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To be really in shape, it's dynamic. It's got to be a lot of different everything, always switching it up. So a good day for me would be hit the gym, do some sort of cross training in the gym and then go surfing and then maybe take a jiu-jitsu class at night or go swimming at night or go stand up paddle boarding in the evening.
People of Baltimore, if you want to simply learn a new trade, if you want to join the Foundry, it's a membership. It's like joining a gym, and you can go and meet other entrepreneurs like you. You can talk about how to get financing. You can take a class on how to sew. You can take a class and say, 'I want to be an electrician.'
Mum and dad would drive me to the ACT Academy of Sport gym at 5 A.M., sit in the car and read a book, and then drive me to school. I appreciated it when I was younger, but I didn't really understand how much they were putting into it. Now I look at budgets of $70,000 to compete, and I think, 'Wow, they've put so much into this.'
I had more pressure when I competed in Moscow. I had no pressure in Montreal because I only went to do my routines and hoping I didn't mess it up when I was on the bar. When I came back, 10,000 people were at the airport and I thought, 'Why?' because, in my mind, I hadn't done anything different from what I used to do in my gym.
The person earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 isn't going out to eat at restaurants. They're not taking piano lessons. They're not going to the gym or the yoga studio. They're not sending mom flowers on Mother's day. What good is this person in the economy? If you raise it to $15 an hour, they're doing all of those things.
In our game, it's your vanity that keeps you in shape. I've got a little gym set up, and I ride a single-speed bike up the hills behind my house. Lately I've been kind of a slacker. Usually it's a film role that makes me start getting in shape. Between roles, I try to do a little maintenance, but I'm not a workout fanatic at all.
I like to go to the gym with my girls, practice yoga, try new recipes, bake, have slumber parties, go to the beach, have adventures, book hunt, shop for new records, or road trip somewhere... anything that keeps me laughing and excited about the day, really. I like feeling free to do what I or my friends want to do on our days off.
I was awkward-looking with huge brown eyes, dark brown, pencil-straight hair styled into an old-school Romanian bowl haircut from the 1980s. And I was very, very small. I was always the tiniest kid on my street and in my classes at school... The gym was the one place I didn't have to worry about feeling awkward for being so petite.
Throughout my life, I have tried to share my belief that getting and staying healthy doesn't have to feel like work. My life is not about deprivation; I don't diet or slave away in a gym. What I do is eat clean, nutritious, real food. I enjoy delicious meals with healthy fats, I eat until I am full and satisfied, and I remain thin.
Gym class was, of course, where the strongest, best-looking kids were made captains and chose us spazzes last. More important, it was where the figures of supposed authority allowed them to do so. Forget the work our parents did molding our minds and values. Everything fell apart as soon as we put on those maroon polyester gym suits.
I wake up at 4:15 A.M., get some coffee, turn on the news, see what's happening, go clickety-clack on the web to see what I missed overnight. Then I go to the gym, around 5:15, and I do what appears to be a very light workout, but who cares. I'm socializing with other nice people at the gym. Then I go into work, and I'm really awake.
I was in the gym five days a week, two hours a day. At one point, I was going seven days straight. I had put on a lot of weight, and then I started losing it drastically, so I was worried. It turned out I was overworking myself. My trainer told me that I couldn't break a sweat, because I was burning more calories than I was putting on.
Just being aware of what you are about to do greatly diminishes the tendency to do what you don't want to. You will pull your hand back from that pizza slice, tell the waitress that you are passing on dessert, put on your gym shoes instead of going under the comforter, and take several deep breaths instead of screaming at your daughter.
I just kept going to the gym, and luckily I have a gym at home, so I just go in there probably for 30 minutes and then I go back out and then I go back in for another 30 minutes and accumulated like about three-and-a-half hours of working out a day. It was a lot. It was ridiculous. But I said I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it right.
I actually go to the gym much more now than I did when I was on Buffy. I like to stay fit, because that's when I feel really healthy. But I never worked out for any kind of image. People have said to me, 'Do you starve yourself before photo shoots?' And I always say, 'No way.! That's what airbrushing is for. I had french fries last night.'
Right after the draft, when I came out to Oakland, there was a press conference and a dinner with the owner, GM, and Coach Nelson. We did some sightseeing and some house searching the next day, but to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. I tried to find a spot close to our gym, because I figured that's where I'd spend most of my time.
I think anything we do outside of Gym Class Heroes still falls under the Gym Class Heroes umbrella. There's really no method to the madness. With Gym Class, it's more of a democratic process, and when I'm working on solo stuff, it's just me, either working with producers or sitting in a room by myself. They balance and complement each other.
When you want to be a fighter, you have to give it everything you got. MMA just became who I am because of the amount of work I was putting into my training. It all starts in the gym. The hours turn into days, days into weeks, and weeks into months; it's like school - the more time you spend learning, the better you'll be prepared for a test.
I never coast through a workout. This is been great for me physically, but it's also become a problem in two ways. One is that no matter how I'm feeling on a given day, I will absolutely kill myself in the gym, and it takes a huge amount of energy do that. I commit 110 percent. The other problem is that finding a workout partner is impossible.
Sometimes I'd literally show up at the gym having a panic attack, and my trainer would be like, 'All right, let's just go get breakfast.' I can't give enough credit to him... he was really there for me, and not just like a trainer where it's like, 'Well, come on, man, I gotta pump you up.' He cared more about my mind and the state that I was in.
I remember meeting my manager Eamonn for the very first time, and one of the first things he said to me was, 'You're fat. The first thing you need to go is get to a gym.' It was quite a wake-up call. I got a bit angry initially, like, 'The cheek of him', but I'm quite a pragmatic and thick-skinned person, so I just went ahead and joined the gym.
I always have my group of friends at the gym. We used to go hang out somewhere before. Now we're just hanging out at the gym. We have sparring parties where everyone beats each other up, but then we all eat my dad's cooking, and I hire a massage therapist, so everyone is just kicking back and having a good time. I just keep the environment great.
I was a fan of jujitsu, so that pretty much got me started in fighting. I won a lot of local competitions when I was young and eventually won a ticket to go compete in Rio de Janeiro. In Rio, I struggled a lot in the beginning, living in the gym and not having much to eat, but eventually I joined the Nova Uniao Team and really improved my skills.
