Find the oneconstraint cappingyour capacity.
Most tests hand you numbers. This one shows you how they connect. Your heart and lungs, your metabolism, your body composition and the way you move are read against how you actually live and work. The result names the Primary Constraint on your capacity, and the order in which to fix everything else.
If it tells you nothing you did not already know, say so before you leave and your £195 is returned that day.
Normal is not the same as capable.
A standard screen is built to detect disease. Plenty of men get a clean result and still cannot get through the week.
That is not a contradiction. Pathology and capacity are different questions, and only one of them is ever asked.
Why your judgement is worse at four than at ten.
Why you are short with people you are not angry at.
Why the training that worked at thirty-five stopped working.
Why you are managing your energy rather than spending it.
None of that is pathology. It is capacity falling below demand. The instinct is to push harder. Effort applied to an overloaded system only adds load.
The cost is already being paid. It is simply not itemised.
Reserve is what decision quality after three o'clock is made of. It is why the second hard day is out of reach, why the flight costs you the two days after it, and why the man chairing the four o'clock is not the one who chaired the nine.
The same reserve decides what is left after the last call, and whether the evening is spent present or spent recovering.
The long view is measurable too. In a JAMA meta-analysis, each one-MET increase in cardiorespiratory fitness was associated with a 13 per cent lower risk of death from any cause.[1] Lower fitness has also been linked to faster cognitive decline in adults followed for up to eighteen years.[2]
You have been paying this for years. The assessment is the first time anyone has shown you the invoice.
Dragging yourself through the day and needing the first two coffees before you are recognisably yourself.
Meet a demanding day with reserve still in hand, and have something left for the people who get you afterwards.
The four o'clock collapse, and the second wind at ten at night that costs you the following morning.
Hold the same judgement at the end of the day that you had at the start of it, and stop scheduling anything that matters before lunch.
Being unable to do it two days running, and paying for every flight and every heavy week with the days after it.
Absorb a bad night, a travel fortnight or a board week without losing the fortnight that follows it.
Attempts that end in week seven with a strain, a travel month, or the quiet conclusion that you lack discipline.
Train against the actual limit, in an order your week can carry, and stop starting again every eighteen months.
You would not restructure a business on instinct. You would read the accounts, find the constraint and aim the work at it. Your physiology is the asset every other asset depends on. The operators who last treat it the same way. They measure first, because you cannot fix a constraint you have not found.
Forty-five minutes. The how is below.
Four measurements. Nothing taken on your word.
Almost everything you have been told about your own health rests on what you reported: how you sleep, how you feel, how much you train. This is not that.
Your engine
Measured by seismocardiography on a CE-marked medical device. Your aerobic ceiling, benchmarked against your age and against what your role asks of you. No exertion, no mask, no treadmill. About three minutes, and you stay in your clothes.
Tells you whether your engine is the limit, or something else is.
What your weight is made of
Segmental analysis of lean mass, fat distribution, visceral fat, hydration and left-to-right balance. Your weight tells you almost nothing. This shows what it is made of and where it sits.
Tells you whether what you lose next is fat or the muscle doing the work.
How you burn fuel
Your resting metabolic rate, measured from your own breath by indirect calorimetry, against what your body should be using. Ten minutes seated with a mask. It shows whether you are under-fuelled or over-fed for your output, and whether the problem is what you eat or what your body does with it.
Tells you whether “eat less” was ever the right advice.
What limits your movement
A screen of restriction, asymmetry and load tolerance. What stops your training before effort does, and where injury risk currently sits.
Tells you what to load now, rather than finding out in week seven.
Plus your load history: sleep, travel, working pattern, alcohol and stress. Four things measured, one thing discussed.
Your GP has never given you this number.
VO2max is the volume of oxygen your body can use at full effort. It is the cleanest single measure of physical capacity there is, and it tracks closely with how long you stay capable rather than merely alive.
Until recently it needed a laboratory, a treadmill, a mask and a maximal effort, so it stayed in sports science.
Here it is measured at rest, from the mechanical signal of your own heartbeat, in about three minutes.
One reading places you reliably against men your age. Repeat it each quarter and the change you see is real signal, not noise.
What the scale actually looks like.
Millilitres per kilogram per minute · men 40 to 49 · taken from an anonymised report
Poor
An ordinary working day consumes everything available. The first hard day is survivable. The second is not attempted.
Forty-five minutes. All four measured in one sitting.
Every other test answers a different question.
None of these is a bad idea, and two of them we will tell you to do. They simply answer different questions, and only one of them answers yours.
| GP check-up | Executive health screen | Wearable ring or watch | Capacity Assessment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The question it answers | Is anything clinically wrong today? | Is anything clinically wrong, in more detail? | What did my body do last night? | What can my body currently carry, and what is capping it? |
| What it measures | Blood pressure, bloods, and the symptoms you report. | Bloods, imaging and cardiac screening, sometimes a treadmill test. | Sleep, heart rate and a readiness score, estimated from sensors on a wrist or finger. | VO2max, metabolic rate, body composition and movement, measured directly by instrument in one sitting. |
| What you leave with | Reassurance, or a referral. | A results pack, usually with no view on your capacity. | A daily number, and no idea which lever moves it. | Your results read back in the room, and a written report within 48 hours naming the one constraint holding the rest down. |
| What you own afterwards | Notes on your medical record. | A results pack formatted for the provider. | Data inside an app you rent, which stops when the subscription does. | A document that is yours, usable by your GP, whoever trains you, or nobody at all. |
| Typical outlay | Free on the NHS. | Typically £850 to £1,150. | Around £350 up front, then a monthly subscription. | £195, once. Credited in full against anything that follows within fourteen days. |
The question it answers
GP check-up
Is anything clinically wrong today?
Executive health screen
Is anything clinically wrong, in more detail?
Wearable ring or watch
What did my body do last night?
Capacity Assessment
What can my body currently carry, and what is capping it?
What it measures
GP check-up
Blood pressure, bloods, and the symptoms you report.
Executive health screen
Bloods, imaging and cardiac screening, sometimes a treadmill test.
Wearable ring or watch
Sleep, heart rate and a readiness score, estimated from sensors on a wrist or finger.
Capacity Assessment
VO2max, metabolic rate, body composition and movement, measured directly by instrument in one sitting.
What you leave with
GP check-up
Reassurance, or a referral.
Executive health screen
A results pack, usually with no view on your capacity.
Wearable ring or watch
A daily number, and no idea which lever moves it.
Capacity Assessment
Your results read back in the room, and a written report within 48 hours naming the one constraint holding the rest down.
What you own afterwards
GP check-up
Notes on your medical record.
Executive health screen
A results pack formatted for the provider.
Wearable ring or watch
Data inside an app you rent, which stops when the subscription does.
Capacity Assessment
A document that is yours, usable by your GP, whoever trains you, or nobody at all.
Typical outlay
GP check-up
Free on the NHS.
Executive health screen
Typically £850 to £1,150.
Wearable ring or watch
Around £350 up front, then a monthly subscription.
Capacity Assessment
£195, once. Credited in full against anything that follows within fourteen days.
Figures are typical UK prices, checked September 2026.
If you have not had a GP check in some years, have that. If something clinical is worrying you, a screen is the right tool, and this is not a substitute for either. Neither will tell you why the second hard day is out of reach.
The one question the others do not ask.
Forty-five minutes in the room. A report you keep either way.
The forty-five minutes are short because the method behind them took ten years to build.
Assessment
The four measurements, plus your load history. The metabolic reading is taken seated with a mask for around ten minutes, so most of the conversation happens around it rather than during it.
Interpretation
Your results read back to you against the relevant benchmarks: which systems are under most strain, and what that is costing you in practical terms. This is the part that matters.
What follows
What addressing it would involve, in sequence. If that is of no interest, we stop there.
Within 48 hours you receive a written report: your measured results, your benchmarks, the systems under strain, and the order in which to address them.
It is written so someone else can act on it. Benchmarks are named, methods are stated, and every figure says what it can and cannot tell you.
No portal, no subscription, no login that expires. It is a document, and it is yours. There is no follow-up sequence and nobody will chase you.
The assessment is not the first step of a programme. It is the step that tells you whether a programme is even the answer.
Where the report can go from here
Four options, and three of them do not involve us. That is deliberate. A measurement you can only act on with the person who took it is not a measurement. It is a sales tool.
Written so a clinician can read it. The waist, visceral and metabolic figures are the ones worth raising, and the report says so.
Restrictions, load tolerance and aerobic position, in terms whoever writes your programming can build against tomorrow.
Each finding carries the order it should be addressed in. Most men could run the first four weeks from the report alone.
An option, not the point. If you want it, your £195 is held against it for fourteen days.
The report is included, and it is yours to keep.
Built for men whose performance has consequences.
You will recognise yourself in at least two of these.
You run something: a company, a team, a portfolio, or a family that depends on you.
Other people's decisions rest on your judgement still being sound at four o'clock.
You have tried to fix this before, and you suspect the problem was never effort.
You would rather know the number than be told you are doing well.
Founders, directors, executives, investors and senior operators, and the fathers among them. Men whose energy, judgement and reliability carry other people.
Anyone looking for a diet or a training plan to follow. Anyone who wants encouragement rather than information. If that is you, you are free to spend the £195 elsewhere, and you probably should.
For men who would rather be measured than motivated.
Every assessment is run by the same person.
I spent ten years on performance: in the military, in elite sport, and alongside executives. One gap kept appearing. There was nothing built for the men at or near the top of an organisation, where falling capacity shows up first in the numbers, then in their health, and finally in a sense of being disconnected from who they used to be.
I built Optimised Male to close that gap: to put a man back in control of his own biology, and to build his capacity until he is no longer the handbrake on the thing he runs.
I conduct every assessment myself, at both locations, because the person reading your results back to you should be the person who took them. There is no associate, no junior and no handover.
Sam Cleaver
Founder, Optimised Male
Studying towards an MSc in Performance Nutrition at the University of Portsmouth. Qualified applied nutrition and supplementation consultant.
Trained on the Seismofit, Tanita and indirect calorimetry equipment by qualified practitioners in each.
Ten years in performance, across the military, elite sport and the boardroom.
From directors, operators and board members who have sat in the chair.
Names withheld: the men this is built for do not put their health in public, and we would not ask them to. Every statement is genuine, on file and used with written consent.
This is the fourth time I have tried to get on top of this. It is the first time anyone measured anything before telling me what to do. Forty-five minutes and I understood why the other three stopped.
I went in expecting to be told to sleep more and drink less. What I got was a number that explained why I have not been able to do two hard days in a row since my early forties. I had put that down to the job.
The report told me my constraint was recovery, not effort. I stopped adding training and fixed my week instead. Three months on, I can do the Tuesday and the Wednesday, which I could not do before.
Same chair. Same forty-five minutes.
Why the diary is the constraint, not the price.
I conduct every assessment in person, at one of two locations, around a coaching diary that is already committed. The equipment does not travel and nothing is delegated, which puts a hard ceiling on how many happen in a week.
Across both locations, Monday to Friday. Some weeks hold fewer, and when the week is full the next opening is the following week.
City of London and Canary Wharf. Days differ by location, and the live diary shows what is actually open.
Your £195 is held against any engagement begun within fourteen days of the assessment. After that, it lapses.
Laboratory VO2max testing, indirect calorimetry and segmental body composition are each typically a three-figure appointment on their own, at three different clinics, with nobody reading them together.
The assessment is not the business model. It exists so that any work that follows, with us or with anyone, is aimed at the right constraint. It is priced so the decision is about your time, not your money.
A quarter spent waiting is not a neutral quarter. It is another three months of the same afternoons, run on the same unmeasured system, with the same conclusion drawn about your discipline at the end of it. Start the next one measured.
Nothing here is a countdown and no place is being held for you. The diary is simply small, and it fills in the order people book.
The London location. Forty-five minutes, in and out. Most men come at lunchtime.
Before advice, you measure.
Forty-five minutes. £195. City of London or Canary Wharf.
Two short steps: your details, then your time and payment. Your £195 is held against any engagement begun within fourteen days.
If it tells you nothing, you do not pay for it.
Sit through the forty-five minutes. If, at the end of it, the measurements and the interpretation have told you nothing you did not already know about yourself, say so before you leave and the £195 is returned in full, that day.
You still receive the report either way. No form, no conditions, no conversation about why. The only thing asked of you is that you say it to my face rather than by email a fortnight later.
This is offered because the risk here is genuinely mine, not yours. If the measurements do not tell you something useful, they were not worth taking.
Is it physically demanding?
No. VO2max is measured at rest in about three minutes, the metabolic reading is taken seated, and the movement screen asks no more of you than a warm-up. You can come straight from a meeting.
How should I prepare?
Eat dinner as normal the evening before, then nothing until your assessment. Water is fine, and no training that morning. The metabolic reading measures your resting energy use, and both food and training distort it. Full instructions come with your confirmation.
Is this a medical test?
No. It measures capacity, not disease, and it does not replace your GP. If anything in your results needs a clinician's eyes, you will be told so plainly, and the report is written so your GP can read it.
What happens to my data?
Your results are health information, the only sensitive category we process. They are used to produce your report and handled exactly as the privacy notice sets out.
What if I need to move my appointment?
Move it freely up to 24 hours before, using the link in your confirmation. Inside 24 hours the fee is not refunded, but it stays credited against a future appointment.
What if it tells me nothing new?
Say so before you leave and your £195 is returned that day. You still receive the report either way.
One more thing. Whatever the results say, they are yours, in writing, with nobody chasing you afterwards. The worst outcome available here is forty-five minutes spent confirming what you already knew, and your £195 back. Every other outcome is better than that.