The BodyBlitz Challenge is an awesome way to achieve good results if you are a competitive person. This is because, at times when you feel like giving up, the competitor in you comes out and pushes you through. Throughout the entire Challenge I followed a pretty tight diet although I didn’t always have the time or the energy to do the cardio required.

At the start of the challenge I had a three month old baby, which was taking a lot of my time but also motivating me to continue on the journey. I have always enjoyed doing weights but not so much cardio, so I decided to change it up a lot. I started doing kickboxing and mixed martial arts training and enjoyed them both. I found the kickboxing to be an awesome cardio workout and the mixed martial arts to involve both strength training and cardio.

The first time I did the mixed martial arts class I had aching biceps for three days. With the benefits also came the negatives as I did encounter a few injuries along the way.

I also went surfing, swimming and walking to help break it up. I have a reasonably good home gym setup and mostly worked out by myself — at times I struggled to keep on track, but the thing I enjoy the most about bodybuilding, which is the thing that kept me motivated, is the quest to simply understand how the body works and the goal of trying to change your training to suit your body. As you go through the industry, you soon start to realise that everyone has their own opinion about what works but soon realise that what works for them doesn’t necessarily work for you. Reading Australian Iron Man Magazine helps you in so many ways as far as weight lifting routines and diets to follow are concerned. As fun as it is to make it up as you go, when you start to read the magazine articles and find that you agree with the pros’ ideas and already know a lot of the stuff, it gives you that extra confidence boost.

In the end I probably didn’t quite achieve the results that I would have liked — I had set myself the goal of 86 kilos but ended up 91 which was still an 11 kilo loss — rest assured, as the BodyBlitz Challenge ends, the bodybuilding challenge continues. The enjoyment you get out of completing a good set or a good workout is almost unexplainable, but to those of you out there already training hard, you need no explanation — just keep charging.