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Zoë Salim | Strength Coach

@essentialift_coaching

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Strength coach for the mind and body.
I’ll get you lifting heavy, then we’ll settle your nervous system.
DM “STRONG” to enquire.

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My Story👇🏼

Hi, I’m a twin mum who loves to lift heavy 🤍

My journey with fitness didn’t start in the gym.
It started with loss that turned in to survival .

💍 👶🏻 ❤️‍🩹 3/4
I got married,
then I had my first daughter —
who was stillborn. This is when I started to fall in love with strength training.

That loss stayed with me
in ways words couldn’t explain.

🤰👬5/6
Later, I became pregnant with twins.

Becoming a mum again held both joy and fear,
and it changed how I related to my body
and my strength.

🇸🇩 🫀7/8
I chose to move to Sudan
so my children could grow up connected
to their culture.

When the war broke out, we had to flee.
Life didn’t fall apart —
but everything became deeply unsettled.

I was already strength training then.

The patience, discipline, and resilience
I’d learned in the gym
helped me cope with uncertainty
and find a sense of normality again.

💪🏼🫁9.. & the rest
Through training, I learned this:

For me, strength training isn’t about aesthetics.
It’s about resilience.
It’s about showing up —
steadily, consistently, and with care.

That’s when fitness becomes more than training.

Not about pushing women harder —
but about supporting them through real life,
grief, change, and growth.

Today, I help people:
• reconnect with their bodies
• build strength without burnout
• train in a way that feels supportive and sustainable by @essentialift_coaching

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8 months ago

Three things worth knowing:

Three months to start, so we have long enough for it to work. After that it runs month to month.

Sessions are booked monthly. We aim to fit them all in and they don’t carry into the next month, because consistency is what makes the programming do its job.

And if your week goes sideways and you miss a session, you’ll still have programming. Nothing falls apart while life is busy.

If you’re not sure which one fits, message me and tell me what you’re after. I’ll tell you honestly what I’d suggest, including if it’s neither.

DM the word STRONG.

Zoë by @essentialift_coaching

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2 months ago

We have a strange relationship with our own strength.

We carry a 10kg toddler on our hip… or in some cases a 10kg toddler on each hip. We haul the shopping in one trip. We pick up a tired child who suddenly can’t walk at the worst possible moment.

And then we walk into the gym and reach for the 6kg dumbbells.

Here’s what I want you to know: the weight of your child is your baseline. Not your ceiling.

(Quick caveat: some movements need reintroduction before load matters, squats especially, because we actually hinge more than we squat in daily life. Technique first, always, but once it’s there, the strength builds quickly.)

What I see most in the women I work with isn’t a strength deficit. It’s a strength blind spot. We have been taught for a long time and in a lot of ways to downplay how capable we are. To soften it. Sometimes we’ve done it so long we don’t even realise we’re doing it.

Walking into a weights room and feeling overwhelmed by the numbers? That’s often the result of our conditioning growing up.

The work I do starts with picking up heavy things but it doesn’t end there. Picking up heavy things is where we start. Understanding why you’ve been underestimating yourself is where it gets interesting. by @essentialift_coaching

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4 months ago

Every session with my clients starts with scapular retractions, demonstrated here with my maman 💛

Imagine squeezing a pencil between your shoulder blades, then spreading them as far apart as you can, keeping your arms straight the whole time. It looks small, but learning to control your shoulder blades shows up in almost everything we do: squats, deadlifts, rows and presses.

Not everyone starts on all fours. If the movement feels hard to find, that’s normal. Here’s how we build it:
1️⃣ Hands against a wall
2️⃣ All fours (what you see here, after a few cat-cows)
3️⃣ Kneeling plank
4️⃣ Full plank

Start wherever your body can feel it, then progress. If you can’t feel it yet, that’s information for you to take note of, not failure. Some clients move from the wall to the floor within a session or two once the connection clicks.

As we move towards menopause, stiff, achy shoulders become more common for women, so keeping these joints moving matters more, not less. A few slow reps each morning is a lovely place to start.

Try it tomorrow morning and tell me how it felt 👇

#strengthtraining #womensstrength #menopausefitness #shouldermobility #hackneypt essentialift by @essentialift_coaching

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12 days ago

If you’ve been watching what I do here and wondering what it would actually look like for you, that’s the question I want you to ask.

DM STRONG and we’ll go through the options. In person or online, whichever fits your week. by @essentialift_coaching

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a month ago

This is my mum and me doing 90/90s to keep her hips mobile.

I’m sharing it because I’m proud of her, but also because I want more people doing this exercise. And I want to be honest about why it matters so much to us right now.

My mum has been diagnosed with bone degradation and will need a hip replacement soon. She has told me she is ok with me sharing this.

We’ve had to modify her workouts, and we still do 90/90s to keep everything moving, and we’re working to preserve as much as we can as she moves towards a hip replacement.

So here’s what I want to say to you.

Please start lifting weights. I know it can feel daunting, and that’s exactly why it’s worth working with a trainer at first. If you walk into a gym, pick up a weight and you’ve never been shown proper technique, you might hurt yourself and hate it. A good coach builds your confidence and keeps you safe while you learn.

Expect your muscles to hurt at first. That soreness (DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness) is normal. It doesn’t mean stop. It means recover, then go back. As your body adapts it eases off, and for women it often settles faster than you’d think.

So please go to the gym. Lift weights. Eat your protein. Eat your fibre. Yes, we want to look good, but I want to leave you with this message.

You can always buy new clothes.

You can’t buy a new hip.

If you want help getting started, DM me. by @essentialift_coaching

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4 months ago

I had a consultation yesterday with a new client who told me what drew her to my coaching was the focus on getting strong. Not on shrinking. Not on a six-week shred. On getting strong, training well, and building a body that holds up.

That conversation reminded me why I do this work the way I do it.

I’m a teacher. Before I coached, I taught in secondary schools for 10 years! I can’t help myself, I still teach. I want my clients to understand what their body is doing, why we’re doing it, and how to trust themselves with it. Strength isn’t something I create for you. It’s something I help you learn.

I’m also an empathetic coach, not a sympathetic one. Most of the women I work with already expect a lot from themselves. They apologise. They push. They turn up tired and try to make up for it. My job isn’t to demand more — it’s to teach them well, and to remind them, often, that they’re already doing enough. That they’re amazing. That the work is in the doing, not in the punishing.

Finally, in all honesty, your time is precious. You shouldn’t be spending it with a coach you don’t enjoy being around. Pick someone you want to learn from. Someone whose voice you want in your ear when you’re tired or stuck. That’s the coach who’ll actually move you forward.

If that’s the kind of coaching you’ve been looking for — you know where to find me. 🤍

#strengthcoach #womenwholift #londoncoach #femalestrengthcoach #essentialift by @essentialift_coaching

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5 months ago

Friday vibes ✨ A beautifully simple session.

Bar holds as I’m learning pull ups (still fighting that swing 😅), front squats (minus my lifters this week), these need work, it’s been a while, bench press gains, and finishing strong on the bike with some Devil May Cry.

My coach @sachalucas_ put this together. Simple, effective and focussed.
A few solid lifts, done well, beats a complicated program every time. In, out, and genuinely enjoying yourself!

When I coach my clients I meet them where they are. For some this will be enough. For others we pair movements. However simple over complex and always good form! by @essentialift_coaching

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5 months ago

Leg extension’s down!

These are up. Kneeling reverse nordics or harder… standing ones—no momentum, no hiding, just your quads against gravity. I swear every rep of the standing ones because they’re that hard, and that’s the point.

You can use the wall for light support like I do. Once you trust the movement, drop the support and own it. One solid set beats ten easy reps on a machine any day.

Look, I believe in nervous system regulation and I weave Reiki into sessions—but I’m still a strength coach. I want you to get really strong!

Also - these are so hard that you really can’t think about much else other than squeezing your glutes to get back up!
#womenwholift #strengthtraining #holistichealthcoach # by @essentialift_coaching

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4 months ago

In December 2018, my daughter was stillborn at full term.
The pregnancy had been textbook. Then, without warning, there was no heartbeat.
What I want to talk about isn’t the loss itself — it’s the quiet, extraordinary work of the charity that made those first hours bearable.
When you’re told your baby has died, you can’t think. You can’t plan. You certainly can’t advocate for the version of yourself who’ll exist years from now. This is where Sands steps in.
At the hospital, we were given a memory box. Inside were small, carefully chosen things — a way to capture our daughter’s footprints, her handprints, a lock of her hair, photographs. Someone had already done that work for us.
Years later, I have those memories. I have her tiny footprints. I have proof that she was here. That gift is genuinely invaluable.
Sands supports anyone affected by the death of a baby — before, during, or shortly after birth. They provide bereavement support in hospitals across the UK, fund research into why babies die, and run helplines, peer support, and resources for families navigating pregnancy after loss. Something I went through myself, six months later, when I fell pregnant with my twins.
This May, I’m running 50km across the month to raise £1,500 for Sands.
Any amount helps fund the memory boxes, the helplines, the research, and the steady presence Sands offers to families on the worst days of their lives.
If you can give, please do. If you can share, please do that too. 🤍 by @essentialift_coaching

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5 months ago

Most women I meet are carrying something.
Grief, burnout, stress that’s compounded over years, a body that’s been through a lot. And most training plans pretend none of that exists.
The clients I do my best work with want to get genuinely strong — and they need a coach who gets that what your body can handle today isn’t always what it could handle yesterday.
We lift. We breathe. We adapt to the human who showed up that day.
In-person (RNGD gym deBeauvoir) and online spots open. DM me to chat.
#strengthtrainingforwomen #nervoussystemregulation #traumainformedcoaching #hackneypt #onlinepersonaltrainer by @essentialift_coaching

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5 months ago

Come watch me coach my mum through her first dumbbell RDLs — she’s 78 and she is doing the work.
Wall behind her, hinge back, find the hamstring stretch — and yes, I will be telling her to feel her glutes spread. It works. Don’t knock it.
Watch until the end.
#StrengthCoaching #RDL #WomenWhoLift #LondonPT #MovementCues by @essentialift_coaching

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7 months ago