My fitness journey

A lifetime of workouts.

My fitness journey, much like my modelling one, began really early. I was only 4 when my mother took me to the swimming pool for swimming lessons. I grew up swimming, that was my childhood sport. I never had an interest in football or ball games as a kid, and swimming really forged my endurance mentality. As a young teenager I was drawn to physical exertion, addicted to endorphins. In Italy, our house was on a hill near the mountains. The alpine outdoors, the vastness, the elements. Trail running became my greatest passion. I would always push it to the limit. How far could I go, how fast, how steep. Sun, snow, mud.

I quickly started to realise that for improved performance on that type of terrain, I needed to improve my overall strength. Resistance training became complementary to my endurance training. Local newspaper ads were still a thing, and so I gradually gathered some old gym equipment for the garage.

I was very skinny as a boy, with a good shoulder frame inherited from the swimming years, and an incredibly fast metabolism. The fast metabolism meant that as a child I could already see my abs. But it also meant that if I were to pack on serious muscle mass, I had to lift weights. And I loved it. It came very intuitively to me. And as I struck a balance between endurance and resistance, the rewards of an aesthetic physique became apparent as well. It is universal, everyone is instinctively drawn to the proportions of a classic physique.

Suddenly I understood the importance that classical art attributed to symmetry, proportion and completeness. I embraced the philosophical nobleness of a healthy body and its relationship to a healthy mind.  

My vision of a body that could perform at its best and simultaneously manifest its virtues exteriorly was clear before me. But that was not what motivated me to workout.

The motivation was innate in me, and the passion was, and still is, for the act of physical effort itself. The vision, the goal has to go beyond mere aesthetics. It is a way of life.

When I moved to London at 18, I left the Alps behind. I still continued with cross country running, open water swimming and long-distance cycling for many years. These were second nature to me. For years I would start my day with a swim in one of the lidos or ponds in Hampstead, through the freezing winter months. But I also made the gym a daily habit. It felt like my playground. There is no feeling quite like the feeling of becoming stronger and stronger. A feeling that is renewed each time on the gym floor, as the blood rushes to the muscles and the pump makes you feel invincible. The big meals that follow, the tiredness, the soreness. The bursts of intense focus required to drive that last heavy rep of squats, or as the barbell is deadlifted from the floor. The burning sensation at the end of the set. The sense of self-respect. Strength training is the best form of exercise. It targets every part of the body in the safest of ways. It is for the long term, for life. But it is a surprisingly complex discipline. It takes hours and hours of learning. Every day. And not only from books, most of it comes from listening to your body. Understanding how it works. I am lucky, because I learned that at an early age, on those Alpine trails. I owe a lot to my past endurance training. It made my resistance training what it is today. To all my workouts I owe the inner balance, the mental resilience. And to the mind, to the mind I owe everything. Because where there is an idea, where there is focus and will, there is always a way to success.