S01E01 - The Beginning

In this episode, Niko starts his PT career by entering the Men's Health Cover Model competition and nearly dying in a Reformer Pilates Class...

Transcript

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Welcome everyone to the PT Chronicles podcast. This is the story of a small town Welsh boy and his rise to the very middle of the fitness industry. I'm your host, Nico Algieri. I'm also the main protagonist in this story. So let's get straight into episode one, the beginning. Everything you're about to hear is all true. However, I've changed some of the names of the people and the locations for my own protection. Thirteen years ago, I was in my third year as a media planner for MediaCom, one of the biggest media agencies in the world. I'm bored out of my mind. Every day was the same. It was presentation after spreadsheet after presentation after spreadsheet. Then one day I'm sat at my desk and my phone rings, and it's my friend Chris from Men's Health magazine sales. Nico, mate, cover model comp coming up in two weeks. Get involved, pal. Jesus Chris, two weeks, I'll get destroyed. You could tell I was worseing out immediately. But what Chris was asking me to do was enter the men's health cover model competition. Now, usually men's health hire professional fitness models to be on the cover of their magazines, but this time it was about the everyday man, the guy that was balancing his lifestyle correctly, but being in shape at the same time. So after some back and forth with Chris, I can he convinced me to enter. I jumped straight onto a call with my father, two-time Mr. Wales, and two time second in the world for bodybuilding. Dad is an expert with nutrition supplements, so I asked him to create me a program to get ripped quick. I envisaged a regime of, say, oxygen and protein drinks and maybe a bit of cress. I wasn't far off. Chicken and rice, chicken and salad, turkey and vegetables, water, water, water, and a protein drink at 3 a.m. in the morning. So here I am training twice a day, eating religiously this diet regime that my father had given me, specifically to rip up, remember, it wasn't just a normal nutrition plan. And I was miserable. I worked in media every Thursday and Friday. People in the media are always in the pubs, together, having a few beers, trying to drink away the stress of the week, the mind-numbing attention to detail, the too much caffeine, kissing clients' asses every day. So we just went out together to forget about it. But of course, I couldn't drink, could I? I had to go home early. Well, actually, first I had to train, then I had to go home early, eat what I needed to eat, and go to bed as early as I can to recover and build the muscle that I needed to build. So this being my third miserable year in media, what this one experience of training for the ment's health cover model competition did give me was focus for the first time and tapping into a passion I had from years and years of athletic prowess. So being a semi-professional footballer, a black belt in kickboxing, a Welsh champion, high jump and hurdler. But being an 80s child, once I'd got past the age of 18, it seemed that only being an academic was the only way forward to get a career. I could have gone into sports science, I could have gone into fitness training early, but it just wasn't a consideration of mine. It was never said to me in school that you could follow something that you're already really good at and have a passion for, but you had to choose something academic to excel in. So I went to Cardiff University of Wales and I studied journalism, film and broadcasting, which, with my love of film and TV and media, is kind of relevant, but it wasn't really a passion of mine. So it was three to four years of basically getting drunk, dancing, womanizing, and not too much academic work. And that filtered into my London life. I just didn't have a clue what I wanted to do when I got here. Came to the big city, fell into media planning, and then it was three years being dispassioned about my job. The men's health cover model competition itself was strange to me. The first section of the competition was you had to send in pictures of yourself with your top off, obviously looking in great shape, and explaining what you did for a living. Because the competition was all about having a great physique but living a life of balance. And I did it. I got through round one. Got the call from Chris, I was over the moon. Now, the second round was even weirder. It was hundreds of guys that have qualified, all sat in one room and then been called into another room, like an X Factor audition room, where we had to stand on the X in front of a panel of four people from Men's Health and Great Britain swimmer Mark Foster. Then we had to take off our t-shirts and talk about how balanced our training regimes were with our social life and our home life. Thinking back now, it's just bollocks. I love men's health, but to think that your life is balanced to get on the cover is naive. You have to live, breathe, eat, sleep, fitness and nutrition and training. More surprises followed. I got through to the final twelve of the competition. But eventually got soundly beaten by a deserved David. But the focus of the competition never left me. It seemed I don't know, as if fitness had chosen me, I hadn't chosen fitness. And it breathed uh a new energy or vigour or motivation into my life. Media and I were done. And then about a week after, my uh boss, um, I don't need to change her name because she was lovely, but she'll laugh if she ever hears this. Shireen, she leaned over to me and was like, Nico, have you finished that PowerPoint presentation? And I was just like, Oh my god, just internally, do you know what? Fuck this. I phoned my mother, made sure that she could lend me I think it was fifteen hundred pounds. Then I phoned my father, asked him to lend me 1500 pounds. I then stepped out of the office to make a phone call to the training room, which is a personal trainer course training provider, booked a course, walked back in and handed my notice in immediately without a thought to the future and about how I was gonna make any money. Now again, I can only really comment on PT courses back then, but most of the syllabuses were just generic and useless and didn't really give you I suppose like school, didn't give you real life experience of how to be a successful personal trainer, but what it did do was give you the actual qualification you needed to purchase insurance. I was lucky on the course, however, lucky enough to have a teacher who would veer off course, go off piste a little bit, and add his own experience and knowledge. Brian Walpole, who was fantastic, hugely knowledgeable, but most of all passionate. This'll come up a lot through the PT Chronicles, but passion is absolutely key to possess for your job, for your relationships, for your life. If you're not passionate about anything, then you have nothing. I lived on Brixton Hill back then, and it was winter when I started my course, and it snowed basically for the whole six weeks of my course, which was in Croydon. So some days the buses were cancelled, so walking through snow became my morning routine. Now throughout the course, I knew that after the six weeks I'd have zero clients, zero money, zero prospects. So I got myself onto Gumtree, not Google, and searched Personal Trainers Wanted, and I came across a job post for PTs to become reformer Pilates instructor. I remember reading this and thinking, what the hell is a reformer Pilates instructor? You have to remember that at this point I'm a 28-year-old small-town Welsh boy who's just moved to London and knows that training is either going to an aerobics class or a Taibo class or a boxing or a kickboxing class or weight training in the gym. I didn't even consider that there were Pilates classes and certainly not on a reformer. If you don't know what a reformer is, it's like a sliding carriage with cables, handles, bars, all to develop core posture, flexibility, strength, and endurance. They're phenomenal. But at this point, I didn't have a clue what they were. So I walk into this reformer studio and I see these reformers for the first time while I'm having my interview with the manager Ali. And I'm looking at these ladies with their perfectly poker faced and their purse lips, breathing fluently and elegantly through every movement. I just looked at it and thought, this is rubbish. What is this crap? This just looks ridiculously easy and stupid. So anyway, I had the interview and Ali's like, Do you want to try it? And I was like, Yeah, I just I needed to I needed the money, so I needed to seem eager, motivated. So I chucked my kit on and jumped into the next class, and oh my god, did I almost die? So let me explain what happened to me. My legs went to jelly, my core walked out the door and left me to fend for myself, and I ejected sweat from areas of my body I didn't know that I could. Also, breathing was an issue, but I was hooked. I accepted the job, and as soon as I passed my PT course, I became an instructor for boot camp Pilates. I had started my personal training and a career.