Allan Nguyen

Growing up, I was never really into sport. It was actually being bullied that got me into the gym for the very first time. I started going after school because it was the one place where no one could pick on me. What started as somewhere I could escape eventually became the place where I started building confidence in myself. Fitness gave me something I didn't really have growing up. For the first time, I felt like there was something in my life that I could take control of and improve. I didn't know it at the time, but that would eventually change the direction of my entire life.

When I first started training, I took things to the other extreme. My goal became getting as big as possible, and over the years I ended up gaining more than 50kg. At my heaviest, I weighed 104kg. When I eventually decided I wanted to lose the weight, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I cut carbs. I tried intermittent fasting. I drank weight-loss shakes. I bought fat-loss supplements. I'd find someone online who looked the way I wanted to look and start copying their diet, their training or whatever they were recommending at the time. I'd make progress, fall off, try something else and repeat the same cycle. It took years of trying and failing before I eventually learnt how to approach my health in a way I could actually sustain. That eventually led me to losing more than 30kg and getting into the best shape of my life.

Going through that experience left me with a pretty strong dislike for misinformation in health and fitness. For years, I thought I just needed to find the right diet, workout or supplement. Eventually, I realised the problem wasn't that I hadn't found the perfect approach. It was that I kept following approaches that weren't built around me. There isn't one right way that everyone needs to eat or train. People have different lifestyles, responsibilities, preferences and challenges, which means the approach needs to fit the person. Once I understood that, health and fitness became much simpler. That lesson would eventually become one of the foundations of the way I coach.

Growing up, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. At one point, my plan was actually to become a dentist and make my Asian parents proud. But somewhere along the way, health and fitness had gone from something I started because I was being bullied to something I genuinely wanted to build my life around. After completing my Bachelor of Sport & Exercise Science, I was meant to move on to my Master's of Physical Therapy. Instead, I decided to take a bet on myself. I approached the manager of my local gym and asked him to mentor me. I remember telling him I'd work for free if he'd just take me under his wing because, more than anything, I wanted the opportunity to learn. That decision was the beginning of my career in coaching.

I started as a group fitness instructor, became a personal trainer and eventually worked my way into managing a gym. Those years on the gym floor taught me things that I don't think I ever could have learnt from a textbook. I worked with different people, with different goals, personalities, lifestyles and reasons for struggling. Over time, I realised that most people didn't need another person telling them to eat better or exercise more. Most of them already knew that. The harder part was understanding why they weren't doing it consistently. That's what made me start looking beyond someone's training program or nutrition plan and trying to understand the person in front of me. What was actually getting in their way? What did they need help understanding? And how could we build an approach that worked within their life? The longer I coached, the more I realised that my job wasn't simply to tell people what to do. It was to teach them how to eventually do it without me.

After years of coaching people and going through my own journey, I kept seeing the same problem. There was more health and fitness information than ever, but people were still confused about what they were supposed to do. That's why I started Timeless Coaching. I wanted to create somewhere people could get away from all of the noise and misinformation and have an approach built around them instead. Something simple enough to understand, sustainable enough to actually live with and personalised enough to work within someone's real life. Timeless has become a representation of everything I've learnt over the last 10 years — from the kid who first walked into a gym because he was being bullied, to making almost every mistake possible with my own health, to years spent coaching people on the gym floor. Health and fitness gave me a level of confidence and control over my own life that I never thought I'd have. Now, my goal is to help other people build that for themselves.