Finlay has been a professional golfer since 1994 and is a member of the PGA. He suffered shoulder and spine injuries which hampered his ability to play and like a number of his colleagues at The Movement Studio, he has used the personal experience of physical injury to forge a second career as a wellness practitioner.
Through the practice of Gyrotonic® and Gyrokinesis® Finlay brought himself back to full health and enhanced skill and he uses this hard-won experience every day to help fellow sportsman, performers and ordinary members of the public to find lasting pain relief, increased strength and flexibility – and for those that need it, enhanced results in their chosen fields of endeavour.
Finlay has been wholly absorbed by the science of biomechanics for more than 30 years. He caught the golfing bug as a teenager and resolved himself to become a professional golfer. For him, this was a journey of studying a vast array of approaches to improving human performance and to question its very essence.
After leaving University, where he’d immersed himself in the emerging Sports Sciences, he threw himself into a technique led crusade to better performance – it was an experience of diminishing returns. Finlay began to lose trust in himself and the intuitive skills and self-awareness that had made him such a fine young prospect in the first place.
2 events fundamentally changed him and help rediscover his calling. The first was a shoulder and spine injury and the other meeting a kindred spirit and pioneering coach, Kendall McWade.
His injuries and subsequent lack of good rehabilitation drastically altered how he played. It became clear to him that in order to achieve full fitness and skill level a much more focused approach was necessary. It was at this point that he discovered Gyrotonic and Gyrokinesis.
Of Kendal, Finlay says; ” helped me trust my own instincts and abilities again and more crucially though, he also impressed upon me the example of a true teacher as someone who will guide and lead a student to make their own discoveries. And that is something I carry with me to this day in terms of my own approach to improving physical ability.”
Injury effectively called time on his personal golfing ambitions but, he says; “It was then I realised that my vocation was really, not to pursue my own dreams of glory but rather to help other people. It dawned on me that as good as I was at golf I had had other, more personally rewarding, things to offer – skills and experience that could make a profound impact on the lives of other people.”
Having finally found his true calling, a decade on, Finlay Menzies is widely renowned as a leading practitioner in the disciplines of Gyrokinesis and Gyrotonic, with a specific expertise in dealing with sporting and general injuries, long-standing pain issues and conditions such as sciatica, frozen shoulder, scoliosis and arthritis. He worked with Scottish Ballet for 11 years – rehabilitating dancers or working on optimising performance movements. With his vast practical experience of fine motor control, honed on the golf course and as a professional golf instructor, Finlay brings the drive to help others and a wealth of technical know-how to his role as a founder and highly respected member of The Movement Studio team.
