“When I was younger I used to play soccer. I was a really skinny guy. This made me an easy target for bullies and so I got mocked and laughed at for as long as I can remember.
I was really close with my nephew and we used to hang out a lot. He was overweight and needed to lose some kg’s. And I definitely needed to gain some. (Both for making the bullies stop and for becoming better at soccer.) And that’s how we started going to the gym together.
At first it was weird. I didn’t understand what we were doing. But I stayed consistent and later on started training on my own. But even then, in a gym, I got laughed at by other people. 

As time moved on I started seeing real progress and gained more than 30kg of lean body mass in a year. I gotta say, I probably pushed myself a little too hard there. But I really wanted people to be impressed by my transformation. I wanted to walk into that gym and show my bullies how hard I had worked. And so I did. And all of them were baffled.
Clearly the vibe in that gym wasn’t really my thing. So I went looking for a new club and so I found Sportclub Het Eiland. And now I’m here, every single day. This is my home, where I can be my true self, without being judged by others. 

The gym closing was a nightmare for me. Losing weight and losing muscle is one of my biggest fears. It honestly keeps me up at night. I never want to go back to that time in my life where people treated me poorly just because I was skinny. But it’s not only about physics. Coming to the gym also helped me through a lot of things; depression, fears, anger. I walk in and all of that’s forgotten, I can just be in the moment. “