S02 E01 - Floating, My Brother and The Lightbulb

We rejoin the PT Chronicles after a long break, Niko has been floating for 3 years earning great money with no real drama in life, he's living in Notting Hill but just floating and procrastinating.  His brother Jay enters the story and their lives begin to change forever...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome back everyone to the PT Chronicles podcast, to season two and the very start of episode one. Floating, my brother, and the light bulb. So it's been a hot minute since we spoke last. There's been traveling, living in New York, broken hearts, damaged egos, changes in the career. But we're gonna get to that because once the Chronicles actually catches up with what I'm doing in the present, we'll get to that. But we need to go back to the past and continue the chronicles from where we left off. The last time we were together discussing my calamitous rise in the fitness industry, I'd just dislocated my shoulder very, very badly and was trying to recover. But I'd done it performing one of the stupidest moves in the TRX library, the rollout. If you know what that is, don't do them. But I'm gonna leave that period now and just wipe out three years with one sweeping categorization. I was floating. I had my talent and I had my niche, and that was bringing me great success in the West London one-to-one market. But for some reason, my drive and my ambition had just dissipated somewhat. And I can't give you an actual reason as to why, but you're gonna see throughout the PT Chronicles that there's gonna be several repeating habitual periods of procrastination that are like the harbingers of destruction and chaos in my personal and professional life. So after the dislocation, I recovered and I floated. I had a full client roster, making great money, but just no plan, no drive to build something a little more, capitalize on the magazine articles that I was writing. I was writing for Cosmo, GQ, Men's Health, Esquire, but a little bit ignorant and kind of unaware, not really concerned about capitalizing on these articles and what I was actually what I was actually doing at the moment. Yeah, so my opinion of social media back then, right, was just like dogs, trees, clouds, and cakes. And I just thought, I don't need social media. I like I was I was un what's the best way to say it? I was unwilling to open my mind and think that this could further my career and get me more clients, which was such a silly thing to think back then. But I was stuck in that way, right? So I was living in Notting Hill and I'd started training people at this gym called Westbourne Sport and Fitness or Westbourne Leisure Centre, right? Great, but it was in Notting Hill, it was a little bit rough. Some of the clientele were a little bit well, violent, shall we say. Temperamental, that's the best way to put it. Different from coming from a private personal training establishment like Heart and Soul, which is where I dislocated my shoulder, to then coming to a more commercial gym and having to adapt that way. And remember that when you're more of a TRX-specific coach, people don't like it because you take up a lot of space, right? You need a bar to wrap your suspension trainer around if that gym hasn't built a specific fitness area for the TRX. But this one had, but that didn't stop people getting in my way. So every time I used to turn up, I had I would like remember I had a massive client roster. Yes, I was floating, but I was like full with personal training. I was smashing it, but that allowed me to float, right? Because I was making good money. What else did I need to do? As I said, my drive and ambition had kind of, I don't know, jumped out the window somewhere. So every time I lived across the road, it was a it was a about a 37-second walk from my apartment to the gym, which made me lazy in a sense. Anyway, every day I would go in there, and if I had clients in the morning, there would always be this one lady who would situate herself under the A-frame of the TRX, put a mat underneath it, and stretch directly under my suspension anchor point. And every time she would see me, she would increase her stretch time for about an hour. To say I wanted to commit murder is an understatement. Honestly, I would gladly be spending life in prison. So saying the clientele were a little bit rough and temperamental, again, another understatement. I got called into the manager's office one day, right? So I I'd been there for about a year, doing all my clients, you know, I'd had models coming in. I made this great connection to a model who lived in Notting Hill, and then she connected me to a network of models who were looking for bodyweight training and not wanted to put on too much muscle, but obviously maintained their beautiful physiques. And I was training like five or six models at this time. So they were coming into Westbour Sport and Fitness to train with me, and of course, that kind of made me look like a bit of a dick, right? Like, look at that dick with a you know, you know, look at that guy in the corner with his TRX on the in his hogging the whole corner for eight hours a day, training all these absolutely worldly looking beautiful women. Uh, it didn't make me popular. And I got called into the manager's office one day um and they said, Nico, we just need you to be careful. I was like, what for? I was like, Well, there's there's a lot of gangs that train in Westbourne Sport and Fitness, and um one of like the one of the top guys trains in here, and we've overheard him saying, Look at that fucking dickhead. Um, I'm gonna wait for him outside at some point. So obviously I spent the next two years scurrying home or like using uh stealth tactics to try and get to my apartment. Luckily, nothing happened, but it still put the fear of God into me. Now, the reason I'm going through this period and telling you about floating and just wiping out three years of training in this gym is because nothing really happened. You know, my my relationship with Sophie was still going. Um, there was no drama, and it's because I had no drive or ambition. I'd just kind of gone flat and given up because I'd had that failure of opening up a studio, and now I was back in a gym, smashing it with cash and money, um, doing really well, but just not wanting to scale it or improve or you know, get better than I was. I was just procrastinating the whole time. But having a great time, uh but having a great time in my personal life, going out to the all the London clubs, having fun with my mates because I had plenty of money. I was fucking paying for everything. I didn't care. It was it was fantastic. The really important part of this episode is that my brother enters the story. My brother's name is Jay Brockway, and still to this day is one of the top personal trainers in London. Now, Jay left school at 15, didn't do his GCSEs, worked on a building site for the family business, um, would would categorize himself as not very educated and not very well read uh and not very smart. But of course, he's wrong. Jay came to London to observe me personal training, these, you know, uh these CEOs, these high-end people, um just normal people, classes. Jay would be looking at me and thinking, can so I invited him to London to watch me train to see if he could actually do this. Because remember, coming out of school at 15 and being on a building site, he'd built up, you know, communication skills with labourers and carpenters and bricklayers, and that's fine, but that isn't enough to work in a situation like London. So he came up to observe me and I asked him, Do you think you can do this? And he was like, Yeah. So he did a PT course, he passed on his third attempt, and then he went down the route that I did. He worked for boot camp Pilates. There we go, I'm saying that word again. Um, but again, that taught him how to cue perfectly, that taught him how to deal with different levels of clients, different personality types, different temperaments, different fitness levels. So he learned very quickly. And of course, at the same time, I was teaching in the TRX, but he also developed a little bit of a passion for CrossFit. So Jay became like your all-round trainer, right? Barbells, kettlebells, which is what which is what we had always talked about doing, but Jay kind of took it to a different level. Now, because Jay is is dyslexic, had come out of school, his teaching style developed a different way to mine, right? Remember that I was full of I was like arrogant and egotistical. That was the character that I created, and I would take the piss out of my clients or berate them slightly to get them to where they needed to be. Whereas Jay would be the other level, right? Jay is the gentleman, the nice guy, who goes to the nth degree to make sure that you are comfortable and that you understand what movement you are doing. So that was a beautiful yin and yang mix of the how we taught. Now, because Jay was there, it's almost like he he lit that fire inside me now because I had my brother with me, I had my team weight with me now, and he was always like, let's let's get that studio open, Nico, that you've talked about. Jay always wanted up, we wanted to like increase or build something bigger and beautiful and more successful in London. And it lit the fire. At the end of this floating three-month uh three-year period, Jay, I think, had done maybe a year of personal training. He's driving through Holland Park one day on St. Anne's Road, and he just sees this little property, gives me the number. Um for some reason, I can't I do you know what? This is bad of me, and I apologize. I can't remember the detail that lit me up, but Jay was like, This is the studio, it's a thousand square foot, here's the number, and I just acted on it immediately. Applied for planning permission because it wasn't the right usage. If you need fitness usage in London, and I'm just trying to remember if I'm right, you need D1, which is the fitness category or leisure category. Remember that when I applied for a studio before, I lost it because they wanted to save the studio space for a certain percentage of office in London, in West London. So we lost that studio, but we got the planning permission on this one, and I remember the day that we got it. Um, I was driving through Notting Hill on Westbourne Grove, and I remember tears welling up on my eyes because I was just so happy. It was like, right, this this now is the next stage. And it was Jay that stimulated, right? I stimulated that period. I would not have got there had my brother not come to London. So I helped him become a personal trainer, and he helped me remove my head from my anus. So we we we perfectly complement each other. I have to go back to uh I have to jump back a little bit because I forget that we we named our studio equilibrium, right? And if you look at the definition of equilibrium, it means total balance or the total balance or the the balance of opposing forces, which is fabulous, right? Because fitness is nine elements. You can be considered as more these days, but there's things like balance, speed, strength, endurance, flexibility, cardiovascular capacity, loads of different elements, right? And they all if you balance them, you become the complete and total athlete, which is you know similar to the way they say hybrid fitness now or CrossFit, right? It's a similar sort of ethos, but just better. If you're a follower of me on Instagram, if not, I am a huge movie fan or a movie geek, constantly watching movies or TV programs. Um, I'm also a little bit of a gamer, sorry ladies. But me and my brother watched this movie starring Christian Bale, futuristic uh cop action thriller called Equilibrium, and you'd think that we would have chosen the balance of opposing forces because of the fitness element. No, we just liked the word and we just liked the uh the movie. And that was it, and that's how we that's how we named Equilibrium. We added total balance on the bottom, and there was born equilibrium total balance. I also have to tell you how we made the business plan. It was quite literally, Jay, how many clients have you got? 30. Nico, how many clients have you got? 30. What's the rent? This, uh, yeah, we can pay it without working out rates, bills, or anything else like that. We quite literally entered the rent cost of the property and how much we made per client, and we were like, Yeah, we got it. Nothing about rates, utilities, marketing, staff, cleaning. Uh honestly, what a shambles, but so good. We got the plan permission. Luckily, my stepfather Graham Brockway, Jay's father, is a builder. Um, and he agreed to do the build. But we had some we had some uh some teething problems on the build. So I I like I was kind of in charge of organizing the things with the council, so the planning permission and getting the right um electricity and utilities sorted out on the bills and and the website and everything that I like Jay is more the manual labor, the guy that gets stuff done in the building. I'm the gets stuff done outwardly and online, which is again part of the great partnership. But Graham um arrives with this building crew on day one, and uh obviously they need power to build, right? You know, there's cement mixers, there's uh all sorts of generators to use, and he said, Nico, where's the power? And I was like, Oh, there's a um big power power connection in the corner there, and he said, No, but you need a meter installed by the council to route the electricity into the building. I was like, huh? So I was like, all right, well, I'll just I'll call them and get them to put it in tomorrow. He goes, Yeah, no, Nico, that takes at least a month, so we had no power. That meant we had to go up into the student accommodation above, beg them to connect a uh a plug into one of their bedrooms, loop a wire out of their window, then come down through the extractor fan hole outside the building into equilibrium. So we had one plug. Now the build went really well, and we designed it with beautiful Welsh brick. We put a little bit of pink wall in there, we had black colours in there, some cool greys. It's just for a thousand square foot, it was just the most perfectly designed studio I've seen. And now that that's that is down to me and Jay. Um, and we built this beautiful TRX valley, so there were 10 TRX five other side running down the center of the studio. Which, if you ever want to lay out a studio for your TRX, come to me and I'll tell you the perfect measurements because this was the perfect layout. So, anyway, we're doing that, and of course, we start our business. Now, because we have no power, that means we've got no air conditioning. It didn't matter what period, I think we were in it was just at the end of summer, so it was in September. The studio, honestly, you would walk one meter inside that place and you would be beating sweat out of your head. And we we didn't have any power, so we had to in the evening, when we had evening sessions, we had to still steal the wire out of the student, and then we just had a bulb. We didn't even have a lamp, we just had a bulb laying on the floor, training people in the in in the dark almost, was sweating profusely. But you know what? The clients they stuck with us because they loved it, and the studio was gorgeous, it was just you know dark and boiling. But then once we got the electricity in, everything changed, and I'm gonna tell you about that in episode two. I'll see you then.