Sam Purchase.
Strength and conditioning coach, and the only coach at Chase Health & Performance in Grafton, Auckland. ASCA Level 2 accredited, a decade coaching privately, and a PhD in progress at AUT’s SPRINZ developing new methods for athletic assessment.
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One person at a time.
I’ve spent the last decade coaching people one at a time. Athletes chasing a season, professionals rebuilding after years at a desk, and everyone in between. Most of that has happened on a private floor, where I can watch every rep and adjust in the moment.
That’s a deliberate choice rather than a limitation. A programme written in advance is a guess, and it stops being right the moment your week, your body or your season does something unexpected. Being in the room means I see that happen and change it on the spot, instead of finding out about it a fortnight later.
The through-line has never changed: training built around the person in front of me, and coaching that makes you more capable, not more dependent. If you still need me in five years to know what to do in a gym, I haven’t done my job.
Qualifications and background.
Coaching backed by a decade of applied work in private, performance and team environments, and the first-hand research experience to ground the methods behind it.
- ASCA Level 2 — accredited strength and conditioning coach with the Australian Strength and Conditioning Association.
- Master of Sport, Exercise and Health (MSEH) — Auckland University of Technology, through SPRINZ.
- Bachelor of Sport and Recreation (BSR), majoring in sport and exercise science — Auckland University of Technology.
- PhD in progress — SPRINZ, Auckland University of Technology, developing new methods for athletic assessment. Supervised by Dr. Adam Storey. ORCID 0009-0000-9709-6114.
- Applied strength and conditioning in national-level team environments, alongside the private floor.
Research behind the coaching.
The PhD sits with SPRINZ — the Sports Performance Research Institute New Zealand, AUT’s sport performance research institute, and one of the longer-established groups of its kind. My supervisor is Dr. Adam Storey. The work itself is on athletic assessment: how you actually measure what an athlete can do, and how you tell a real change from noise. It’s unglamorous and it matters, because every programming decision downstream rests on whether the assessment underneath it meant anything.
It also keeps me honest. Coaching attracts a lot of confident claims, and being in the literature every week is a good way of finding out which of the things you believed are actually supported. What reaches the floor here is what survives that.
“Training with Sam has been a game changer… He doesn’t just tell you what to do; he explains why it matters, ensuring every session is purposeful and effective.”
On the record.
I joined episode 3 of the ENDUROX podcast with Dr. Dan Plews and Dr. Adam Storey — one a client of mine, the other my PhD supervisor — talking about assessment, training design, and where the research actually meets the floor.
Start a conversation.
Tell me what you’re after and how your week actually looks. The first session is free, and there’s nothing attached to it.
Elsewhere: LinkedIn, ORCID and Instagram, and ENDUROX ep. 3.