22/03/2016
A little about me & my AmphibiFIT & FINfitness transformation.
My name is Phil Wright and I am a full time swim instructor in Swords. I have been an instructor for over 18 years and still love it just as much as when I started.
Over the last few years I have being itching to start up some ideas I have had. One of them was an Aquatic based fitness class, I call it FINfitness, since the classes started 3 years ago it has been a fantastic success, I have seen some amazing results from people loosing weight, toning up, building aerobic fitness and keeping people active who can't do impact exercises. Its even helped athletes who have recovered from knee surgeries and being able to get them strong and back to their sports. I came up with this idea of a class from a few experiences iv had, swimming with Fin's in my youth swim team, also my love for scuba diving and then adding a saying that I always used to joke about "the fittest people in the pool are the people who fight with the water instead of use it". So in FINfitness I use the resistance of the water to make the exercises harder while still keeping the impact to a minimum.
AmphibiFIT is my next inspiration. I have always loved all type of sports and fitness, land and water. I competed in swimming and a sport called Canoe polo, I competed in this until I had my first child in 2012, then the timing demands of training and going away to matches just where not possible. Canoe polo is a fantastic strength and fitness sport, surprisingly for your whole body, most would think just the upper body but we use our legs for a lot of bracing and balance. Canoe polo is also surprisingly very similar to swimming in some ways, due to the resistance being from the water which means there is nothing solid to push against, due to your body being above the water and the size of the blades on the paddles its also very similar to land exercises also as the canoe gives more stability to use force. To train for this sport I did a large variety of land and water based training to build muscle but to also keep the training relative for the sport. This is when I discovered the functional strength training sandbags, with all the versatility of the sandbag and the use of water for swimming and kayaking I discovered their really isn't any better form of all round fitness. Their are over 300 different variations of exercises you can do with a sandbag that use functional movements from your core, using these not only builds muscle fast but allows the strength created to be utilised into everyday life or sport, mix these exercises with swim sets and pow you have some serious work load potentials, I came up with the name Amphibious Fitness so then I could use the 3 mascots, The Gorilla (power lifting, The Rhino (speed and power) and the king of Amphibious animals The Alligator.
Over the last two years or so I have been struggling with my health, which all came to a head in December 2015, I got septicaemia, pluracy and a blood infection which really took its toll and got me to be in the worst shape and fitness of my life. I am about to post a picture from when I was given the all clear from the hospital, please be nice. This picture helped motivate me to start an employee transformation challenge in my work place, énergie fitness swords. I decided for the 10 week challenge I was only going to use my four classes to try transform, FINfitness, Gator Fitness, SilverBack Fitness and Rhino Fitness. I decided to do this to help promote my classes of course, but also to show that a father of 2, who works 40-50hrs per week, can train 45 minutes (many sessions where only 30) 3-4 times a week and can make a difference in how you feel and look. Due to my health issues I had to be very careful and had to build up slowly and in fact didn't even get to do the Rhino classes as my chest was not able for the January weather.
So here goes I'm going to post my before and afters. I'm doing this hoping to inspire you in to getting going on transforming yourselves and your lives, or even make a change to your workouts if your loosing momentum and not seeing a difference in yourself. If you want to try a different form of training & if any of my classes interest you and you would like to try, please drop me a message for your free trial class.
With a bit of hard work and a lot of sweat you could be posting your story and transformation results or better still get the energy you need to live the lives you want. Thanks for your time reading this and please share with anyone you think might be inspired by it.
