Instructor and other Professional Fitness Courses, certifying thousands of coaches.

• Specialist in disease (cancer, heart disease, diabetes, joint pain, stroke etc) management

• Expert in advanced-level thinking: Systems Thinking, Synergism, Theory-of-Constraints, 80/20 rule etc

• Professional Member, American Council on Exercise since 1998

• Professional Member, Scrum Alliance

• CPR and AED Certified

• Over 25 years of professional coaching & over 40 years of personal fitness experiences

• Paul is highly critical of the latest research presented, even if appeared in reputable journals. He is first to debunk/promote ideas which have been lately proven true. Examples:

  • For:

    • use of creatine and caffeine for health and sports. [5,6,7,8]

    • use of high-intensity exercise (e.g. Tabata, Crossfit, resistance training) for fitness and fat-loss. He was the original proponent of various high-intensity training methods and implemented them way back in the 80s & 90s (in fact, it was his Master’s Degree thesis topic) and in recent years it has begun to spread like wild-fire to become one of the most a widely-used training methods in the fitness industry. [9,10,11,12]

  • Against:

    • old theory of exercising at least for 20 minutes for fat-loss. Some old-schools still believe in this ineffective theory. [13]

    • never dying theory of high protein, low carbs diet (tends to manifest in various names like Atkins and Paleo diets which are dead/dying down and now the Ketone diet, which although have some limited medical use but not for long sustainable weight loss or health [14,15,16].

    • use of sports-enhancement drugs like steroids due to many health complications.[17,18,19].

    • a theory that foods containing cholesterol will cause high blood cholesterol. Cholesterol is produced by our body NOT directly from food.[20,21,22]

He is not your armchair fitness theoretician who has only academic background or typical gym trainer with pseudo-knowledge that are derived from own training, hearsay, latest fad or references to muscle magazines (usually not supported by research). His approach is strongly based on scientific studies and extensive experience.

Paul has been cited by HealthToday as “the authority of fitness and health in the region”. Global Fitness, an international leading fitness management company, considers him a “world-class trainer”. And here are some comments from professionals about him:

Prof Michael Hor, Former Law Dean at NUS: “..even more striking is Paul’s absolute commitment and dedication to his work… It will be difficult to find someone else like Paul”;

Read more testimonials

Humble beginning…

When young, he had a ‘fat but thin’ and sickly body with possibly the worst genetics for physical activities. He read fitness books at an age of 7 (p/s: he was talking about biceps and pectorals while other kids were still playing with the latest remote-controlled cars, game cards etc), started flirting with exercise equipment and competed in sports. Years later, he transformed himself into a superfit teenager. He even won a 2nd runners-up position in the National Bodybuilding Competition (under 20).

How’s that for a real-life ‘ugly duckling’ story?

Later…

Fast-forwarding to adulthood, he actually ended up in the wrong track (he studied engineering and became a product designer in the early stages which later set a solid foundation for his fitness career in a few ways: good understanding of mechanical and movement science coupled with the mental stress relating to the corporate work) but continued his passion for fitness.

Didn’t quite enjoy his engineering jobs, he decided to enter into the fitness industry. He started by acquiring a list of fitness certifications and a Master’s Degree in Exercise and Nutrition from Liverpool (2002), trained a few clients and dramatically transformed their body, health and fitness. He never looked back.

Now…constantly updating, adapting and changing

Coaching based on Science: putting theories into practice, and practice into systems

Many fitness junkies know a handful of exercises, but he invents exercises and creates new routines, and integrates them with various theories (eg 80/20 rule) seamlessly into his clients’ lives.

Paul adopts an Agile approach, all grounded in Science, in his coaching and business practices which has led to tremendous success to his clients and himself. Drawing from his many years of experience working in different industries, such as serving in small elite special units in Army, IT, Engineering etc, they have become highly-valued skills in which he puts them into practice on daily basis. To further his knowledge of understanding processes and productivity, he has recently become certified as a Scrum Master, a highly recognized credential in the IT industry.

In commercial settings, many fitness professionals (as well as self-taught experts) are taught to stick to certain fixed training methods, where exercise routines and diet plans are rigidly used (maybe slight modifications) on clients regardless of changes (eg hydration/nutrition status, sickness, age, background, temperature, mental/physical fatigue, goals, pain, motivation) occurring on a day-to-day basis. Hence, a typical trainer employs a ‘waterfall’ working method, where the planning and execution phases have little provision for errors. Such inflexibility have often resulted in massive wastage and poor productivity in other industries. In the fitness context, this can potentially cause a lack of progress, boredom, serious injuries and even deaths!

By anticipating unforeseeable changes he constantly modifies and renews his training routines and working process (eg eat-on-demand, natural-kinetic-exercises) to meet them while sticking to original set goals, he ensures that risks and poor outcomes are highly mitigated. This is the true art of personalised training!

Always turning back the clock…

Has Paul found the anti-ageing formula? He might have. Instead of feeling and growing older by the day, he feels he’s getting younger (though there are some subtle tell-tale signs that betray his age)!

He is now passed 50 (as on 2022) yet his overall fitness is better than 99% of guys half his age. And not just that. With a little focused training, he can still surpass most of his previous fitness achievements he had once attained (e.g. scoring perfect scores for IPPT, strength, speed, body shape etc).

And he has done so without training frantically every day nor needs to use dangerous chemical agents which are often used by those who are seeking quick results, ignoring the harmful side effects. What’s fascinating is that his current total training hours a week is less than 3 hours! Now compare this to those who need to train at least 3 hours a day, every day (total hours a week: 27 hours)!

He knows that in order to achieve a great body and fitness, smart training and work ethics are important. He fully understands the concepts of leveraging, systemizing and synergism, and integrates them successfully to all his programs and work. His scientific techniques are fast capturing the attention of trainers around the world as clients demand faster results with little time commitment.

Some of his creations:

• Body-Transformation-Programs

• Health-Transformation-Programs

• YouthAgain™

• Natural-Kinetic-Exercises

• Be a Walking Gym

• Eat-On-Demand

• Energy Management for Personal Excellence

Paul also implemented weight management workshops and programs for schools and companies in the 90s, long before many people understand the meaning of ‘weight management’.

References

1. Hu, F.B., et al., Dietary fat intake and the risk of coronary heart disease in women. N Engl J Med, 1997. 337(21): p. 1491-9.

2. Kratz, M., Dietary cholesterol, atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease. Handb Exp Pharmacol, 2005(170): p. 195-213.

3. Hu, F.B., et al., A prospective study of egg consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease in men and women. JAMA, 1999. 281(15): p. 1387-94.

4. Fernandez, M.L., Dietary cholesterol provided by eggs and plasma lipoproteins in healthy populations. Curr Opin Clin Nutr Metab Care, 2006. 9(1): p. 8-12.

5.  Beis LY, et al The effects of creatine and glycerol hyperhydration on running economy in well-trained endurance runners. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. (2011)

6. Terjung RL, et al American College of Sports Medicine roundtable. The physiological and health effects of oral creatine supplementation.Med Sci Sports Exerc. (2000)

7. Cox GR, et al Effect of different protocols of caffeine intake on metabolism and endurance performance. J Appl Physiol. (2002)

8. Magkos F, Kavouras SA Caffeine use in sports, pharmacokinetics in man, and cellular mechanisms of action. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr. (2005)

9. King, J.W. A comparison of the effects of interval training vs. continuous training on weight loss and body composition in obese premenopausal women (thesis). East Tennessee State University, 2001

10. Talanian, J.L., et al. Two weeks of high-intensity aerobic interval training increases the capacity for fat oxidation during exercise in women. Journal of Applied Physiology 102(4):1,439-1,447, 2007.

11. Trapp, E.G., Boutcher, S.H. Fat loss following 15 weeks of high-intensity, intermittent cycle ergometer training. Obesity Reviews 341, 2006.

12. Schmidt, W.D., Biwer, C.J., & Kalscheuer, L.K. (2001). Effects of long versus short bout exercise on fitness and weight loss in overweight females. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 20, 494-501

13. Jakicic, J.M., Wing, R.R., Butler, B.A., & Robertson, R.J. (1995). Prescribing exercise in multiple short bouts versus one continuous bout: effects on adherence, cardiorespiratory fitness, and weight loss in overweight women. International Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders, 19, 893-901

14. Golay A, et al Similar weight loss with low- or high-carbohydrate diets . Am J Clin Nutr. (1996)

15. Leibel RL, et al Energy intake required to maintain body weight is not affected by wide variation in diet composition . Am J Clin Nutr. (1992)

16. Golay A, et al Weight-loss with low or high carbohydrate diet . Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. (1996)

17. Gregory AJM, et al. Sports medicine: Performance-enhancing drugs. Pediatric Clinics of North America. 2007;54:797.

18. Snyder PJ. Use of androgens and other hormones to enhance athletic performance. http://www.uptodate.com/index. Accessed Sept. 15, 2012.

19. Carpenter PC. Performance-enhancing drugs in sport. Endocrinology and Metabolism Clinics of North America. 2007;36:481.

20. Pearce KL, Clifton PM, Noakes M Egg consumption as part of an energy-restricted high-protein diet improves blood lipid and blood glucose profiles in individuals with type 2 diabetes. Br J Nutr. (2011)

21. Goodrow EF, et al Consumption of one egg per day increases serum lutein and zeaxanthin concentrations in older adults without altering serum lipid and lipoprotein cholesterol concentrations . J Nutr. (2006)

22. Vishwanathan R, et al Consumption of 2 and 4 egg yolks/d for 5 wk increases macular pigment concentrations in older adults with low macular pigment taking cholesterol-lowering statins . Am J Clin Nutr. (2009