Hey team, it’s Nicole again from the Pretty & Powerful channel. I really hope you enjoyed my last podcast. Today we're going to touch on where my fitness journey went after powerlifting.
Juggling Fitness and Career After I finished powerlifting, I started working at a gym called EMF, and at that stage, we had one gym. Fast forward to once I finished powerlifting and we now are at five gyms. It was quite a journey, and within all of the fitness stuff that I was doing, we were opening gyms, and I was jumping from gym to gym. As we would open a new one, I would go there and manage it, get it up and running; and almost every 6 months later I would do it all over again. After my last powerlifting competition, we opened the largest facility in Queensland called EMF Performance Center, and it was just such a task. It was a huge thing to open, and that took all my focus; and because that took all my focus, my training just went out of the window. I was finding that I was having days (and sometimes weeks) where I just wouldn't even train, and that had so much of an effect on me that it was really getting to me mentally. I was stressed at work, and then I didn't have that, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything for me. I decided to combat that, the best thing I could do was to change my time of training. I was always an afternoon trainer, I was never a morning trainer. In my head, I couldn't lift weights in the morning if I didn't have food in my stomach. Because my work was so stressful, and I was getting to the end of the day and just having nothing left in the tank, I thought the only way I am going to get this done is if I train in the morning. I started training at 5 am every single morning. It was hard - it's not easy to get out of bed, but at least I knew that once my training was done, it didn't matter what happened to my day. If my day went bad and I got to the end of the day, and I just wanted to go home, I knew that I still had that little bit of time for me. I made sure that I had time for my own goals too. My career was super important to me, and I absolutely love what I do, but you still need to have your own things, and that balances me out. I assume that everyone that knows me will know that if I don’t train then I’m really grumpy and I just have too much energy that I wouldn’t sleep at night time because I’m still bouncing around.
Technique, technique, technique That’s how I went back to morning training. As I said, I struggled to lifts weights in the morning, and I was also struggling with my motivation. I signed up for fitness classes and from doing fitness classes that gave me a push, and it made sure that I was accountable to people. Before doing the classes, I started talking to a different demographic of people. I was watching brand new people come into the gym and just watching how little people knew about the technique and how everybody moved. Everybody knew the exercises - everybody knows there is such a thing as a squat, they know there is such a thing as a deadlift - but they just don’t really understand the technique or why it’s so important. So that was why I wanted to do this podcast because it is so important for you guys. I hope that you all got to catch our squat videos; we’ve done 4 so far and we’ve touched on important things like how we warm up. It’s super important that we make sure that the glutes, as well as our core, are warmed up before we squat because those two muscle groups are important. If they are not warmed up, we are just setting ourselves up for injury. We also touched on some variations, we touched on some tempo, how to set up the bar – just some cool tips to make sure that you’ve got all the basic right. If we don’t have those right, then we are really missing out. Going forward, I am going to make sure that I touch on the other two compound lifts, so we're going to do some good videos on deadlifts and some variations to deadlifts. Also, as I mentioned in the squats, we’ll do some warm-ups as well as making sure that we’re engaging those key muscles, especially the glutes. I’ve shown two really good exercises to make sure we’ve got those nice and warmed-up and to make sure they are firing.
What Supplements Do I Take? I would also like to go over a little about the supplements that I use. I keep my diet and my training regime super simple; I don't like to overcomplicate things. I think from following a diet, I've just got used to having standard food, nothing too fancy. That’s just what I’m used to and I’m quite time-poor most of the time, so it’s just so much easier for me to make 10 of the same meal than it is to make 10 different meals for the week. I train super early in the morning, so there is no chance of having breakfast before I train. I always do have my Body Science HydroxyBurn Shred before I train; it wakes me up, it gives me that bit of a pick me up. I am super sensitive to pre-workouts, so before I found HydroxyBurn Shred I would have a shot of black coffee but it just makes me super anxious. It doesn’t make me want to train, it makes me just want to lock myself in a dark room and let it go away. But with the Shred, I feel amazing and ready to rip into my workout each morning. I take that before I train and then again because I haven't eaten I make sure that I use my Amino BCAA Fuel during my workout. The reason I do that is because I am lifting weight and I have worked so hard in order to build up some muscle. I’m very cautious to make sure that I don’t do any sort of damage my muscles. I make sure that my body is not losing that muscle as fuel while I am training on an empty stomach. If I sip on by BCAAs during my training then I am fuelling those muscles throughout my whole workout. My post-workout nutrition has always been really important to me. Again, being so early I sometimes don’t feel like stomaching a huge meal at that time - I prefer to save it for later on in the day - so I make a smoothie every morning. Every morning, all my staff know that I go around with a green smoothie, they just know that’s the first meal of the day. I use water, two scoops of HydroxyBurn Lean5 Protein, usually I put vanilla, sometimes it could use espresso, it depends if I want to get fancy. I will often also put in there a little bit of honey, some spinach leaves, and recently I’ve been adding zucchini. It probably sounds weird, and it probably looks quite odd when I am putting zucchini in the blender. I do have many veggies as I can in my diet and, I am a little bit like a child sometimes, I always try to hide the vegetables in there somewhere. By adding zucchini, I get that extra serve of vegetables but you can barely even tell it’s there. I think that nutrition, especially while you’re training, is super important. We are in the gym working so hard on getting ourselves that physique we desire, but if we're missing the nutrition side of things then we are not doing the best we can for ourselves.
What's Coming Up? Stay tuned for the videos to come. When you watch them, make sure you try out some of the cool workout tips. We’ve kept it really nice and simple, and easy to understand – we’re really stripping it back and getting back to basics. It’s about really making sure that we’re warming up correctly and starting out each lift knowing how it should feel. There are different body parts that we use, and the reason that I think the compound movements (like deadlifts, squats and the bench press) are so important is that they use so many muscles. We should feel a bench press in our whole body, not just in the chest. You will notice that when you start putting the tips that I talk about in the videos into practice, your legs will be tired, your muscles will be tired, your back will be tired. Body composition is our goal, and we're trying to get that nice physique so we want to do those big lifts and use as many muscles in our bodies as possible. If we put enough stress on our muscles as possible, that's going to make you burn more calories than anything else. Stay tuned for next month’s and make sure you watch all of the Pretty & Powerful videos! We’re going to learn how to master the big lifts and really get BSc YouTube channel, Facebook and/or Instagram if you’ve missed any so far. And there’s so much more to come!
