EP27 VanesaNicolosi Youtube
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Sara Ferrer: [00:00:00] Welcome to Fearless and Flawed Today, our fearless female founder is Vanesa Nicolosii, a certified personal trainer. Vanesa is the powerhouse between Grow StrongHer a wellness brand, rooted in helping women build both physical strength and unshakeable self-worth. Through her empowering fitness programs, she goes beyond the workout, helping women reconnect with their bodies, rewrite limiting beliefs, and grow into the strongest versions of themselves inside and out.

Sara Ferrer: And I’m Sara, an email marketing pro converting clicks into cash.

Serena Reynolds: And I’m Serena and I make brands stand out from the noise. Elevating thought leaders in Go-to Experts. Together, Sara and I are two women in charge, diving into fearless, flawed, and fabulous journeys of female entrepreneurs. Welcome to our podcast, Vanesa.

Serena Reynolds: So you’ve built a [00:01:00] movement with Grow StrongHer, and what inspired you to start it and how has your vision evolved since day one?

Vanesa Nicolosi: So when I first started my career as a personal trainer, I didn’t have this brand. I didn’t have Grow StrongHer. It was just me. It was Vanesa Nicolosi everywhere. You could see.

Vanesa Nicolosi: I got to this point last year, but before all of that, what inspired me to to become a personal trainer, to start on this journey was my own journey with, with fitness and how he fitness had had helped me sort of healed in some areas of my life. And also how I found that at some point I was not necessarily doing the best thing for me.

Vanesa Nicolosi: When I was doing my own training, my own movement, I was not necessarily considering my own mental health and other aspects of my life. I was only considering the physical aspect. So at a point, I just kind of make it made a click, and I started seeing it in [00:02:00] a different way for myself. And then. We can dive more into this because it’s a long topic, but I had a big burnout from another career and I, I knew that was a point I needed to make a change and this is what I wanted for myself.

Serena Reynolds: The Grow StrongHer was a rebrand for you as well as for your company.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Yes, exactly. But when, when I started, it was just me. It was just me as a person. And when I got enough sort of visibility, enough people that knew me and trusted me, I said, this is the right point for me. I can actually bring up something else.

Vanesa Nicolosi: And I decided to bring the brand to add a few things other than what I was already doing with my personal training services.

Sara Ferrer: You mentioned burnout. You had said, Hey, I got this. Experiencing burnout. Lead us down. We, we love a good burnout story and then an evolution of a 2.0. As long as there’s like the 2.0 version.

Sara Ferrer: So lead us through it. What caused the burnout? How did that affect, you know, the next [00:03:00] chapter, mentally, physically, all that good stuff.

Vanesa Nicolosi: So this is when I started as a personal trainer five, six years ago. I, I’ll take you back to the beginning ’cause I like, I like to tell the story as it is. So, when I finished high school, I didn’t know what to do with my life and I didn’t wanna move to another study back home.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Um, so I decided to study to become an English teacher. I thought that was the thing I wanted to do. I studied English. I was like, I had a very, very good teacher at the private school, and she’s like, yeah, you have to do this. You’re gonna be fantastic, whatnot. So I went into English teaching as a career. I finished that.

Vanesa Nicolosi: I realized that I didn’t wanna do any of that. I was like, yeah, no, this is not what I want. Kids in schools in this method. No, this is not for me. I did some teaching for adults, so I realized I. It was not that I hated teaching, it just wasn’t the right environment for me to teach. So I moved out to a bigger city at that [00:04:00] point, and I just had to find work, anything I could do.

Vanesa Nicolosi: So I started working with different companies, doing different roles, and this was 2007, and from then until 2015, my whole life in terms of work was different companies, always admin, customer service, sales, all of these kind of roles that gave me. A lot of skills that I use nowadays, but that also were all working with like foreign companies.

Vanesa Nicolosi: So I always had to work in English even though it’s not my mother tongue. And I always had to work with all these different roles. And in 2015, my husband and I moved to Argentina, to Dubai for a job, and I worked a couple of years there. And then at some point is when this burnout happened because it’s such a stressful environment.

Vanesa Nicolosi: It’s a. It’s a big city, but the way of life, it’s very, very like on all the time, you work all the time, you [00:05:00] do things all the time. You can never stop. You’re driving everywhere. Everything is a stressor it. So I was trying to sort of balance that out with, okay, I worked along like very long hours, but before getting home I would step.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Stop in the gym, do my training, and then go home. But that would mean that I would leave the house at 7:00 AM and come back at 10:00 PM like all my days were like that. And it was super hectic, very stressful all the time. And at one point, I. I was like, I can’t do this anymore. This is, I hate this job. I hate this life.

Vanesa Nicolosi: This, everything’s wrong with it. I got hurt when training. I had a big injury, and that led, led to, to also stopping workouts and everything happened because I was overstressed, overworked, overtrained over everything. Not good. So at that point, I had a very, very long conversation with my husband who has helped me along.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Al always helped [00:06:00] me in this journey, and he’s like, okay, well what do you wanna do if you don’t do this? If you quit the office and you don’t wanna find another office job, what do you want to do? And I was like, a big, I have no clue. And we started like digging into things like analyzing different aspects of my life and what I like, what I enjoyed, blah, blah, blah.

Vanesa Nicolosi: That’s when I realized that I, the thing I enjoyed the most was movement. Not everyone who likes training needs to become a trainer is, you know, it’s like it’s, it goes beyond that. I loved movement and I also always loved teaching. That thing was still inside me, never left me like even if I was not doing it in all the roles I had in different companies, I always ended up.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Doing something, teaching, education related, mentoring related. You know, there was always the aspect involved in my life. So I was like, okay, maybe I can actually use [00:07:00] all of this different bits of my life, the teaching, the customer service, the admins, all these little aspects of the puzzle and put them together into something meaningful.

Vanesa Nicolosi: And because I had gotten the injury and I had to really, really step. Down from the level of training that I had before, and I had to take a, like this step back and look and reflect into how I was going to get back. Once the physio was done and they allowed me to, to go back to training, I realized that movement and training meant a lot more to me than just a physical thing.

Vanesa Nicolosi: It was not about how I looked anymore. It was. Everything else, like all the time that I couldn’t train meant that I was like very, very close to depression or very close to things that were not so nice, like not feeling this, I don’t know. It just didn’t feel right [00:08:00] and I knew, and I realized at that point that the training that I was doing, it was not just physical, but it was a lot of my mental health as well that I needed it to stay.

Vanesa Nicolosi: On point in a way, or, okay. In other aspects of my life.

Sara Ferrer: How do you get, let me, let me ask you at this point, at this point, because I’m fascinated, right? I’m fascinated by like personal journey, and I think that this is, I’m gonna ask you the question that I think a lot of, you know, entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners get to where this sudden shift has happened, right?

Sara Ferrer: The big thing has happened where you’re like, I can’t do this anymore. I’m gonna become a trainer. You know what’s good for you mentally, emotionally, ideally monetarily as you build your business. But now how do you start the business? Like how do you, you know, how do you figure out the business of grow StrongHer going from zero?

Sara Ferrer: ’cause you’re not coming from a training background, do you, do you align with the gym first? And you mentioned you were in Dubai, [00:09:00] so I’m imagining your clientele a lot is in. Person. So how do you wear all those hat? Just walk us through some of the, the, the pain points, some of the, the high moments in the beginning of actually starting the business of grow stronger.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Right. So it is, it is a bit more complicated on that because at that moment, this was 2018 ish. Yeah, 2018 when I realized that I wanted to make this change, but it wasn’t immediate for me because we were living in a place where we needed a lot of money. So we were okay as long as we both had our jobs, as they were, and we were already thinking of leaving Dubai to come to Europe, somewhere in Europe, which just didn’t know where we, we had no clue.

Vanesa Nicolosi: We did. We knew that we wanted that. So we also had very clear that. The next year, which was 2019, we were going to save money so that in 2020 we could move out. We had that already. So what I did during that time, I actually got my certification [00:10:00] and I continued the job that I didn’t like. I just took it differently because I had had this sort of shift in my mentality of, okay, I’m going to do this just to aid me to finish this and to lead me into where I want to go.

Vanesa Nicolosi: So my job started to feel a lot easier. I, I, you know, things got a lot better in that aspect because I had this other, other purpose in my, in my head to build my own business. It was super scary, super scary. Especially because in 2020 when we moved to Spain, well well decided we were moving to Spain. We moved end of January, 2020.

Vanesa Nicolosi: We came here, we were going to start our things, and then the pandemic happened. So it was like chaos all over. So my business as a business, it only started like in June, 2020, so, and I had no clue what I was doing. No clue what I was doing. I did, [00:11:00] I had, I had 0, 0, 0 background. Like honestly, I, and I, I, I love doing it and I keep doing it when I can, but I, it’s a lot of trial and error.

Vanesa Nicolosi: It’s a lot of trying the things you think and, and of course try reading and investigating and when, when I started to get connections and asking people, but at the beginning it was just me. We were alone here. Like we had a couple of friends, but no one knew anything about businesses. They all were employees everywhere else.

Vanesa Nicolosi: I do have to say that my dad has his own business and here he has had it for maybe 20, 30 years now. So I do come from that. I don’t know a lot of it, like deep down, but it, I grew up with that in my life. Like where he had to build, he was an employee. He started building his business while he was doing his own job at the, where he still was employed.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Then when he had enough work on his [00:12:00] own, he quit his employment. So it’s a very similar situation in that sense and, and I sort of grew up around that. So there were a few things that I sort of. Frat from my background, but I didn’t know how to sell. I didn’t know how to make clients in this area. I, I, I knew how to make a spreadsheet and I could, like, control my finances, but that was about it.

Serena Reynolds: So how did you get your first clients?

Vanesa Nicolosi: So I, I was, yeah, that’s what, that’s the funny story. So I found two websites in Spain where teachers of different areas can post their services. It’s a very rudimentary kind of system, but it works. So I put my ads in those pages and I got my first client through one of those pages.

Vanesa Nicolosi: And at the moment I got this first client. She was not what I would call my ideal client, but when I started I was like, whatever comes, I’ll take it. I have to try this out. [00:13:00] Get wherever you can get your hands on, and I always tell people the same when they ask me what to do, like, just try it out. You’d never know what you’re gonna like.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Also, I didn’t know what I wanted, like I knew I wanted to work preferably with women. I just kind of had that clear in my head, but I wasn’t sure about the age. I wasn’t sure about what I wanted to focus on, like. I just had to try things out. So this girl, the mom of the girl calls me because she, I think she was like 19 years old, something like that.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Like very young, totally different from the people I work with right now. Uh, I’m like, yeah, fine, let’s do it. And at the very beginning I was going to people’s houses, like commuting everywhere. And I took clients that were like maybe an hour away, an hour and a half away, just didn’t care. You know, that year I think I had two clients.

Vanesa Nicolosi: I had a 20-year-old and an 82-year-old. Completely different experiences, completely different people, but it was very interesting. [00:14:00] And then the next year got better, a little better. I started to have more clients. Some, I swear I don’t even remember how, because I. I kept those ads there, but then I think it was the year after, I think it was 2021, that I found IWBB, the Facebook group for entrepreneurs in international business women.

Vanesa Nicolosi: And that really sort of put a, a like a little. You know, like pressing the gas on, on a car. Uh, because I started to meet a lot of people, I necessarily, I didn’t necessarily make a lot of clients at the beginning, but I did start to make a lot to meet a lot of women to sort of start moving in the right environments and understanding more of what I wanted and.

Vanesa Nicolosi: It led to saying, okay, this is the client that I want to have. This is the kind of people I wanna work with. And in that group, you have a lot of resources for business too. A lot of people who know about a lot of different things that I [00:15:00] didn’t know. So I started learning more and more about how to sort of go about the business, things I could do social media wise, sales wise, you know, marketing wise, things I had no clue about before.

Vanesa Nicolosi: So that, that’s where I started like really, really sort of learning and then understanding, okay, I can look at this and these are the resources and you know, but at the very beginning it was just those two ads, free ads also, mind you, I didn’t pay for that. And he gave me my two first line.

Sara Ferrer: Let me ask you too, it’s like, so you mentioned that all the, the beginning was all about refining the idea, right?

Sara Ferrer: Testing out what you think you want versus the reality. But your brand name is Grow stronger. Grow stronger, her HER at the end. So grow StrongHer. Um, it’s very clear that you are female oriented. And, you know, can you talk us through, ’cause in the fitness industry right now, in general, there is a lot of, you [00:16:00] know, bikini seasons coming up, beach Bob seasons coming up and, and being a woman myself, I tend to get a lot of these ads at Target women.

Sara Ferrer: And it’s a lot of aesthetics. It’s a lot of, you know, look great for that two week vacation you’re gonna take, walk us through. How you’re similar, how you’re different, how you’ve decided, hey, I’m gonna create my niche, focusing specifically on women, and I’d like you to talk more about that too. Why not men?

Sara Ferrer: And then what your philosophy has been as you’ve grown the business since 2021. When people go to you, they go to you for what and for and why. What makes grow stronger different than Beach Body Fitness.

Vanesa Nicolosi: So. The first thing when I started, I didn’t have this brand. I only developed this brand last year, and this is because at first I was under my own name because I wanted to get known as a person.

Vanesa Nicolosi: When I got enough visibility and a stable sort of number of [00:17:00] clients, then I was like, I’m ready to take the next step and to say. Everyone knows what I do already, right? Everyone knows what I focus on and we’ll get there in a second so then I can, now I wanna find a name for this that is not just my name.

Vanesa Nicolosi: And then that’s when Grow StrongHer came into life in a way, and I read it my website, and I added a membership and a few other things that we can talk about in a minute. Even though the brand is new-ish, I did try teaching men. I just didn’t feel comfortable. But it’s not that I have a thing against it.

Vanesa Nicolosi: It’s just that I, myself, it was not the boys. The boys were great. You know? It was not that it was, it was just that with women, I feel there is a different, or a connection at a different level. The one thing I knew from the very beginning is that I want to do strength training. I wanna focus on strength training for women, but I don’t wanna focus on the looks for me.[00:18:00]

Vanesa Nicolosi: Training doesn’t have to be necessarily about looks. If you wanna focus on looks, because that’s your goal. Fantastic. I’ve done that too. Yeah. And, and, and I think it’s a great thing to do. Like if you like it, if you enjoy it, if you enjoy the process and it’s your thing, go for it. But to me, and this is when I decided to focus on women over 30, in a way, is, and, and why Grow StrongHer is, has that name, it’s like.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Let’s grow into people or let’s get older in a way, and that’s one thing I say to all my clients is my goal is that when I’m 80, I can go to the toilet on my own and I don’t need help and I can get out of bed from my bed without help. So that, just to give you an understanding of where I’m going, like for me, is teaching women about what’s strengthening and giving them the tools to actually become stronger for life.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Muscles are [00:19:00] beautiful. They look amazing on your body and they will make you look great. But it’s not just about that. Muscles are functional, they protect your bones. If you fall, you will not get hurt, and if you do, your recovery is gonna be much faster than if you’re not trained. Muscles give you that extra energy that you need, like the training itself will give you the extra energy that you need through the day.

Vanesa Nicolosi: They will, it will energize you. It will bring you this feel good hormones to to, to help you. Do other things during your day. You know, it’s, it’s about that. It’s about protecting the bones, protecting the joints. And for a lot of us, especially if you have a job where you sit a lot, it’s about reducing aches and pains.

Vanesa Nicolosi: It’s about training movement to not feel so much pain. I’ve had people tell me in three sessions. That their back pain is gone or their knee pain is gone, or that they can jump again. And you know, like that is why I do this. That is [00:20:00] exactly why I do this. Like if you, if your biceps is bigger now and you’re proud of that, beautiful, but if you come to me and say, Hey, my knee pain is gone, thank you for this.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Like, this is the goal. For me as a trainer, this is the goal.

Serena Reynolds: So let’s look at strength training. ’cause, ’cause I’ve seen this a lot in the press, especially around, um, weight loss injections, serious dieting that all us women do for that bikini body or whatever body I have to be rocking up on the beach with.

Serena Reynolds: But that actually depletes our strength, doesn’t it? That impacts our muscles, our tone, our bone structures, everything when we, when we go on these severe diets. And that’s why strength training is now becoming very important to move forward with.

Vanesa Nicolosi: It depends on what you do while you’re doing the diet.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Like those two things we. We tend to think of diet [00:21:00] and weight loss as the only way, you know, like, like you have to, we tend to, I wanna say, we tend to think of diet as like restriction and, and like depriving yourself from the things you really like and, and really, really suffering through the process, which is something we’ve all grown up with.

Vanesa Nicolosi: I guess we’re about the same age and. We grew up with this culture of, oh, you have to be small, you have to be lean, you need to eat very little. You cannot be eaten like a man, you know, and you have to see me eat, but like, I mean, I do eat a lot. So we, I think we relate diet and with restriction and that we think the only way to weight loss.

Vanesa Nicolosi: If weight loss is our goal, we tend to think that the only way is just like. Filling our still our lips and not eating at all and suffering and, and all the injections or, well, not all this. And this is when it’s, it still pains me to see these ads nowadays, even when we, when, when we [00:22:00] know it’s not the case anymore.

Vanesa Nicolosi: And we, we know how important it is to do other things like strength training and eat healthy or balance rather than little. But we still see those add of lose 11 kilos in three weeks or lose 10 kilos in seven days and like. No, there are healthy ways of losing weight if that’s what you need. You may wanna lose weight for a ethics, or you may wanna lose weight because of a health issue.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Some people really, some of us may need it at some point. You know it. It’s not necessarily math.

Serena Reynolds: But this isn’t about weight loss. This is about strength training. Right, exactly. I didn’t want to turn this into what’s your take on losing weight? Women lose weight, men lose weight. We go on diets or to lose weight, and that is restricted, that affects our strengths.

Serena Reynolds: And now the, the conversation around that is that strengths training. Actually more than aerobics is what we [00:23:00] should be doing. A, to maintain weight loss. Two, to protect our bodies from the stresses and the strains that we put on it through weight loss journeys or poor diet or, or whatever it is.

Vanesa Nicolosi: If you, if you’re doing a diet or whatever you’re doing, like, and if you wanna lose weight, strength training can help in that sense too, because then what it means is that.

Vanesa Nicolosi: The way that you lose is not gonna be from losing muscle. There was in the past, the tendency was just to do cardio because that was it. But then, yeah, with cardio you lose a lot of weight, but you are losing a lot of muscle mass. The process. And that’s, that’s not necessarily healthy. So the, the best thing would be to have a combination of both things.

Vanesa Nicolosi: A little bit of cardio and a little bit of strength training. More strength training than cardio. Like, if you have to balance it out, the, the, the thing will be more strength training, more working on developing those muscles. Because then even if your goal is to lose weight. [00:24:00] The muscles at when you are at rest, when you’re like just chilling, sitting on the couch, they would help you burn more calories than if you didn’t have that muscle mass.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Uh, other than the extra health benefits that it has.

Sara Ferrer: Do you feel like most women understand that, or do you feel like a lot of your job is kind of retraining the mind? If a woman goes, no, no, no. I, I don’t wanna bulk up. Oh my gosh. I don’t wanna look like a bodybuilder because that, I’m sure that there’s barriers to your job where it’s just like reeducating reassuring.

Sara Ferrer: So walk us through kind of, what does that look like high level in terms of some misconception. That women might have that come to you when it comes to what health looks like or what weight training looks like and how you kind of

Sara Ferrer: navigate

Sara Ferrer: that.

Vanesa Nicolosi: There is one thing what Sara and I was saying, there’s more information about how strength training is important, why it’s important.

Vanesa Nicolosi: So I’m very lucky to, to be doing this at this point of life because with all that information that is out there, I do get more and more clients who are actually ready for it. [00:25:00] Who are actually looking for it. Like they’ve been, they’re tired of doing cardio their whole life and it not being effective. So they want to do the strength training, which is fantastic.

Vanesa Nicolosi: But you do still have misconceptions because of course it’s, there’s a lot of information and there’s a lot of misinformation. So we do have a lot of this misconceptions and the biggest one I think, is that women think that grabbing a two kilo weights are gonna, is gonna make them bulk up, you know? Or that start, what I mean is starting strengths training.

Vanesa Nicolosi: And I’ve had had some people ask me, it’s not the majority, but I’ve had had some cases of, yeah, but I don’t wanna get too big. You know? And then you have to have this conversation with them. Ideally, you wanna know what is behind that thought. Some people have different reasons for it. But then once you work that out, sort of the.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Bigger picture is you’re not going to get bigger [00:26:00] by doing strength training for, even if you do it for years, you know you do get the muscles, which is yes, you’re gonna get a little bit different. Your body’s going to change. That’s a fact. You’re going to, your t-shirts are gonna fit in a different way.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Your pants are gonna fit in a different way, but the level of training that you need. To be like a man or to bulk like a man. It’s insane. We, we don’t get there naturally. As women, we don’t have that physionomy, you know, we don’t have as much testosterone to get there. The men get there because of all the testosterone, and not even some men.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Some men cannot even get there because they’re just so tiny and they struggle with it. Some women may have it easier because they’re not so small when they start. But the reality is that the developed bulky or bigger bodies that you see, it’s mainly because of testosterone. And yes, there are some women that get very, very bulky, [00:27:00] but I’m going to bet like 99% of the times they are on something.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Steroids or a supplement or something. ’cause you’ll see this, this kind of women, you’ll see it’s women who do competitions like weightlifting, strength training competitions. Those women are like, you may see they’re a body that is very bulky for a woman or like, looks very different from what you think of a, when you think of a woman.

Vanesa Nicolosi: And I think people are scared of that and like this, this woman particularly trains a million hours a day. She have been training for 10 years or more. She eats a lot more than you eat, like three times more probably. And then she might or may not be on some kind of enhancing drug, you know?

Serena Reynolds: It’s also their full-time job.

Serena Reynolds: It’s where they make their money, where their career is going. So, you know, I mean, hats off to these women if that’s what they want to do. I think that’s the, it’s a serious [00:28:00] power move for ’em. What would somebody expect if they were to come to you? What, what would be the first thing that you would lead them through?

Vanesa Nicolosi: So the first thing people do with me is a consultation online. That always happens on online. We just have a chat. Like 20, 30 minute chat, where we go through where they are at the moment, why they’re looking for a trainer, what their goals are, and just to give me a little bit of an idea of whether we could potentially work together or not.

Vanesa Nicolosi: If we are like a good fit, I. They can ask any questions. So that’s the first thing. And then if they decide to work with me, then we’ll go through a very brief onboarding, which is an email with a contract and a medical form they have to fill in. And then of course, by now we’ve had scheduled some sort of sessions, at least the first sessions.

Vanesa Nicolosi: And then when they come to a class, whether they do it in person or. Online. The first class is usually very [00:29:00] introductory. We go through all the classes, we go through a warmup, but, and then we’ll go through a basic program of exercises like any strengths or any exercises that I plan for that, for that person, for that session.

Vanesa Nicolosi: But it’s, the first session is kind of slow, and I always tell people this, the first session is slow and expect, not, expect not to be dead at the end of the session. Because my first session with you is going to be very. Sort of on the easy way, on the easy side, and it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get harder later, it’s just that I don’t know, you and I need to know how much you can do and how you feel with all the exercises.

Vanesa Nicolosi: So first sessions are always like that, maybe one and two. Those two sessions usually like, okay, we try different exercises. We see how the person moves through all the exercises, see if the exercises that I thought are okay for the person or I if I have to change something. And also we kind of start playing with, okay, how much weight can you lift on X, Y, Z?[00:30:00]

Vanesa Nicolosi: And I try to teach them from the very beginning. How do you know at what level of effort you’re working? How do you know how an exercise feels for you? This is for me, the first thing. People have to learn the technique of the exercises. They’ll learn as they practice, and we focus a lot on that. But understanding what level of effort you need to put in.

Vanesa Nicolosi: To get the results. And how do you know if your body is at that level or not? I think it’s very, very important and because it’s very subjective, we also have to practice it in a way. So that’s the first thing we do. You know, when we, when we go sort of the first session, we go through the exercises and our understanding, how do you know if you’re at the sort of.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Challenging level of effort that you need to get results out of this or not.

Sara Ferrer: And what does success look like? Like for this client? O of course, the aesthetically, I think there’s always a bit of, if you’re putting work into something, aesthetically there will be a change. But can you give us some [00:31:00] non aesthetic?

Sara Ferrer: Success metrics. Sleeping better, feeling better. Like what to expect if someone’s been training consistently. ’cause I’m sure that’s key. Consistency for like six to eight months. What’s something high level you can say, Hey Sara, you are going to experience A, B, and C if you stick with this.

Vanesa Nicolosi: What Most people get more energy to run their everyday tasks, their everyday things.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Whether, whatever it is, you know, jobs, families, children, whatever it is. More energy, less aches and pains all over. So that would be like the two main improvements that everyone will see, like energy levels rising and pain being reduced. And then what the, what success looks like after, uh, with the sessions.

Vanesa Nicolosi: It’s very personal and what, that’s why at, at least with the personal training side of things, it’s very, very particular. ’cause you’ll have to see what everyone needed like. I’ll give you an example. I had a client who was like, [00:32:00] I fly a lot, so I wanna be able to put the overhead weight, the over, you know, the weight on the overhead compartment of the plane by myself without having to ask, without having to ask a fly a flight attendant.

Vanesa Nicolosi: She did like a month of trading or two, I think, and one day she comes to me and I, oh, I took this slide and I could do this on my own without having to isolate it. So that’s successful. You know, or I had another client who couldn’t walk more than three blocks without her hips taken. And when that stopped, that was success for her.

Vanesa Nicolosi: So, you know, it’s, it’s very, very particular. But those are the sort of metrics we look at. I don’t ask people, oh, send me pictures or measure yourself, or none of that. So it’s more about feeling, how do you feel with this? How has this, how or, or even like something that is. Maybe more equal for everyone than you can sort of generalize is I started doing the squats, let’s say a squat.

Vanesa Nicolosi: I started doing squats today and it feels like [00:33:00] I’m dying. And in, in a week or two weeks from now, it feels easier. It doesn’t feel like I’m dying anymore, or I don’t need three days to recover. I need one. You know, these little things is, it’s all indicators of success. It’s all indicators of progress. It’s not only.

Vanesa Nicolosi: You can, you can measure progress with how much more weight they’re lifting in, for example, but it’s not always the case. Sometimes it’s these other different things. I can run up the stairs without run like. Having to step on or to stop to catch my breath, you know, I can go up the three floors of stairs without having to step, uh, stop midway to, to catch my breath, that kind of thing.

Vanesa Nicolosi: I have a lot of stories like that, like very particular cases of people coming and telling me I would be able to do this and I wasn’t a yoga before and it’s because of the training. So, but yeah, it’s like you said, consistency is the key there. Right? So

Serena Reynolds: Vanesa, we’ve got to the part of the show where. [00:34:00] We have asked our previous guest a question, um, and now I’m going to pose that question to you, and then after that question, we are going to ask you for a question for our next guest.

Serena Reynolds: So, and you will have no idea who they are either. So the question I have for you this week from our guest last time was, what is your morning practice to elevate your spirit and to start your day?

Vanesa Nicolosi: The curious thing is, I. I don’t have anything like meditation or anything of that sort for myself, but the one thing I have to do every morning and uh, I I, I cannot start my day if I don’t do it Like this is have breakfast, but it’s not just having breakfast for me.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Breakfast for me is like an hour to myself. It’s the the time of the day when everything is silent.

Serena Reynolds: I love that. I love that.

Vanesa Nicolosi: I do. I made my breakfast. I stay away my breakfast [00:35:00] and there’s two games I play on my phone and like they have daily, yeah know. Yeah. Now we’re getting in. Now we’re getting into the realness.

Vanesa Nicolosi: This is not meditation. This is not meditation. This is just my time of the day and this is what I need. Uh, there are two games and they have like a daily game. So I do those two, which take me like five minutes and then I will, if I usually try to read at least a chapter of a book while I’m having breakfast, so I’m not working because otherwise I will get straight into work and then I’ll just.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Take my brain somewhere else. So I try to read and take at least from the hour that I have at least 30, 40 minutes to just sit there, eat, enjoy the food. I, it’s my favorite meal of the day. I really, really enjoy it. And it’s, it’s just that, it’s that time when I’m just eating, maybe reading the book, playing a little game, but not working yet, not thinking of anything else than, than just that little.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Point in time, and even if it’s not, like I [00:36:00] said, it’s not meditation per se. It is not like I wake up and I start doing squats or pushups. No, I don’t do any of that. I, I mean, I, I just, I’m not like that. I work out later in the day, but it’s just what I need to start the day. Right. I feel like if I miss that, like for example, tomorrow I have to go do a blood test and I’m gonna have to fast and I know that it’s gonna screw away my day because I will not have that moment.

Vanesa Nicolosi: I already know it. It’s like that time. I needed to get the date right. I don’t know. That’s just the, yeah.

Sara Ferrer: Yeah. And you know, in a day and age where, you know, at least in the us like the concept of anyone spending time eating breakfast and not just eating it in their car on the run, like the concept of like, you know, like.

Sara Ferrer: Like, okay, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. But I love that, that you’re saying like, no, no, no, no. This is more than breakfast. This is a ritual. This is a little bit of game time. This is a little bit of reading, but this is primarily no work. So kudos. I mean, listen, I’m, I struggle to get in like 15 minutes before checking the email, and I’m like, okay, don’t, I’m [00:37:00] not working.

Sara Ferrer: I’m just overviewing what the work will be.

Serena Reynolds: I reach for my phone before my eyes are open. Just blindly feeling for it. I know it’s around somewhere.

Sara Ferrer: Oh, Serena, that’s Serena’s morning routine. Grasping for her phone for an hour. It’s real, ladies. It’s real. I believe it. Vanesa, what’s a, what’s a question you wanna ask our next guest?

Sara Ferrer: You have no idea who they are. This is totally your time to ask whatever. It can be fitness related. It cannot be. You can, you can choose. So what would you like to ask the next person?

Vanesa Nicolosi: I have a lot of people. Come to me and say, I don’t have time for this. And like, again, if we think of, in my case, I’m, I’m gonna ask something about training and movement, but like, if you think of moving for your own wellbeing, how can you not make time for it?

Vanesa Nicolosi: I know it’s very hard. I’ve seen many cases and I understand that when I go through people’s schedule with them and I [00:38:00] like, okay, this is crazy. We have to do something about this and it’s hard, but also what I try to sort of tell people is that it doesn’t always have to be about training and training hard.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Sometimes it’s just about moving and finding a little bit of time just for movement, and it can be five or 10 minutes of your day. It can be a five minute stretch, it can be a 10 minute workout. You don’t need an hour every day to be healthy. Let the question is. How can you fit at least 10 minutes of movement in your day as it is right now?

Vanesa Nicolosi: Got it. I love that.

Serena Reynolds: I’ve got a counter question for you, right? If you only have 10 minutes, what should they do? What you can do?

Vanesa Nicolosi: There are a few things you can do. It depends on how your body feels. A little bit like if you, if you just like, if you feel like pretty crap. [00:39:00] I’m gonna say it and I have a few of these videos like where you can do like a five minute stretch, a five minute mobility session, just like wake your body up, right?

Vanesa Nicolosi: If you don’t have a clue about what you do and you have no structure, just play a song and dance to it. I love that. Losing your body, you know, let, that’ll take you two, three minutes, whatever that, unless you choose a very long song, but like it can take you up to five minutes, you know, if you wanna play two songs, but like.

Vanesa Nicolosi: It’s about loosening the body and sort of, uh, energizing yourself through the movement. E especially if you do it when you start the day, let’s say now, if you like had a very stressful day and is the last five minutes of your day and you wanna do something to relax, you can use movement for this too by doing some gentle movement like.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Again, stretching or mobility, something very gentle. And if you’re like, okay, but I wanna do something strength related, then what can you do? Right? You can do 10 squats, 10 [00:40:00] pushups, 10 setups, repeat it three times and they’ll take you 10 minutes. Like if you’re cleaning clean, it is a workout. Come on.

Sara Ferrer: That’s true. That is true, Vanesa. You have all these really great, what I love about this conversation is one, I think like. You know, obviously naturally you have that educational piece to it, but I think your approachability, the way you approach fitness, the way you approach kind of, you know, uh, the mind body, soul connection is awesome.

Sara Ferrer: And for our listeners that are like, okay, Vanesa, you’re located in Madrid, Spain, but you do virtual classes as well. Correct. So for someone’s just listening. How can they find you? Of course we will post all of this on our website so people don’t have to search hard, but just for the listener, where can they find you?

Sara Ferrer: Where do, do you offer any little videos? Like you just talk about a five minute stretch. Where is that located?

Vanesa Nicolosi: So I have, I, I do my one-to-ones, which can be online or in person, and they can find that [00:41:00] information on my website, on Grow StrongHer.com. There is link to a free consultation. Consultations with me are always free, so take them this, it’s just a link to my calendar so they can book whenever it’s more appropriate for them.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Uh, and we can have a chat for anything that is private and then otherwise, for anything else in the website itself, there’s a tab for the membership for the Growth Stronger membership, where they can find workouts that range from five minutes to 40, 45 minutes, so they can choose whatever they want to do according to how the day is.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Set and they can choose from mobility, strength, or cardio. So there’s a few ideas there. They can choose if it’s full body, if it’s just one part of the body. Again, if you have five minutes, if you have 40 minutes, you can join a challenge. There’s a few options within the membership. There are two tiers, and so they can choose.

Vanesa Nicolosi: It’s pretty flexible. It’s like, it’s like a very, very flexible option for more general, with a more general approach. Uh, [00:42:00] but it’s a great way to fit movement into a business schedule as well, because you have very short things you can do, and that is not a one-to-one class that’s gonna take you at least 50 minutes of your day.

Vanesa Nicolosi: You know, but everything is on the website. And I also have my Instagram profile, like my personal, the one I use the most is still Vanesa Nicolo at Vanesa Nicolo. But there is the at Grow StrongHer, which is Grow underscore StrongHer, uh, as the brand. But that’s pretty new. There’s still not so much in there.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Uh, but otherwise do the website. Yeah.

Sara Ferrer: Vanesa, you have been wonderful. We thank you for sharing your story. We will be following you. I’ll be looking for those five minute stretches. ’cause the minute you said that, I’m like, I can do that. I don’t know if I can do much more in the morning, but I can do that.

Serena Reynolds: No, I, I’m just waiting for the video of you doing the sit ups and the press up for 10 minutes.

Sara Ferrer: Oh, well that’s gonna be week two, Serena. That’s week two. That’s week two, week three. I’m doing the bodybuilding contest. You all for it, Sara? We all saw, we saw the agreement, the verbal agreement. No, I’m. [00:43:00] I’m on the Instagram page now.

Sara Ferrer: I was just looking at it.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Yeah. On my Instagram profile, there’s a bunch of mini workouts. Yeah.

Sara Ferrer: Yeah, awesome, Vanesa. We will definitely be in touch. We cannot wait to see how you continue to grow and expand, uh, grow stronger. And just thank you for sharing your story. It was really wonderful to kind of hear your evolution and thankfully you turn that burnout situation into something really beautiful that you enjoy and your clients benefit from.

Sara Ferrer: So thank you.

Serena Reynolds: And, and kudos. I mean, you are, you are, you are not native to Spain. You moved to Spain, you kicked off a business, a personal business where you’re interacting one-to-one with people. And that is, that is no small feat, that that’s a pretty fearless.

Vanesa Nicolosi: Thank you so much, ladies. It was a pleasure having this chat with you, and thank you again for having me here.