Life in the spotlight means constantly keeping in shape, and one man who knows all about toning up celebrities is personal trainer Steffan Fusco.
The Dublin-based trainer works with top Irish celebrities and even top model Thalia Heffernan.
We sat down with the celebrity trainer to talk celeb bodies and the perfect training routine:
How did you get into personal training?
I’ve been involved in fitness since my early years, I did athletics as a kid, got into martial arts in my teens and got very heavily into that. Over the course of about 12 – 15 years I became a black belt. I just loved it and it kind of developed from there. My coach was brilliant and I was teaching classes from a very young age about 15 or 16, I just loved teaching people and helping people. It was kind of a natural progression from there for me to be honest.
What would be your main form of training now?
I do mainly weight based training, I focus on the main compound list and high intensity work, coupled with trying to get people that little bit stronger.
We see that you train some celebrities, how did you get involved in that business?
It’s a little bit different but to be honest I’ve learned a lot over the years, I keep pushing on and I show up every day for work – that stuff tends to come to you when you’re consistent. People in the industry will tell you that it’s a transient sort of job, they do it because they like training, not necessarily because they love people, and I just love people.
Who was your first celebrity client?
I suppose the first well known name that I started to train was Jess Redden, she’s a long term client of mine and we’ve developed a good friendship. She’s been training with me for nearly a year now. Then I started interacting with the likes of Nadia Forde and Thalia Heffernan, along with a few others.
Would these high profile clients tend to have a stricter schedule than the average joe?
It’s very similar to the average person, it’s the same as everybody has a job to do being in 9 to 5 or 8 to 4 job, the average person is just a bit more regular. I’ve had a few celebrities in for 5 am training sessions. You could be meeting at about 8 or 9pm at night, when you’ve done 6 or 7 training sessions and they’ve just come from a 13 hour photo shoot.
It’s a bit stricter in that sort of sense. but its all about getting it done at the end of the day. With regards to time and stuff, most people who want to look their best tend to have a final date to be done by. They might want to be fit for summer or have a shoot on the 15th of August, where people will be looking at them in swimwear, so you have to work towards that.
Would you be able to give us an example of a particular celebrity’s training schedule?
The likes of say Thalia who’s been on Dancing With The Stars and does a loy of modelling shoots, she’d be in with me at least three times a week. We get in a lot of nights, Saturday mornings stuff like that. We check in with regards to diet on a daily basis, making sure that she’s on track for that because she could be on a fairly strict diet, especially with the fact that Thalia has come out very publicly being vegan in the last while so it made things a little bit trickier.
With regards to Thalia’s training, we focus on trying to get her nice and strong, but eventually it gets to a stage where strong is strong enough. You have to work on different bits and pieces, like high intensity training, bits of conditioning and circuit style training as well. It’s just important to keep it all varied.
With your training schedule would you ever include a food plan?
I’d go through nutrition with most of my clients and it just depends on what fits in best with their life. If they were getting really strict, we’d get really down into it and select exactly what types of foods and do out an exact food plan out for them. For people who don’t necessarily need that all the time, we can give them a bit more flexibility.
I like to teach people how to make healthy choices and conscious decisions throughout the day. If you can do that on a day to day basis you’re going to be more consistent rather than sticking to something rigidly for 6-10 weeks and blasting it back out at the end.
What advice would you give to someone who doesn’t have access to a gym?
You really have got to just sit down and decide what your personal goals are and what you’re looking for. Depending on that, try and stick to a close plan that’s going to get you to where you want to be. If that’s fat loss help yourself by focusing on your food as much as you can, setting some time aside to do a bit of body weight training at home.
Your body can be one of the best pieces of gym equipment that you’ve got. You need to get your heart rate up, do a bit of resistance training. You can get a lot of that done it’s just more about being consistent. If you put in the time and the work you’ll get to where you want to be, if you don’t, you won’t.
When a new client comes to you what is the first session like?
In the first session we sit down and have a chat. It’s all done on an individual basis, so you see where the client wants to get to, what they want to achieve, what their own goals are because we’re going to tailor our program specifically towards that. That’s why I like to focus on the one to one sort of stuff, as opposed to group training and classes, you can get really in depth into it. So we do that, and then some body composition testing, body fat testing, some measurements with tape measures stuff like that, to see where they are.
We do a brief mobility work out and then depending on how their range of movement is we’ll go in with a bit of a fight or flight workout, because we like to push people and make sure they’re ready because it is work! It’s not going to be easy.
You can’t just expect to show up on the day and be 4 or 5 sizes smaller at the end. You’re going to have to put the work in. One of my favourite sayings is ‘Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard’ so you can achieve whatever you really want to do if you’re going to put the effort in. If you have the best natural ability but you don’t put the effort in, it’s not going to work for you.
So what are your plans for the future? Will you be opening up a gym any time soon?
Hopefully, I want to keep doing more of the same, I love working with people. There’s loads of stuff you can go off and do with it. I do have a few other projects on the go at the moment, but there’s so many you’d have in your own gym. You’d have to do some online training and courses, I’d love to get into training other trainers and do mentor-ship programs. I’m looking at having my own gym eventually but again that ties in with having other trainers on board and teaching them to do things the way that you’ve done them and the way you want them done. They can then go off and have their own place, and progress on.
Check out Steffan’s Instagram for information.
