Nathan Kendrick

From my teen years to my mid-twenties, I was under weight and struggled with my body image. I was making poor lifestyle choices, and making changes seemed like a daunting task. I was stuck in a cycle of being unhappy with where I was at, yet not making an effort to change it.

After many years of making excuses and putting it off, I subscribed to a local unsupervised gym and quickly found that I had no idea what I was really doing. After three months, I started to lose motivation when I wasn’t seeing the results that I was expecting.

I joined Vision because I was finally ready to take that first step towards gaining confidence in my abilities and pushing myself beyond the unrealistic limits that I had set myself. My original plan was to stay for as long as I needed to learn how to properly use gym equipment, then take those skills and go back to the gym.

My first meeting with the team told me that I had made the right choice. During my consultation, I felt that the team genuinely listened to my needs and showed me that it would be a tailored experience.

I feel incredibly lucky being paired with Samir. Sure, he’s taught me how to use equipment and help push me to be stronger, but where he has really made a difference is in my motivation to get up early each morning with a positive attitude to tackle the day. This is something that I have never been able to say before. He also finds it funny when I profusely swear under my breath at the exercises I hate, which is great.

Seeing my progress in one year makes me very proud of myself. A year ago, I was able to bench press 25-30kg max - now I’m up to 70kg. I even bought weights for home workouts, which I do in between my sessions with Samir.

The true indicator of my progress is the fact that I now do cardio. Having asthma has always limited my ability to run long distances, so it was a rocky start to the programme. I’ve since discovered that it’s all about easing into it and building endurance, which is something I hadn’t ever tried before. I’m now running twice a week outside of the studio to help build resistance; perhaps even setting my sights on a marathon of some sorts in the future.

I have also learned a lot about macros and my diet that I didn’t realise played such a huge part in my lifestyle. Cutting back on alcohol and eating the right amount of food to sustain my new active lifestyle has been a key to my progress.

To summarise my time with Vision so far, I would say that this past year has been my most positive and life-changing year so far. Due to the encouragement of Samir, the team and other clients, I’ve been able to achieve things I wouldn’t have thought possible.

I look forward to another year of training hard in Wigglytuff socks, discussing books with Samir in between breathing through sprints, and being a part of the Vision family.