Oct 10
5
Advice from a Big Ballooned Personal Trainer
Hey there I hope you are doing great,
Today’s post is more about my life and some of the struggles I’ve been through but I promise you there will still be lessons in here to help you lose body fat without cardio and how to over come things when life doesn’t go the way it should.
(Please note that this is not a sob story, I’m not asking for sympathy. There are kids all over the world who have dealt with cancer,sickness and many other problems. This post is purely an insight into my life over the few years and the lessons I have learnt that I would like to share with you.)
Just under 2 weeks ago I went in for my 3rd knee operation, this operation was more of a clean up due to dislocating it in 2007 from playing football. So right now as I speak to you my knee is the size of a balloon.
I was the kind of kid who loved sports and always had a ball in my hand ever since I could well… walk. So to me sport was more important than anything – school, girls, and even sometimes family and friends.
Due to my love for sport I happened to pick up the art of AFL football pretty well. Anyways to cut a long story short I worked my absolute ass off to get into a representative football list in the TAC (remember that photo I showed you in the last post I did from training 2-3 hours a day, well that’s how badly I wanted to get into this team) – The TAC contains the best under 17 and 18 year old footballers in Victoria.
Anyways from pure hard work and determination I made the squad and played round one, and that was HUGE for me, I was one of about 4 sixteen year olds picked out of about 20 new kids to play round one. In fact it was pretty huge for the community. Teachers at school who I didn’t even know were coming up to me and wishing my well for my first game. I was even interviewed on a radio station about my story. I was literally living me dream!
In only my 3rd match I was playing in Bendigo on a cold, wet, winters day. I jumped up and landed awkwardly. I felt an enormous amount of pain; I looked down to find my knee cap sitting on the side of my leg. I tried to whack it back in but with no luck I had to wait for the doctor to put it back in on the ground.
My very first question I asked was “how long will I be out for?” I couldn’t care about anything else like “can I have some pain killers?” I just wanted to know how long it would take until I could play again, that’s how bad I wanted to play footy and play for this particular team. The reply was “the entire season”… I immediately broke down to tears and I was absolutely shattered. All those days were I was training for 3 hours went down the drain, just like that!
Eventually I got over it, did all the rehab and came back about 9 months later to have another crack at it for one last year. This time I trained my ass off again but I did it the smarter way by cutting my workouts to 45 minutes a day.
By cutting my workouts down to 45 minutes I eliminated the rise of a hormone known as cortisol which eats at muscle and stores body fat.
So now I had that more ‘harder’ look from having less body fat that I was carrying. I felt like this was going to be 
my year, I was strong fit and ready to go.
In my very first practice match back in the last 5 minutes of the game, I jumped up to catch the ball landed awkwardly and I immediately screamed at the top of my lungs because I instantly knew what had just happened ruined my life dreams.
The only thing I remember that day was the dead silence around the ground amongst the players and spectators as soon as I screamed out in pain. No one could believe that in a matter of 9 months apart I had dislocated both my knees and ended the 2 most important football seasons of my life.
I hit rock bottom and I mean literally rock bottom. I did more damage to the second knee so I was in bed for about 2 months and if felt like I was on crutches for like a year.
Through this period I had a bunch of people (even loved ones) saying…
- Maybe you should give up footy
- Maybe you should concentrate on your education
- Football isn’t going to pay the bills
At this point I had two choices…
1.) Listen to them and feel sorry for myself for the rest of my life
2.) Do something about it
I took option 2 and went for it, I knew that getting drafted now would be so slim but I didn’t want to write myself off.
First of all I told the people who tried to bring me down to…
Because the way I see it, if they were true friends then they would know that football meant everything to me so telling me to quit shows that they know nothing about me.
A lesson that I’ve learnt in order to have a strong mentality and have the feeling of being unstoppable is to avoid people who are energy suckers, vampires, and negative minded, non action bull shit talking people.
You don’t need them in your life they will always bring you down and never let you go where YOU want to go. They are like a bunch of crabs in a bucket, as soon as one crab climbs to the top of the bucket and as its just about to set himself free, all the other crabs cling on and pull him back down.
And this is the attitude I have set at my gym as well, if someone isn’t willing to do the work in AND outside the gym then I don’t want to call them a client. All they are doing is brining my gym and my other clients down to their level. And that’s not acceptable and you should not accept that as well when it comes to your life and dreams goals.
The second thing I did was trained, and trained, and trained, and trained.
Even though I hated cardio, I still did it because sometimes if not most of the time in life if you want to succeed you have to do the things you don’t want to do.
For you it may be eating healthy, using weights, lifting heavy or even hiring a personal trainer. But as the old saying goes “if that’s what ya gotta do, then that’s what ya gotta do” and that’s what my mentality has been like till today.
Some days I don’t want to run hill sprints, complete a finisher, do a superset of chinups and shoulder press, eat chicken and broccoli when the rest of my family and friends have McDonalds in front of me. But I know that each time I do these things it takes me one step closer to my goal.
See I don’t want to be ‘average’ I want to be ‘exceptional’ and that goes for everything – my blog, my gym, my body, my clients… literally everything. I’m not being arrogant or rude I’m just striving to be the best that I can be, and so should you.
Right now two weeks later after my surgery I’m back at training again, I’m not going balls to the wall but at least doing something coz since I have been doing very little to none the last month so my body is sitting at ‘average’ and I don’t want that.
And again people at the very minute are still telling me…
- Take it easy
- Don’t push it too hard
- You need to rest
My answer is “OK” and then I turn around and walk straight outside and do a set of chin ups.
If you take anything from this post make sure you leave with this…
1.) Set your goals high
2.) Ignore people who want to bring you down to their level
My goal at the moment is to look and feel better whilst still being injured – it’s crazy but I’m gonna give it a crack and do what ever it takes, even when the odds are against me.
I would like to know what your goals are, and how you are going to achieve them?
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