When I was 15 I decided to stop playing rugby league.
I had played for most of my childhood at that point and I loved the game. Like many kids I dreamt about playing in the NRL one day. But as became a teenager and continued to age up and move into harder competitions each year, reality started to become apparent to me. I just wasn’t that good.
So after a season of spending more time on the bench than on the field I decided to give it up after under 15’s. But the moment I decided to not play again I made an agreement with myself that I would just do nothing and because there wasn’t any other sports I wanted to be involved in I decided I would train in our garage gym at least 3 times a week.
And I did this. All through year 10 I trained at home, in the garage by myself doing mostly basic bodybuilding style workouts using things I’d found in magazines or online to figure out how to make a plan. I slowly taught myself the basics of training and whilst I did this I continued to be involved in rugby league as I shifted my focus to the coaching side and began coaching a junior team.
By the time year 10 ended we were forced to pick subjects for the following year when moving to a senior school. At this point my plan was to finish my HSC and go to uni for sports coaching. I didn’t need to get a very high ATAR to get into sports coaching so there wasn’t much pressure for having to do difficult subjects or get high scores. But I had always been in some of the top classes so when selecting subjects my year 10 coordinator pushed my to pick subjects that would give me a high ATAR.
This back fired when I then started year 11 next year and found myself in subjects like advanced math, advance English and religion and my whole purpose of being at school was so I could move onto a sports coaching degree. S after barely 3 weeks year 11 I left school, something I had never expected to do. But I left to study a cert 3&4 in fitness as I found that if I completed this then did a diploma of fitness I could still apply for the same uni degree within the same time period.
And over the next 2 years that’s what I did. I did both of those courses. But not long after leaving school, in the process of studying for my cert 3&4, I discovered CrossFit. This was where things started to shift a little and before long I was trying some of the workouts in the garage, getting absolutely smashed by them and wanting more. So I found the closest affiliate which was a 30 minute drive from house and in the owners garage. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with CrossFit and I started to know that this was what I wanted to do. I soon after did work experience in a regular gym and this enforced even more that I wanted to work in the CrossFit space.
So I did. Back in those days almost all CrossFit gyms were a 1 man show so getting any work coaching was hard and you had to be willing to travel. I would travel down to the Central Coast (1.5hrs drive) for a night during the week so I could coach a couple of days there and not long after that would routinely travel 30-45 minutes each way just to coach a couple of sessions.
I knew pretty early on that I wanted to opened my own affiliate one day but that just seemed because that was the natural progression. I actually was close to doing it and had started to plan a little when I was 21. I’m glad that I didn’t ended up starting it that early.
So over the next 4 years I continued to coach. I would coach at a total of 6 different CrossFit gyms, get work coaching gymnastics in primary schools and join the army reserve and become a defence force fitness leader. And then finally at the end of 2019, with a big push from my now wife, I made the official plans to open RIP Training at the start of 2020.
Continuing to coach for all those years and doing my time proved to be a huge benefit to me when opening my own gym as felt confident in my own abilities as a coach but oh did I have a tonne to learn as a business owner.
Over the years I have thought a lot about why I really wanted to open a gym and think it boils down to 3 things:
- I love CrossFit, fitness and training and wanted that to be my life
- I love coaching
- I love to help people
So that’s the story of how RIP training started.
