Emily Skye
Achieved that proud of you
Seven years ago, a shadow of her current self weighing just 47kg, she admits she was depressed, underweight and unhealthy.
Today, with more than 13 million social media fans around the world, the Australian fitness star is, quite literally, kicking butt in the global fitness and health industry.
With rock-hard abs, an enviable set of pins and a derrière to die for, the Central Coast-born beauty certainly knows what hard work looks like. And she’s on a mission to share her knowledge with the rest of the world.
Emily, who is currently in New York with Reebok, has partnered with the sportswear giant for their new “Hands” initiative, which is making thousands of top-notch trainers from the ReebokONE network available for free personal training sessions across the US.
News.com.au caught up with the model-turned-trainer, mid-plank, to hear about her incredible journey from skinny to strong and how she turned her life around.
“It didn’t happen overnight,” the 31-year-old says. “I wasn’t happy and everything I tried to be didn’t make me happy. I was either trying to be perfect, which as we all know doesn’t exist, or I was trying to be like someone else.”
As a former model, Emily says her experience in the cutthroat industry, combined with a deep-rooted obsession with “being thin”, led to an unhealthy and unhappy time in her life.
“I was either not eating enough food or eating too much of the bad stuff and I was so skinny because my body wasn’t eating the right food,” she said. “None of it made me happy, being skinny never made me happy, being as perfect as I could be never made me happy.”
Poor diet and excess cardio, as well as constantly comparing herself to women she saw on the pages of magazines and on social media saw Emily spiralling down a dangerous path, she says.
“I LOVE having muscle and I feel more confident than ever.”
Hiking, walking in nature as a recreational activity. Especially among those with sedentary occupations, hiking is a natural exercise that promotes physical fitness, is economical and convenient, and requires no special equipment. Because hikers can walk as far as they want, there is no physical strain unless they walk among hills or mountains.
Many persons walk alone, mainly on weekends or holidays, but youth clubs and other groups arrange rambles, or hikes. The normal length of the walk undertaken is 7 to 12 miles (11 to 19 km) for a half day or 12 to 20 miles (19 to 32 km) for a full day. Those organized rambles, combining exercise with enjoyment of the countryside, are in country districts surrounding large towns and follow a planned route. Most densely populated European towns have hiking trails outside them.
For regular and intensive walkers there are available services offered by such associations as the Ramblers’ Association in Great Britain and the Wilderness Society in the United States. Those organizations encourage hiking and preserve footpaths, bridle paths, and rights of way in parkland and recognized open spaces in areas of natural beauty against the encroachment of builders, local authorities, and national undertakings. They also help hikers to obtain hostel accommodation and, by exchange of information and services, enable persons of one country to pursue these activities in others. The Appalachian Trail Conference (U.S.), with the aid of its member organizations in 14 states, maintains campsites and a trail more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long between Mount Katahdin in Maine and Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia; it publishes information on conditions of the camps and trail.
Hiking is basic to many sporting activities and is also a widely recommended and practiced form of physical training. For example, hiking constitutes a large part of mountain climbing; experienced mountaineers know that they must train themselves for the long, arduous hikes over the lower trails and across glaciers and snowfields. Backpack camping, hunting, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, and orienteering are other sports and sporting activities in which hiking is important. The ability to walk considerable distances without becoming overtired (an ability generally acquired through practice) also enhances the enjoyment of such other activities as bird-watching, nature walks, field trips of all sorts, and even sightseeing.
Hiking is used as a test of fitness, notably in England, where it is embraced in the duke of Edinburgh’s scheme for boys and girls, and in Sweden and the Netherlands. In Sweden it was made a national fitness test in the early 1930s, and by the 1970s more than three million Swedish men, women, and boys possessed the time qualification badge. The Nijmegen marches in the Netherlands, organized by the Dutch League of Physical Culture, are open to the world in both civilian and military categories. The test comprises four separate days’ consecutive walking over distances up to 35 miles (56 km) each day, with about 12,000 persons taking part.
" Hiking is one of the best experience you can get and it burns calories"
Move, sweat, eat, repeatmakes for a decent training plan up to a point. But if you want to maximize your fitness gains, eventually you need to train smarter: smarter eating, smarter moving, smarter recovering.
But with the avalanche of fitness information available to the average guy these days, it’s not always clear what exactly makes for smart training, and what makes for last year’s forgotten fitness fad.
Every week for four weeks, do two sprint workouts on nonconsecutive days: run on a track on Tuesdays and hit the rowing machine on Fridays, for example. After five minutes at an easy pace, go as hard as you can for 30 seconds to a minute, then rest for 90-120 seconds. Repeat the work-rest cycle six to eight times.
So we’ve sorted it out for you.
Here are five sure-fire ways to hasten your progress—whether you’re looking to gain muscle, lose fat, or build never-fade endurance:
1. Keep It Compound. Isolating muscles—with single-joint exercises such as curls and triceps extensions—may pump up your muscles (and your ego) temporarily. But it won’t build the functional strength you need for maximum athletic performance. To amp up real-world strength, compound exercises—those that use at least two joints at once—should form the core of your workout program.
2. Top off Your Tank. You don’t build muscle in the gym—you build it in the hours and days after your workouts, as your body rebuilds muscle tissue damaged by those brutal sets and reps. To ensure that your body has all the raw materials it needs to maximize muscle building, nutrition experts recommend that you take in at least one gram of protein per pound of your target bodyweight every day.
So most active guys turn to a high-quality whey protein supplement like EAS’s 100% Whey Protein Powder. Studies indicate that whey has the highest biological value of any protein source, bar none.
3. Roll it Out.All the time Americans spend sitting (over nine hours a day, according to a recent report) does more than expand our waistlines. It also gums up our hips, shoulders, ankles, and backs, leaving them more prone to injury when you hit the gym.
Your secret weapon in combatting all that tightness? The foam roller—a six-inch wide cylinder of industrial Styrofoam. Prior to mixing it up with the weights or hitting the running trail, sit or lie on top of the roller to massage and release tight muscles. Key areas include the quadriceps, upper back, the fronts of your hips, lats, calves and IT bands—the thick ribbon of connective tissue on the side of each thigh. Spend 30-60 seconds rolling out each area before you work out—more on any area that’s particularly tender.
4. Avoid the Crash. Between kids, deadlines, gym workouts and other recreational activities, most active guys have precious little downtime to prep the kind of meals that keep muscles growing. For most of us, hitting the wall now and then feels like the price of admission for staying fit.
It doesn’t have to be. On days when you can barely see straight—much less eat—from all the stress, premade meal replacements like Myoplex can be a godsend.
5. Redline it. If you’re prepping for a marathon or a century ride, there’s no substitute for long, slow mileage. But for the average guy looking to build cardiovascular fitness while staying lean and muscular, sprinting may be the better choice. Not only are the workouts faster (you can bang one out in less than a half-hour), they’re also better preparation for athletic activities like soccer, basketball, tennis, and other games requiring short bursts of maximum effort.
America has been waiting for Jason Momoa. Screw the whole pop culture awakening of the sensitive male. That’s just increased our appetite for a man’s man who rides motorcycles, drinks Guinness, throws axes, and does the ‘Haka’ during his HBO audition instead of, you know, crying or something wimpy. That’s why Khal Drogo, the large chested, dark-eyed, long-haired king of Game of Thrones, was such an instant icon.
The fact that Momoa’s half-Hawaiian native, half-white and keeps getting typecast as a “half-breed” (like the blood-drenched fur trapper Declan Harp in Netflix’s Frontier or, of course, the half-man, half-Atlantis person Aquaman) only increases his American-ness. We are, after all, a nation of half-breeds. Plus, he doesn’t mind the typecast. Loves it even. “It’s an awesome role,” Momoa says in his signature baritone rasp. We’re inclined to agree.
He’s got a soulful side, too. The loving-father, hunky-husband, family-man side. When we spoke, he was just about to take his kids camping in the Buttermilks in Northern California. His two offspring, with the eternally beautiful Lisa Bonet, look like cherubs that just got back from Burning Man. His loose plan for the trip? Go rock climbing, make a fire, get the instruments out and jam. On the car ride up he’ll play the music game with his kids (they can identify Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew upon listening, he claims).
“We’ve never really seen anything from this guy before, so it’s fun to have a level playing field,” Momoa grumbles optimistically. “There aren’t like four Aquamans before me. I get to set the tone for it.”
