Training. Where do I start? Like food, I’ve pretty much made every mistake known to wo/man/kind. It’s all there in my past and not-so-distant-past. FB kindly records all shortcomings so no use trying to deny it;

·         Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I only did cardio. I was your typical ‘walk in the door and beeline to the cardio machines’ sort of girl. My idea of mixing it up was swapping the Woman’s Day for a Women’s Weekly mag. End result: kept moderately lean but flabby legs that didn’t ever change.

·         I often wonder why I didn’t ever gravitate to working with weights and I can only say that my confidence in a gym was always so very low. I used to pound the treadie and watch the girls arrive and linger around the reception area, chatting with staff. I wondered what they chatted about. Wondered how they found the confidence to speak with people they didn’t really know. I was truly surprised that the gym members would go out on social events together and have Christmas and Easter parties. For me the gym was somewhere that I snuck into – incognito – and completed my hour of cardio before slinking out. The odd smile here and there was about as social as it got for me and I was in awe of those that made it a culture.

·         And then came Group Fitness. The way to turn up and be put through my paces without having to think of a thing. It wasn’t always plain sailing though I’ll have you know; my ability to “mirror” the instructor was not good. Instead I would find a suitable candidate who looked like they knew what they were doing and stand behind them so I could be sure I wasn’t going to grape-vine the wrong way. On that, I learnt all the moves and felt just a tad proud! I have never been a dancer and this was about as close as I was ever going to get to a stage performance so I made sure my hoe-downs and foot-flicks were completed with as much panache as I could muster. I even ventured into the area of Active Wear – and let me tell you that all the way back then (sigh…), you only wore this shit to the gym so you had to be a true-believer to invest in it.

An incident I’d rather forget (but can’t ever) involves both my 90’s active-wear and my fennel laxative bars. I seriously can’t face sharing the details but I can say that ultra-tight bike-pants underneath a G-string hiked-up leotard were a recipe for disaster when time was tight and the loos were upstairs. Enough on that.

·         2010 was my first introduction to weights. Real weights. My beautiful Cape York friend had a garage full of iron and I can truly say I had absolutely no idea what to do with most of it. Left to my own devices I might have thrown together some bicep curls, triceps dips and crunches and called that a ‘Workout’. So she had a complete beginner on her hands.

This whole new world opened up for me and I couldn’t get enough of it. Rows, deadlifts, presses, sumo high-pulls, uprights – we did them all and we did them often. I had a baby less than a year old and I swear he spent at least one hour a day on that garage floor playing with toys and watching his mama sweat it out. Having had two other babies, I can tell you that this new style of training did absolute wonders for shattering the stay-at-home-mum blues I had experienced with my first two.

Just to explain (though not needed for those closest to me) – I’m no Mother Earth. I have three children and I love them more than I’ve loved anything in this world – but I’m still no Mother Earth. I used to read books on how to be a Mum and I did every free course being offered by every community organisation in relation to new babies. I have certificates for; How to Survive Sleep Deprivation and Still Love Your Baby (barely worked). Baby & You: A New & Beautiful Beginning (say it 50 times and I’ll believe it eventually). Baby Massage (a room full of nuded up baby bottoms was sort of cute!). How to Keep the Passion Alive Once Baby Arrives (Rob made me go. Epic fail in his books).

On the up-side, I have successfully grown them to ages 13, 12 and 8 and that is pretty good really. I hang my head with a touch of shame and admit that there’s some things I just didn’t conquer – in no particular order; I didn’t do home-craft with them. I only made their baby food from scratch because I was too tight to buy it – not due to any healthy aspects. I only paid for swimming lessons for one baby (aged 6months) because I thought it was all a big rip-off scam at that age – the others I just tipped water over their heads in the  bath. I did not ever take them to the Wiggles in concert (though Rob offered Hi 5 and I didn’t let him). I have never paid for professional photos of my kids (other than pixie pics or the free shopping centre Santa ones). I made up lies to avoid having to watch kid’s movies – apart from Nemo and Toy Story. Two had dummies, one refused – and I only ditched them because I hated getting up in the night to put it back in. And here’s the one that I have to drag myself to admit …. not sure I can do this … “you can do it Kirst – just say it quickly and it’ll be out there” – inhale/exhale – even when they were babies I would pretend I was asleep so that Rob would have to deal with them, even though he was a shift worker – I detested getting up in the night …. Not sure I’ll admit that ever again my lifetime. Oh – and here’s one more for free – new mothers can be the most superior bitches in the world – new mothers will know what I mean by that.

So I’m completely weird and that’s ok, sort of. I also had another issue that I was only talking to a colleague about the other day. Throughout my life, in particular my teens onward, I found I would have a serious psychological and sometimes even physical reaction to cold and grey weather. I’m sure everyone gets a little down when it’s bleak and rainy for days on end – but this was different I think. The slightest hint of summer turning to autumn and a change of thought process would start with me. I would spiral down and feel like I had to tread water to keep above it all. Once I had children it became seriously hard to shake and I found myself in freezing cold, grey, rainy, bleak, shitty Auckland (sorry Aucks people) and I couldn’t find my way out. We moved multiple times. We moved from old houses to brand new ones. We bought a spectacular block of land over-looking the ocean. We paid $6K for our dream house plans. I pushed myself to venture outdoors and I kept up with my incessant cardio – but I knew the quality of life for our family was suffering because of me. So we moved to Australia and have been here ever since. It’s taken a while to find the right spot but here we are in Darwin and I can honestly say that the top end sunshine is like medicine to me. Those bleak days with the bleak moods are non-existent and, even after 6 years in the north and 10 years in Oz, I still wake every morning and feel grateful for my beautiful, warm and sunny life – surrounded by palm trees and sweat balls. I look back and feel proud that, as a family, we found a problem and solved it even though it meant a full country change. Our children have thrived over here and are now very proud citizens with an Aussie boy added once we got here. They know nothing different other than the sunshine, sports and weirdness of the top end and we have no intentions whatsoever of leaving it any day soon.

·         Back to training. After my intro to weights, I haven’t looked back. Finally, those blasted legs have made changes. I’m not ready to strap on a red bikini and slo-mo down the beach anytime soon, but I didn’t have great legs to start with and now they are a better version of the same ones. I’m grown-up enough to realise that I will not ever have the muscular, long, lean, brown pins of a super-model, but I’m sort of glad I don’t possess the ones I’m genetically pre-disposed to sans-exercise. A bit of tan goes a bloody long way to dealing with the imperfections by the by.

But this training intro wasn’t enough – it was just the first taste of what was to become my life for the next few years as I ditched my profession and became a full-time fitness trainer. And the fun really started.

So my next lot of training bloopers, blunders and best-bits can wait until Part 2. This gets really interesting now so don’t go far…..

Starting Off With - Where I Once Was...

I had to start with a foodie blog – how predictable. I feel like I’ve harped on about myself so many times now but I guess it wouldn’t be fair to withhold just how kooky I have been … can be … desire not to be one day….

But, like all sensible approaches - it's absolutely not point trying to change if you don't first take stock of where you are. It's all common sense - how can you change what you don't acknowledge as being a problem worth changing? I won't deny I've made huge changes since this time in my life, but here it is in all its gory glory.

I’ll try and make this brief and to the point; if there is anything particularly stupid that anyone has done with regards to food and diets – I’ve been there and have many different sized t-shirts to prove it. I’ll try to highlight only those points that I think are relevant;

·         Growing up I ate anything that was put in front of me. My favourite family meal of all time was when Mum (sorry about this Ma) boiled the living hell out of large chunks of white potato, teaming them on a dinner plate with a once-frozen-in-a-box (yes a box!!!)-but-now-grilled lamb chop with perhaps a blob of melted cheddar cheese on top to fancy it up a little. The really special bit was when that sneaky potato soaked up some of the boiled water only to spit it out on my plate a bit later on, making the whole meal look like it was swimming in a murky, milky mess. My second favourite was my Grandma’s boiled celery with cheese sauce on top. As you can see, fine-food is in my blood.

·         I was not over-weight as a child. Maybe a little heavy at times but well within what I would call a normal range.

·         I left home and introduced myself to fast-food. I gave no thought whatsoever to whether Fillet O Fish was actually real fish – I only knew that it tasted most excellent with a layer of fries smeared in the free McD’s ketchup (a-ha – bet you didn’t know about that!! They don’t tell anyone but it’s a hidden beauty they hide behind the counter, only to be released on demand) added to the mix.

·      
I got Hepatitis B in my early 20’s and dropped about 5 kilos while turning steadily yellow. Nobody seemed disconcerted at my sunny-coloured eyes, but they commented readily on how great I looked minus the kilos. It dawned on me like a concrete block that I must have looked like shit before the illness-induced diet. I made myself a promise that I’d not return to pre-sick weight and I relished my new-found stardom. I took up chewing gum and smoking fags as a way to keep hunger at bay.

·         I started taking a horrendously intense look at food and calorie and kilojoules and rules and diets and all things skinny. I found out some fabulous facts that I could centre my life around and – by-George – they worked!! Here are my top 8;

o   Fruits are sugar. Sugar is bad. Don’t eat fruit.

o   Bread is sugar in a bad disguise. Don’t eat bread or anything that includes bread.

o   Carrots are orange-sugar – see above.

o   Milk is white sugar.

o   Vegetables are good if they are green so consume as many as you can stomach. Dry retching is the best penance and means you are doing well.

o   Meat is negligible. Eat it a bit when you absolutely have to.

o   Fennell is brilliant. I’ll tell you why a little later.

o   Oranges are def sugar but they are a better form of sugar so eat as many as you want – up to a few kilos per day if need be and blame turning yellow on this orange-habit.

·         I found the wonderful world of laxative bars. One a day seemed to do the trick nicely. Actually – too nicely some days. I was grateful that I was quite an agile runner at that time. This bar was a fennel flavour and even to this day (some 20 years later) I CANNOT STAND the smell of fennel.

·         Fast forward a year or two and I was now dangerously thin. I quit my job to concentrate more on dieting. It was seriously tiring so I moved back home. My Mum cried buckets. She asked Jesus to help. He might have helped a little but I fought Him the whole way.

·         And then the tables turned. My hunger grew too huge so I re-introduced myself to food. But somehow my little appetite switch got turned off in the confusion and I had no “stop” button. My favourite foods of all turned out to be, in no particular order; muesli, sultanas, raisins, dried figs, nuts, bread, jam and condensed milk. I drank the condensed milk straight out of the can through two little holes that I would puncture into the lid – glossy, creamy goodness!! I put on weight. Who would have thought??

·         Fast forward again and I’m a nicely rounded fat arse who has no idea what the hell just happened or how to get back to ‘normal’ – whatever the hell normal was.

·         I tried Weight Watchers. Nil success. But I do have a little tip for beginners. It’s a secret thing I made up and I’m sure no one else knows about it. Prior to the first weigh in I would go nuts!! Eat anything and everything and I wouldn’t stop until I had to and it would be an epic night. This ensured that, while weigh in #1 would be fairly ordinary, week #2 would be crazy good!!!! Oh what a high dropping a gazillion kilos at once!! Week 3 … not so much. Week 4 … already looking for a new gimmick to try.

·         I tried Jenny Craig. Didn’t go through with signing up after realising I had to actually meet a real-live counsellor – eek!!

·         I moved to Africa and mingled with people that truly had to work to eat. No government hand-outs. No huge supermarkets with a pile of variety. No food regulations to ensure high standards. Just village people eating whatever they had and making no fuss about it. I came back down to earth in a thud and my body thanked me for it. I developed a real taste for bbq’d maize cobs.

·       

            I joined the police and managed to regulate my input with my output and I learned to lever up or down with piles of cardio activities – mainly running at a steady state for miles and miles while day-dreaming about not having to run. I loved/hated running but realised it was a necessary evil for someone who loved their food. My food habits were sort of ‘normal’ by this stage and most days I had weetbix for brekkie, sandwich for lunch, pasta/potato/bread and vegies and meat for dinner with fruit and other nibbles for snacks. I would probably blow out most weekends with a good taste for wine, nibbles and drunken fast-food – dripping cheese-and-onion toasted sandwiches being my all-time favourite.

·         I was introduced to weight training in 2010 while working remote and it was scary how quickly I agreed to drop the cardio. But I still refused to change my food habits or even look at the health aspects of nutrition. I was happily munching on the usual family meals from my bag of everyday tricks; spag bol, mac cheese, bangers and mash, fish pie, pasta and stirfry – absolutely nothing wrong with any of them.

·          

        In 2012 I started training for a bodybuilding show and was forced (if I wanted success) to change my habits. All of sudden I became familiar with food combinations that I had not even considered once before; oats, protein powder, chicken breasts, lentils, cous cous, screeds of all-things-green, cottage cheese, tofu ….. I loved it but balked badly at the prep time.

·         Shades of obsession came back and I found myself counting and controlling and justifying my choices – mainly to myself. Bodybuilding gave me a legitimate way to see-saw my weight and I got pretty good at it. But something in me knew/knows it isn’t healthy, despite hiding it behind such a great sport.

·         I’ve heard/read/listened to screeds of information on nutrition and have settled on a way that suits me and my family. It is fairly simplistic and I’ll go into it more in a future blog.

·         

       For now, I’ll make these points;

o   I use minimal (and I really mean minimal) supplements

o   I do believe that what you eat and when you eat it will help immensely in fat control

o   I think knowing too much about too many things can be a definite hindrance for busy minds

o   I think it’s all too freakin complicated – eat less and move more works for anyone starting out – let’s not mix up lean strategies of a bodybuilder with fat-loss strategies for the everyday person

o   Choices are everything and they are one thing that everyone has power over

After Months of Silence - I'm Back!

So I sat down last weekend and, after a lot of thought, I decided that I wanted to keep on blogging. I love writing – it’s cathartic and a way for me to dump the information from my busy head. I have an ongoing battle with trying to relax my mind and writing helps. I tried a short meditation course too and I really liked what they taught me. I had a buddy with me and I think it all worked too well on her because she managed to nod-off mid-class. It’s a bit cruel how tired we can feel sometimes until the head hits the pillow!!

I stopped writing my last blog because I felt I had nothing more to say specifically about comp prep. Strange really considering I was prepping at that time. I think this last comp made me very aware of how superficial it can all get. Reading information throughout social media that I thought was crap got annoying and I didn’t want to be yet another person droning on about the usual blah, blah of topics; fasted cardio, no cardio, carbs at night, training regimes, powerlifting, crossfit, bad judging, blah blah blah. I got bored of it all and blog-bailed. FYI – I did compete and I did win. That was pretty cool but I actually didn’t love the whole comp experience. I felt out of place. My issue. Maybe a story for another time.

But now I’m back and I’ve decided to try and share my own experiences - so rather than tell people what to do, which is fraught with danger, I am just going to write about what I have experienced. I anticipate my target market being people in the same position as I am. And that is;

I’m a very average woman in my early 40’s. I haven’t achieved anything super-special in my life but I have a lot of little bits and pieces that I’m proud of. I’m seriously happy in my marriage after 18 years together – he is my Prince Charming and I immensely respect my husband. He treats me like an absolute queen and I thank the universe every day for crossing our paths in that smelly, smokey police bar in Otahuhu, Auckland in 1999 after I fell down 2 flights of stairs and managed to lose all of my spare change and break half a packet of my social fags.

On that same path, we have three children that I could go on about for days – but it’s sufficient to say they are pretty darn cool and they complete our happy household. Currently aged 13, 12 and 7.

Second to family I have my career. I’m a proud cop and have been for 18 years – pretty much frontline for the majority though I’ve worked remote, city, rural and beachside. I’ve attended all of those horror jobs that everyone knows about and lived to tell my tales. I have fought with gang-members in NZ, ripped grog out of hands in Cape York, and suffered through the bogans in Eagleby. I now work in investigations and finally have a predominantly Mon-Fri job – which has been agonisingly out of my reach due to so many jurisdiction changes over the years. Being a recruit three times has ensured that I never really got a chance to be too much of an arrogant wanker. It was genuinely hard to feel or even look too-cool-for-school in a hi-viz vest, guarding alcohol shops for 8 hour stretches. 

This job of mine has provided me with the biggest laughs (I executed a search warrant on the wrong house once – maybe it wasn’t me laughing the loudest that time but there was def plenty of laughing!), the lowest of lows (road trauma really took it out of me in those early years – the sights, smells and sounds can stay with you for years), excitement beyond what almost any other job can provide (pursuits, armed sieges and half-priced McDonalds), and some truly weird little gems (I had to shoot a dolphin once – don’t even ask!!), but it has been a constant in my life for so long now and I thrive on the variety. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else and I am genuinely grateful to do what I do.

And then then there’s my training. The other constant. The thing that I credit with keeping me sane through the years of shift-work, the pressures of the jobs, the journey of pregnancy and babies, the highs and lows of being an emergency services worker and the daily stress of being a mum who is pulled in so many directions at one time. In our early years together, I would melt-down a bit … a lot … quite a lot … often … and Rob would come at me with a wine glass in one hand and runners in the other. More often than not I would pick the runners first closely followed by the wine glass on my return. Back then I only ever really ran for exercise. My philosophy was that I had to do just enough cardio to support my food habit and if I could stay a certain weight, I was happy with that. Again – how life has changed.

In 2012 I decided to become 'A Bodybuilder'. I took it extremely seriously and spent 9 months following my diet to the letter. It was hell on earth but I won. I carried on to do a few more comps;

2012 – Darwin INBA – Overall Figure

2012 – Nationals INBA – 4^th Figure Novice, 4^th Figure Open

2013 – Darwin WFF – First Figure

2013 – Southern Hemispheres WFF – 3^rd Masters

2014 – Darwin NABBA – Overall Figure

2014 – Nationals NABBA – 3^rd Masters

2014 – Worlds WFF – 5^th Figure

2016 – Darwin INBA – Overall Figure

So I’ve done a few and won a few. I've made some decent changes along the way,

My desire now is to get on with life and continue learning how to integrate all of the best bits of my training and nutrition into a lifestyle that is sustainable, still reaping results and able to be adapted to the occasion.

I am a trainer too by the way. I have a little business called Final Stage and I train bodybuilders into comps. I absolutely love it. But by far the majority of enquiries I have had always relate to the every-day person (mainly women) who simply have no idea where to start in order to get their health and training into line with what they want their bodies to look like. I understand that. Unfortunately the desire to change is not actually half the battle. It’s only the beginning. It’ll take more than a mere thought and that’s where I lose most of them. To the point that I gave up even trying to help as I felt like a fraud with such a bad rate of success.

So this blog is about how I manage to make it work for me. I’m hoping it might give some good ideas and, more likely, some good laughs at my expense. I love a good laugh and I do some pretty stupid things sometimes.

This is a wrap for post #1 and I’ll finish with this;

     At some stage in your life we are all forced to face our health – it’ll either be on our terms or the doctor’s terms but it will happen.

-         
     The cumulative effect of anything will have the greatest outcome. Spend consistent time making good choices and you’ll have good results. Spent consistent time making bad choices …

-          Bodybuilding competitions are great fun but they are only a hobby. I took it way too seriously once upon a time and now realise that it’s a great thing to do but it's no more or less important than anyone else's hobbies. Once a Go Fund Me account is started with pleas for money to go to a comp - holy crap, the plot has been lost well and truly.

-          You CAN fit in good food and excellent training around family, work and life. The fact that people don’t is because they won’t – not because they can’t. But not everyone will believe that.