Jai's Story

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After a 13-year career in the Information Technology industry, I realized that it wasn’t my passion.

Doing something I wasn’t enjoying everyday really brought down my energy, my health and my happiness.

Until the night I had a cardiac arrest, and everything changed for me.

I’d had a late night celebrating a good friend’s birthday, then I was up early the next morning for a basketball training session with my team.

My energy was low, my body was under stress from a hangover, and I was really pushing myself on the basketball court.

This triggered a response in my heart called Wolf-Parkenson-White-Syndrome. Something I was likely born with but was never recognized/noticed. An additional electrical pulse in my heart.

 The extra stress triggered the pulse, which created an irregular heartbeat, which led to a coma, then cardiac arrest.

Thankfully by the time this all happened I had checked myself into the hospital where they were able to save my life.

The time spent in the hospital was quite an eye-opener for me. I noticed all the middle-aged men with clogged arteries filling the cardiac wards waiting for bypass surgery.

I realized there are too many of us living unhealthy, and winding up in hospitals dealing with heart surgeries. It’s the last place you want to be.

 At that moment, I knew I could help people avoid this fateful future. I knew that with regular exercise and a healthy diet and lifestyle, we can all avoid sickness and premature aging.

 That’s when the idea came to me to not only turn my health around, but also have a career and life change and become a personal trainer, share my story and my voice to inspire people, and create my own business out of it.

I’d always wanted to own a business, but I knew that it had to be a business that I would be excited to be involved in.

Fitness and sport have been my favorite things my entire life, so it made sense to take the leap.

It was a tough decision to give up a cushy, high-income career as a network security engineer for the complete unknown,

And starting from zero in an industry where I have no experience.

But I learned a great lesson from the cardiac arrest I experienced, and that was to make the most of my life. Coming so close to losing my life made me realize how precious it really is.

So I signed up for night classes at the Australian Institute of Fitness to get my cert 3 & 4 in Fitness while working my I.T job by day. By the time I had all my required qualifications, I’d already set up my website, and spread the word that I was the new trainer in town!

With 3 months of annual leave and long service built up from my 13-year career, I was able to use this as my buffer while I got my PT business started.

By the 3rd month in I had 40 clients that I was training outdoors in parks and homes in Sydney's inner west. This was enough for me to quit my job and pursue my PT career full time.

After about a year of working with clients 1-on-1, I realized that my fitness education wasn’t helping me with the psychological, emotional, and relationship issues my clients were suffering from and needed to overcome.

So knowing I needed more tools to help my clients reach their goals, I completed a diploma in Life Coaching with The Coaching Institute in Melbourne.

Not only did this course help me to better serve my clients, but it also helped me personally and my business.

Over the months I started hiring contractor PTs and growing my client base, and sharing the load of work with other trainers.

During that time I met Kate, who shortly after our meeting in 2010, became my girlfriend, then a contractor PT at SQ1, and today my wife of 9 years, and co-owner of SQ1 Fitness.

In 2014 we went from training in the outdoors to opening a private studio/gym in Sydney, which we ran right up till the end of 2021.

We found the perfect place in our home town that was just the right size for us, and over that 11.5 years, we ran 15 group classes per week and over 150 personal training sessions each week for our SQ1 FAM!

During that time we had the most amazing experiences, met the most amazing people, and were lucky enough to have a thriving gym for many years which enabled us to help lots of people with their health, fitness, and overall lives.

Today, as of 2023, the world has become a very different place, and so has SQ1 Fitness. We now operate from Casuarina, on the beautiful north coast of NSW, where we run online group challenges, online private coaching and 1on1 personal training in the local area. 

We have a great family community vibe (the SQ1 FAM).

We love our SQ1 community and have been helping them with health and fitness for the past decade and look forward to continuing with it for another decade to come.

Jai

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Kate's Story

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When I was 19 I moved to England for 2 years and was lucky enough to travel around Europe and see amazing parts of the world. I also drank and ate way too much during this time which after returning continued for a few years and put me at the heaviest I've ever been.

A few years after returning I secured work in the finance industry working in risk management and analytics.

Doing the desk job life was great for the first few years, but eventually I wanted something different. I was always organising sporting events at work and getting everyone together to go to the gym. 

When I met Jai I was running a free outdoor bootcamp each week for my friends and my soccer team. 

I come from a sporting family and enjoyed soccer, boot camps and going to the gym at that time.

While I was at the bank and Jai was running SQ1 Fitness we decided we were much better off working together as a passionate team. I left the bank and Jai and I started working together running outdoor group boot camps, which eventually led to us running our gym in Sydney for almost a decade. 

Today we love working with our clients online, helping them overcome their health and fitness challenges with our private coaching and group challenges. I also really enjoy one on one personal training with our clients in Casuarina. 

I particularly love diving deep into women's hormones and using specific methods to track fertility and get better management of your health overall. A long history of migraines has sent me down a path of education on both the hormonal side and just health in general. I'm the queen of workarounds if you're injured and need an understanding coach and really love diving deep into what's happening in the body. 

If you'd like to chat with us about your health and fitness, drop us a line in the message box below.

Kate

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