Here I built up my own supplement store with a partner and soon I even made my fitness coaching full-time. In addition, I trained by myself six days a week, gave personal trainings, took part in bodybuilding competitions and consumed steroids for three years in a row at the end of my bodybuilding time. Don’t worry, I was my own lab rat at the same time, doing new blood work every two months and talking to specialists about it. A very intense time.
Since I have double scoliosis, physiological problems appeared more and more as my training became heavier. 230 kg hack squats didn’t leave my spine unaffected, although my obsession was always on execution and how to get the most out of the lowest resistance. So I built a team of doctors, physical therapists and chiropractors for myself and my clients to take a more holistic approach from a physical standpoint, in addition to nutrition and training design and mindset work.
Everything was going well, I was successful. But after ten years, I had the feeling that the game of “fitness & bodybuilding” had been outplayed. It felt like it was now time for something new.
A very good mutual friend of Christian and me is bodybuilding world champion, Peter Baers. I sat with him for a mutual project and confided in him that I wanted to get out. Get out of the supplement store, get out of my work as a fitness coach, get out of steroids. I told him that I felt like I had to take this leap, even though it felt like “suicide” since my entire identity and everything I had worked for years was attached to this. Peter had previously recommended Christian’s book Leider geil, fett und faul to me and now he advised me that I could discuss my concerns with Dr. Z in person if another opinion was important to me. Peter and Christian already knew each other very well and personally from shared travels.
So I got to know Christian in person and I went to Rügen for a coaching with him. We discussed my concerns and after two days of consideration, I told him my decision: “I’m out!”. Still on the spot, I told some of my clients, got out of the supplement store and discontinued all medications as no doctor would normally recommend: All chemistry out, without the classic discontinuation over time.
Bodybuilding was dead. The successful personal trainer Sascha had died and I had killed him myself. Philosophically one of the most formative events of my life and it felt awesome and correct.
As I wrote on the page Our Origin, Christian and me not only met in the context of this coaching, but as he would later say, our lives became entangled. I fell in love early on with the freedom, minimalism, and uncompromisingness with which Dr. Z masters his life – feather-light, deeply relaxed, yet focused. The feeling of my inner resonance was so great that I had to pursue it. I wanted to know how my life would change if I integrated just a part of it into my own life. This was also the birth of AMOR FATI.
Today, I include my knowledge of fitness, health, nutrition, physical therapy, fascia, blood and hormone levels, yoga and meditation as a component in my coaching sessions to help my clients on a physical level.
“Many are afraid of the small, the social death and hardly dare to step out of line; even more are afraid of the big one, the absolute death – whereas they should be afraid of a dead life only.” – Dr. Christian Zippel