Kerry| Mount Eden
“About five years ago I was beaten up in town somewhere along Queen Street. I was intoxicated, I got kicked out of a work do, I was being a less than lovely employee.
At the time I was quite an overweight person at about 100kg. I was living a lifestyle that I didn’t enjoy. I wasn’t happy with myself as a person. I wasn’t happy with the way that I was going, but because I was so set in my ways, so set in my job, I didn’t see a chance to reset and find the enjoyment that I knew was possible, because I was earning a wage and I was set in my ways like I say. I just thought that I’d continue what I was doing, because I didn’t see a way out of it. So I received this head injury. It was quite a severe one.
I got four brain bleeds and I had suffered a stroke and so I had a fairly long time in rehab. A friend of mine who’s a personal trainer started out by taking me for walks, just to get me moving again. So we’d go up mountains and stuff like that, and then basically he tricked me into doing his boxfit class, because he’d previously tried to convince me to do boxing. I was like I’ve got a head injury from being punched and kicked in the head, I’m not that keen on doing boxing. So anyway, he tricked me. He was like, “I’ve found a new mountain”, and he basically drove me to the gym and he said, “you can either do the class or you can sit in the car”.
So, I did the class and he helped me fall in love with exercise again. He picked me up almost every day to go to the gym and allowed me to look at life as a less than miserable thing and look for the positives. I’d try and create positives and he basically changed my life in that regard, and now I’m a personal trainer and I’m trying to do the same for other people.
I guess the biggest challenge around that was even after the head injury and after getting into fitness, I still didn’t know what I was going to do. I tried to go back into the job that I previously was in and it took for them to fire me before I had this feeling of hopelessness. Like, I got served my notice that I wasn’t working anymore on my worksite.
I bawled my eyes out in front of my workmates, which is not the most ideal thing to do on a construction site if you can imagine, being a kiwi bloke on a worksite, but with those challenges and through help of other people, which was probably the most important thing, I don’t think I would have been able to do that by myself.
Having that help through it has 100% changed my life. It was the worst thing that could have possibly happened to me, but the best thing that ever happened to me. Through support and people showing me a positive way of doing things, it’s completely changed my life, and I now get to try and do the same for others.
Through that I’ve started a business called School of Hard Knox. I really didn’t have an idea of what I was going to do with the business. All I knew was that I liked training, and that I was very good at talking crap. I continue to be quite good at that.
I’m doing that right now, by the way, it was a way for me to combine the two things of fitness, which I was new to enjoying, and the idea of helping people. Being able to talk and connect with people sort of really connected with me. We started off just by doing boot camps. We did some outdoor trainings. We did some evening ones and then we started doing 6AM boot camps, and it’s kind of grown from there to where we are now, where you know, I’ve got a couple of trainers helping me out, and I guess we’re just trying to go from strength to strength.
Rather than concentrate on people trying to lose weight or being fixated on their physical image, it’s about creating a community and an environment where people not only feel comfortable about being themselves, but want to go to training and feel good about the changes that they’re making in their lives.
It’s not like, hey let’s not eat food for eight weeks so that we can look good for summer; it’s let’s make some changes in your life so that even when I’m not there you’re compelled to try and do the thing that we’re trying to get you to do, and you want to do that and then you can pass on that knowledge to other people.
So it’s not about, hey if you’ll pay me then I help you, and that’s it; it’s like, let’s create change in your life so that you can create the same change in other people’s lives, and then we’re basically building a big community around that sort of positive change.”
