S01E02 - Cowboys, Croissants and Romance

Niko becomes a Personal Trainer for the first time facing up against cigarette smoking clients, eating croissants in Hype Park and running head first into cupid.

Transcript

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Welcome back everyone to the PT Chronicles podcast, the story of a small town Welsh boy and his rise to the very middle of the fitness industry. As always, my name is Nico Algieri, your host, but I'm also the main protagonist of this story. So let's get straight into episode two, Cowboys, Croissants, and Romance. I get the job as a Reformer Pilates trainer for Boot Camp Pilates in Bayswater, West London. So I've started my career, but at the same time, I'm actually still training to be a PT. So I was doing a six-week fast track course, 9 to 5, but also simultaneously in the evenings going up to Bayswater to train to become a Reformer Pilates cowboy. Now, why do I say cowboy? Well, if you understand Pilates and Pilates trainers, the proper authentic ones, they take about a year or more to qualify. They really put the hours in, over a hundred to be exact, and they study the method from its origin right up until the modern method. So they leave no stone unturned. I learned in six weeks. I'm good, but that's cowboy behavior. Now, the bootcamp Pilates trainers from 12 years ago, they were fucking brilliant. The master instructor, Dimitri, one of the best Pilates instructors in London. There was Geordie, just a beautiful dance posture and delivery. Geordie, Vicky, Ashton, they were amazing. They cared about technique and delivered varied, perfectly programmed classes every time. Now, enough smoke blowing for them, guys. Let's get back to me. If you've ever done a Pilates class before, whether it be Reformer or Matt, you know that they are slow, controlled, technical. But that slow bit bothered a 28-year-old Nico. I wasn't having that. I'd spent four years in Cardiff drinking and dancing to RB and hip hop. That was my character, and I wasn't going to leave that behind. So that's what I did. I made the place bounce. Barely wet behind the ears, I cranked the volume up, played Flowrider. Now, hang on, now, at the time that was cool to me. Tyo Cruz, Usher, Ludacris, 50 Cent, all that sort of stuff. And the clients et it up. I moved them faster. Not fast, but faster. It suddenly became like a training session, just using the reformer. But by the end of the month, the word was out. Some loudmouth cocky Welshman was packing out the classes with mega weight lists. It was electric. I'd found my skill. And that skill was the ability to turn training into entertainment. Now, in the meantime, because of the Pilates' popularity, my PT was growing, but not as fast as I'd liked. Remember, I'm really only about two months into a 12 to 13 year career here. I needed to pay rent, so I approached a successful PT who couldn't fulfil all the inquiries that she was getting. Her name was Gina. She helped me immensely, and I'll always be grateful for that, so thank you, Gina. The first client Gina gave me, let's call her P, can simply be described as a force of nature. Now, when you first start out as a personal trainer and you're entering a very wealthy Lebanese woman's house in Belgravia for the first time, you're not really full of confidence. As you grow in your career, you develop conversational skills, your confidence, the ability to chameleon your character to any given situation and any person. At this point, I had zero skills. None of these skills were available to me. Media had not prepared me. So I sit down in a kitchen, keen to show my ethos and skill level. She ran over me like a freight train. Okay, Nico, let's walk to Hyper Hyde Park. I was like, what? Yeah, she was like, I don't want to train today, I just want to go for a walk. That'll be enough. But first, let me make you some food. Eat, eat, eat. So she made me a traditional Lebanese meal, which honestly nearly killed me and put me into a coma. There were so many carbs in there. And then we walked to Hyde Park. Now she had a cigarette in her hand for the whole walk there. And then we sat down on the serpentine together, had a lovely little chat, she had a croissant, and I had a pan au chocolat. That is just absolutely not what I thought was going to happen in my career. Then we just walked home, she smoked another three cigarettes on the way and uh paid me 80 pounds and I was on my way home. I remember the feeling of disappointment in myself. Was I a PT? Honestly, I felt kind of like an escort for a second. Weeks went by like this, smashing it at Bootcamp Pilates, but failing miserably as a PT. But such was my popularity at Bootcamp Pilates that my confidence was high. Um, I really can't explain that time period, guys. That I found that reforma Pilates was something that just clicked for me. I could just teach it honestly with my eyes closed and develop classes on the spot. I sometimes didn't even have to program. I could have a theme in my head start with lunges on the sliding carriage facing forward, and I could build a balanced program without actually having to write it down and just free-flow and build it to actually suit the people in the class because this is what you find in the fitness industry is that PTs generally write their programs and they write one program and then apply it to every one of their clients. Well, each person is different, so you have to actually have to play to the crowd, place the room. So I built those sessions around the clients that I knew could handle those certain movements in the room. Now, if someone needed regressing, I would obviously give regressions, but I would also give really advanced progressions where need be. And that's what gave me that popularity. That's why I was packing out classes with two-week waiting lists. It was just phenomenal, and I just remember loving it so much. Even so that I was taking the 6:30 a.m. shifts. If you asked me to do that these days, I'd tell you to go do one. But I was waking up at 4:45 a.m., leaving the house in Brixton. Again, I'm doing that journey, bust to the station, then tube station up to Victoria, and then bus in Victoria up to open the studio for 6.15 to start a 6.30 a.m. class. And I'd be doing that with hangovers. I'd be doing it having taught 10 classes the day before. I was just obsessed with it. Now, after another month or so, I did actually manage to pick up some personal training clients, and that's because of the trust that I'd built from teaching the classes. So, of course, all my new clients came from the reformer Pilates studio. And my very first client, Anya, who's been with me for the last 13 years, that's where we actually met. So everything was going fantastically well. The PT was slowly starting to build, my classes were packing out. I'd started that real climb, that professional career in personal training where I was starting to make a name for myself, certainly in West London, and there was no way I was going to risk that by being unprofessional. However, one day I'm teaching bootcamp Pilates, and this perfectly postured, beautiful, strong blonde woman walked in. Sophie, my god. I'd only ever had girlfriends who were just girls, but this was a woman, and I couldn't take my eyes off her. But there was no way I was risking my bootcamp Pilates job, so I left it. But then she emailed me. I don't remember much of the conversation, but I do remember this one embarrassing part for me. So me and Sophie were talking over email, just conversing normally, but I knew there was a little bit of flirtation going on, and I just said, What are you up to this evening? And she said, I'm going to Club Duvet. What did I reply? I don't know that club. Where is that in London? Oh my god, Nico, honestly. Club Duvet. Now before I tell you what happened with me and Sophie, I want to just tell you that way back when, around 2010, I think this was, Instagram and the rest of the social medias were not the forces they are today. Instagram was cakes, trees, dogs, and sunsets, I think. So we were like the rock stars. Those boot camp Pilates trainers were like the rock stars of West London. And the Barry's boot camp trainers were equally, probably more so, in fact, the rock stars of the whole of London. It was all about how much press you were getting. Were you being in the evening standard? Were you the official trainer for said magazine? So I was riding on a dopamine hive of having packed out classes, loads of attention, and you know what? I just thought, fuck it. So I asked Sophie out for a drink, and we met for a drink, and it was great, but there was a storm coming.