A sneak peak inside my life

When I was younger I went for an interview at a fancy new school.

The headmaster was terribly posh and my parents had warned me in advance to be on my best behaviour.

I sat there for more of the interview trying to look interesting and intelligent…

Until the question came. →

The question that every well intended adult asks children…

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Finally, this was my chance!  (I thought)

My eyes lit up… my heart started beating faster… and I proudly announced….

“A popstar!”

The headmaster looked blankly at me while my mum (mortified) did that strained, high-pitched laugh that signalled that I was in trouble.  

→  BIG trouble.

“Why could you not have said something like a doctor, or a lawyer?” she asked me, as we left the interview.  I was confused. I’d always been told that lying was bad, yet here I was, being encouraged to lie.  WTF?

Cause honestly, ALLLLLL I wanted was a to be a freaking POP STAR!

I loved performing in front of the camera and I loved the spotlight.  It was my dream to stand on stage…

→ → → Fast forward 30 years and that dream has come true…

…in a rather unorthodox way!

I DO stand on stage several times a year, but not as a pop star, but as a pro bikini athlete.

And y’all are terribly interested in what goes on behind the scenes to make that dream a reality, year in, year out.

So I couldn’t hold off on your anymore.

Announcing (dun dun duuuunnnnn….)

My brand new, weekly VLOG!

In this video I share with you:

• My daily routine including what time I get up and the best time of the day to train
• What cardio I do (how much and for how long) to shred away body fat in time to don a sparkly thong on stage
• The exact leg day workout I do build legs that will make you wanna hit quad shots in your Daisy Dukes while smiling sweetly at those who say lifting weights will make you “bulky”  (I mean, purleeease!)

Don’t forget… the best conversations always happen in the comments.  

After you’ve watched the video, leave a comment below and tell me if you enjoyed this kind of vlog and want to see more!

Love Kim xo

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Show Prep Week 3 | Vegan Meal Prep | Intense Leg Day Workout | What cardio is best for fat loss?

Kim:      Good morning, 6.30am and I have just come down to the kitchen to get some coffee. I usually wake at about 6.15am and check my sales overnight and check my Instagram and all my messages and notifications and then I come down and I make some coffee, usually two espressos and then I head to the stepper. I’m actually prepping at the minute, my competition is in April, at the minute it’s the middle of January so I have about another 10 weeks to go but I want to be over ready this year because it’s my 40^th Birthday in April. I’m speaking quite quietly because everyone is still sleeping except Buddy, Buddy is awake. Buddy, are you awake? Good morning, he sleeps by the Aga because it’s very warm by the Aga. So yeah I have about 10 weeks to go before my Birthday and I want to be like super ready, like over ready so that I have like a little bit of wiggle room around my Birthday to eat a bit more and drink a bit more and have some fun with friends. So I’m going to have some coffee and then I’m going to hit the stepper.

I have a stair master in my office, I have a home office obviously because I run an internet company and I remember the first year that I was prepping for a show I used to have to go to the gym and do all my cardio which was torturous because the kids were young, I never saw my husband, I was already there training loads anyway and it was just …it just made it much more time consuming. So then the second year I started …I competed, I actually had a treadmill for the house which was a good substitute but the problem with the treadmill was, it doesn’t go on a very high incline, so I wasn’t really able to get a good a workout as I would have liked. So last year I decided I was just going to bite the bullet and I was going to buy myself a stair master, it was expensive, it was about, I think £2,500 which is about $3,000/$3,500 but totally worth it because it means I can get up every morning now, I can do the best type of cardio which is walking on the stair master, a slow steady cardio, burn loads of fat and it doesn’t take up an awful lot of time which is a result.

So I have finished on the stepper and then made breakfast for myself, tidied up the kitchen. I actually have a full time housekeeper called Lorraine, you’ll meet her later, she’s amazing, she doesn’t arrive until 9.30am though, but normally she cleans up and tidies the kitchen but I decided this morning that I would do it because it really was a bit of a mess from the weekend.

So I just wanted to show you guys what I’m eating because one of the biggest questions that I get asked is what do you eat as a vegan bodybuilder, a vegan athlete and to be honest my food doesn’t really ever change, it stays very, very consistent because when your food stays consistent it means that you can track very easily and I don’t actually track macros and calories anymore, at all, not even when I’m prepping for a show or when I’m dieting for a show because I kind of know what’s in my food every day and I just eat plain whole foods, so I kind of do know what is in them and I don’t need to track anymore.

So this is my breakfast this morning, this is my breakfast almost every single morning. It’s simply jumbo oats which have been cooked in water and I just cook them in water and then before they are ready I put in a scoop of vanilla protein powder. The protein powder I use is from The Protein Works, you can actually get really good discounts on my website, www.thesculptedvegan.com/tpw but it’s only available in the UK and Europe unfortunately. So I put a scoop of protein powder into my porridge, it makes it about 42 grams of protein and then I just add some berries on top and some cinnamon, I never add any sugar or sweetener, I’ve just gotten used to the taste now without sugar and I just don’t want the extra calories when I’m dieting. Even when I’m not dieting though, I generally don’t even add any sugar anyway.

It’s now 12.30. I’ve been sitting at my desk all morning, I had a big meeting, Gareth is the resident chef at Team Sculpted Vegan, he creates all of our recipes for our meal plans and our programmes, he has actually just brought me up my lunch which I was half way through and then I realised that I actually wanted to share it with you. So earlier on this morning he brought me up a green juice which wasn’t actually green because it had a beetroot in it but it was fennel, ginger, beetroot, carrot, lemon, spinach, that kind of stuff. Every day I have a freshly squeezed green juice and then every single day my lunch remains pretty much the same, it doesn’t change.

So this is lunch today, lunch today, I’m sorry that it looks like this, lunch today is seitan which has been cooked in water and tamari because I’m trying to cut down on fat. Whenever you’re shredding for a competition, carbs aren’t the enemy, fat is, so you want to make sure you cut out as many fat calories as you can when you’re shredding and then this is served with as many green vegetables as I want, I had a huge amount of broccoli, spinach and, what is the name of that one …asparagus which is a great diuretic actually and the thing about green vegetables …Sorry I’m just holding the phone because it’s wobbling.

The great thing about green vegetables is that you don’t have to count them in your macros whenever you eat a huge amount of green vegetables, the fibre from the vegetables means that the calories are so slowly absorbed into your system that you don’t need to count them in macros. So bodybuilders don’t ever count macros, well professional bodybuilders don’t ever count the macros from green cruciferous vegetables, anything like carrot or beetroot or any root vegetables, you do have to count but green cruciferous vegetables, those are totally free and you can eat as many of them as you want and believe me, I do eat a huge amount of them.

So I’ve just arrived at the gym to train legs, normally I train in the afternoon but this morning I am training in the morning because I have appointments all day. I find that I train a lot better in the afternoons, I’m actually stronger, I have more food in me and I just feel better, I definitely train better around kind of between 1pm and 3pm, the morning time, not my favourite day for training and honestly legs is like my least favourite day of the week because it’s just so hard and Mark does not let you off the hook at all, you go to failure on every single exercise and you literally leave your soul on the gym floor. So come and see what my leg day looks like.

The gym that I go to is actually owned by my trainer Mark which is quite handy because it means he gets to fill it with all the best machines and it really is like a true bodybuilding gym, the machines in here are absolutely and utterly incredible and I don’t actually need a card to get in either.

I’m just going to set my stuff down. As you can see it’s a lot of machines packed into quite a small space but the kind of machines they have are just amazing like every angle of every machine, every angle of every leg press and incline squats, vertical presses, hack squats, amazing.

So I want to introduce you guys to Mark, my trainer, for anyone who doesn’t know him, this is Mark.

Mark:    Hiya.

Kim:      He’s just put my weight up on my leg extension, full stack, it’s really not pleasant but we’re going to record it just so you can see the pain that I go through just to have good legs.

Mark:    And bum.

Kim:      It’s time to go.

[Training 5 sets x 10/12 reps].

Kim:      Explain to me why your training doesn’t change during prep, what you were just saying a second ago?

Mark:    We’re training off season to build muscle and the whole emphasis when you’re training during prep shouldn’t change. You know, a lot of people have this conception that as soon as [0:08:17 unclear] …and you’re not giving your muscles a reason to stay the same size or to grow, you’re basically giving them a reason to shrink. So for me, my training doesn’t change whether it’s off season or prep, it’s always hard, it’s always heavy, we’re always trying to break records, putting more weights on the bar and lift more reps and if you keep doing that, you’re basically focusing and you’re giving your muscles an aim to grow and stay the size and if you keep your muscles that size, you keep them bigger, then obviously that’s going to keep your metabolism burning fast and burning fat and what I try to do is not confuse the two during prep so the diet and cardio should be used to burn the fat and the training should be used to keep and build the muscle.

[Training 4 sets x 10 reps] [Training Final set 160kg /340lbs]

Always work to total failure.

Then onto Pendulum Squat 4 sets x 10 reps 100kg/220lbs.

Lying leg curl 4 sets x 10 – 15 reps 70kg/145lbs.

Kim:      So I just finished our final set of leg curls, the devil, see the horns, he thought he was …I thought I was doing 140, I can’t speak and he sneaked a wee extra plate on the top here and I didn’t notice.

Mark:    It’s all about progressing, if you don’t know you can still lift it.

Kim:      They don’t know they can still lift it.

Mark:    It’s all about building them legs …

Kim:      You know me, I never shy away from a challenge Mark.

Mark:    Sometimes you do it much better [0:12:21 unclear] …

Kim:      Legs are done. Oh my god that was absolutely brutal, leg day is always on a Tuesday to give …well I have two leg days, one on a Tuesday and one on a Friday. The Tuesday one is always quad focus but we always do some hamstrings as well, the Friday one is usually hamstring and glute focused but we always do some quads too. So the reason why we do legs on a Tuesday and a Friday is because you want to give yourself enough time to recover between your leg sessions and every night I take Buddy for a walk, it’s something that I’ve done for a long time, I used to see at as kind of a session of cardio but now it’s really my second session of cardio and the funny thing is, it used to just be a thing which I did, I was just like yeah, I just always went for a walk in the evening but now if I don’t go for a walk, like I’ve already done 45 minutes on the stepper and a full leg day workout as well as kind of run around and worked all day but if I don’t go for my evening walk, I really feel like I’ve missed out on my second session of cardio and there’s something about prepping for a show where the fear creeps in, like you know you’re just like oh will I be lean enough and even though I’m actually 4 weeks out from show condition at the minute and my show is still 11 weeks away, there’s always that fear in the back of your mind that maybe you won’t be ready, so I very rarely let myself off the hook.

I mean I just get up and I do it and I do the work and it means Buddy gets a good walk, we usually go for a good 7 kilometres, I might go a little shorter tonight, although I always say that and then I never do go shorter because once I’m out there and I’m walking, I enjoy it and then I usually listen to podcasts while I’m walking as well. Let’s go Buddy, let’s go.

I listen to podcasts or I listen to audio books while I’m walking and it’s a great way to learn at the same time as getting in some exercise because I’m obviously running a big company, a busy company and I have a lot to learn, so it’s a great way to do some additional learning while you’re walking. It’s dark here because I live in Ireland and it gets dark really early in the winter, so we walk in the dark but it doesn’t matter, we just put our headphones in and we just go.

 

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