S01E08 - Skis, Sleds and Shock

In this episode Niko to trains 12 journalists, learns to ski, experiences his first blood geyser and suffers badly from shock...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello everyone and welcome back 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, I'm your host, Nico Algieri, and I'm also the main protagonist in this story. So let's get straight into episode 8: Skis, Sleds, and Shock. We're about 12 months into my personal training career now, and I'm still the official personal trainer for Cosmopolitan magazine, and lo and behold, it pays off. Within three months of the magazine getting actually published, with my picture in it, I get contacted by Becca, who has taken a group of 20 journalists to Banff in Canada to review the resort, and they need a PT on the trip to train them throughout. TRX is perfect for skiers. So, fee agreed, I go. I want to pause the story there and come off piste a little bit. So obviously, I've got my notes that I'm following, that I'm trying to relay a story from the past for you, but you see what I just said at the end there. So, fee agreed, I go. Now, agreeing a fee when you're a personal trainer, this is pre-social media age, it's so tough because you're trying to account for time, you want the job, because obviously it gives you uh a good little note on your CV, it raises your integrity and it gives you a little bit of standing. So you don't want to over egg it, but you do want to get paid for your time and not lose the money that you're getting paid for your clients. So it's a real hard process, especially as a young personal trainer. So for any PTs out there, if you're not sure what to charge for certain things, if someone offers you to maybe go away on holiday for them for seven days and how much to charge without losing the job, ask a business consultant, ask one of your friends that works in finance, or ask someone who who's a little bit more savvy with uh things that you need to charge and how you charge for your time and your worth. Because knowing your worth is important, and if you start underselling yourself early on in your career, that trend is going to follow you throughout. So, my advice, get some advice. But if you're completely wet behind the ears as a PT and you're really not sure what to charge, and you just want a way of working it out, just work out the hours that you're actually losing. Let's say you're doing four clients on one day, five clients on another day, that's nine hours. Do it like that. Don't go and try and charge eight hours for the full day. You want to secure this cushy little job that you've got. Remember that it is about the hours lost, but it's also about the way it looks. It presents you as having another string to your bow. And what I mean by that is think about it. Let's take my example. I was able to travel um to an international country, so to Canada, with 12 highly regarded professionals from things like uh papers like The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times. So think about the optics of that. Once you post that on social media, you're a professional personal trainer who is regarded highly enough to be traveling to Canada with journalists and train them whilst they're skiing and reviewing the actual resort. So there's a lot of different strings to your bow there that you can present: programming, presentability, trust, lots of different elements. So you have to think about your price point after you've done that trip and after that's been presented to the public. Because before that trip, you were just a personal trainer. But now you're a personal trainer who's been asked to train journalists internationally. So there's a little bit of a difference there. There's more prestige, there's more esteem, there's more regard for your professionalism. So, anyway, back then, I wasn't a hugely travelled individual, put it that way. Um, my most of my holidays had been to Mallorca, Magaloof, Ibiza. I was a classy individual, very well traveled and cultured. But it came from when we were younger, we didn't have a lot of money in my family. So going something like skiing was completely unthought of. I couldn't fathom it actually. There was only two of my friends in the whole of my school career that actually went skiing. So let me talk you through my packing process. Basically, I go into my bedroom, open up my suitcase, uh, pull the pin on a grenade, throw it into the room, close the door, and see what sort of clothes land in there. That was the general skill of my packing. Anyway, I felt lackluster throughout the whole trip, but it was fine, and I nestled in nicely with the group, getting onto the bus, getting onto the plane, everything was fine, boring, boring. The structure of the trip was that each GNO would come and have one TRX session with me. Uh, they could book it whenever they want to throughout the whole of the week. So this was just to show how TRX and training and keeping yourself fit synced beautifully with skiing. Because obviously you need leg strength, core strength, balance, coordination to be able to ski, and TRX just marred beautifully with that. All was good, and I was impressing the whole bunch of journalists. Now, being a stereotypical Welshman, to me, skiing was clearly a posh knobeds holiday. I don't think that now, but because obviously I didn't have a lot of money when I was younger and I never skied, I just thought it was just for people who were a little bit posh. And what eventually lifted that prejudice is that as soon as I got on the slopes, I realized that skiing is amazing. I got my very first lesson on the slopes, and then within two hours I was on the green run in Banff. Very proud of myself. I wasn't by no means good, but I was competent. So loving my skiing, but of course I wasn't just there to enjoy myself. I was there to work, train the journalists, and on the fourth day I was expected to head up to top of one of the mountains and film some training that actually related to skiing. So think about it like squats, lunges, balances, side lunges, things like that. Stuff that would strengthen your legs and strengthen your core and work your balance to be able to become a more competent skier. However, on the third day, a spanner was about to be thrown in the works. So I wake up on the third day, go downstairs in the beautiful hotel we're staying in, have a massive breakfast. I love American and Canadian breakfasts, just huge buffets with enough bacon and eggs to kill a human. So with my stuff all packed and ready, I go outside, and then we're told that we're going to a fitness experience with two local personal trainers on one of the football pitches in the area. Now, of course, me with the ego in my first year of PT, I'm the man, I'm supposed to be the PT on the trip. I'm completely unaccepting of this immediately. So when we arrive, we walk up to the snow-covered football pitch, and these PTs are setting up cones and sleds. How original I thought. So anyway, I walk up to introduce myself to them, all the niceties covered, and I look down at the equipment, particularly at the sled. Now the sled looked like it had been made in the 1850s, cast in iron, dipped in water, and rusted for the next 150 years. So as you can tell, I was a little bit apprehensive. So I say to the PT, mate, are these not a little bit sharp, these sleds? He's like, mate, don't worry at all. Once they're uh strapped on your back and you're running, they're gonna be miles ahead of you, and as you turn corners, they're just gonna slide away from you. I was like, okay. You know when you can just hear fate giggling at you? So then we split into teams and one at a time, strap a harness onto our shoulders. Now that harness is obviously attached to the sleds, which were weighted with extra uh weighted plates on there. We were to sprint with the sled behind us around a cone, and once you reach the cone at the bottom, we would actually arc around. That would allow the sled to actually arc around you, and then it was a sprint backwards. So you'd sprint forwards, spin around the cone, sprint backwards. Genius stuff. At this point, I'm still around 29 and my ego is at 100%. So as they say, go, Super Nico sets off at Usain Bolt pace. I'm crushing the deskbound journalists I'm racing against. What a loser. I arc around the bottom cone and the sled is now in front of me as I sprint like a gazelle backwards. My ego as per has already gotten the better of me. I've gone off too fast backwards. So I start to fall because the sled isn't heavy enough. No way I'm gonna look stupid, so I engage a Simone Bilesque backward roll, and as I do, you've guessed it, the sled catches my head up and smashes straight into the top of my head. I hear the crowd of journalists behind me go, it must have looked painful. It fucking was. I sat up, touched my head, and said, Oh, I'm okay. They all ran over to me and their faces said it all. I checked my head again, and just before my hand made contact with my head, I could feel the warm liquid squirting up to meet my hand. Interesting. Blood was coming out of my head like a geyser. Here's a callback to my lack of travel experience. No travel insurance. Anyway, I'm rushed to the hospital, worrying about that, and the doc comes in once I get to the hospital and says, Right, do you want to wait 45 minutes for the anesthesiologist or should we just get on with it? I elected to get on with it, and he stapled my head closed. Fuck me. Painful. I still have a scar, so if you see me around, come and ask me and I'll show you the lump. Anyway, the fourth day arrived and I'm expected to be up on the mountain filming, remember. Instead, I'm in bed, shaking, cold fever, puking, and I'm feeling dizzy. I'm basically concussed and I'm in shock. My mum calls me eight times to check on me. Sophie is worried sick and I'm embarrassed as hell. The problem is, remember, I'm contracted, I'm working, I need that video to actually complete my contract. It's a void unless I get my ass up on that mountain. So I do. It's a shambles. Try squatting and lunging and teaching after you've hit been hit on the head with a jagged sled. It just isn't happening. I did complete the video, but it must have been a pile of rubbish. I never actually wanted to see it. I returned to the UK, having learned to ski, trained journalists on the TRX, ended up in national newspapers, stitches in my head, and a mild concussion. Not a bad trip, not a bad story, and I haven't skied since. Oh, that storm I keep talking about, it was getting closer.