Aidan O’Mahony doesn’t need more than four words to talk about a good diet.
“Drink water… eat healthy”.
His pause would make you think that you’re an idiot for ever asking. What more do you really need to know for now? Drink water, eat healthy. And, when you’re like him, training twice a day – usually once on the bike and the other in the gym – you’ll not have to get bogged down in measuring calories, reading ingredients or working out percentages to balance your diet.
The start of AOM Fitness is going to be approached with a similar attitude. The Kerry legend doesn’t want to tell people what to do or what to eat. Instead, all he’s doing is showing everyone what he does and what he eats.
“It’s not about if this is right or this is wrong. It’s there for them if they want to use it and, if they want, they can use it.”
Along with Michael O’Donoghue, another Gael now living in London, the pair have put together a bible for sportspeople filled with food ideas, strength workouts, pitch sessions and fitness tests that will range for the first-timer to the senior club team.
He’s already ready for the inevitable questions. It seems that every man and his dog nowadays are sticking PT beside their Facebook name and calling themselves a personal trainer but, alongside working in Tralee as a Garda, O’Mahony has been upskilling in the fitness world.
“I’ve studied now for two and a half years so I’m qualified,” he says.
“That was my biggest thing, that people would come back and say ‘what does he know, he’s not qualified’. I’m qualified and I’m still studying.
“I have my certs, I’ve done my resistance training, I’ve done my endurance and my functional screening but this was the biggest thing for me: I’m not going to be selling books, I’m not going to be selling nutrition or food to people – what I’ll be doing on the website is stuff I did myself throughout my playing career.”
https://twitter.com/aomfitness1/status/988495587527053312
And that’s a playing career that won him five All-Irelands, 10 Munster titles and two All-Stars. It’s a life that led him to become the country’s first winner of Dancing With The Stars, a gig that pushed him onto ever higher plains. When Aidan O’Mahony once walked into a bar, he’d have questions about famous football matches or infamous scrapes along the way. Now, he has people asking him about dancing and dancers.
But, if anything, it only makes him even better-versed in the fitness industry and in the many different levels that his new audience are at.
“I’m not go to be telling people ‘you should be doing this or you should be doing that’, it’s there for them, it’s a website, it’s free.
“If it suits them, they might come on and say ‘right, I want to do an upper body workout session, I’m only starting off’, there’s 45 minutes for them there to look at. If they want to do a spin on the bike or on the rowing machine or maybe just a training session with the team, they can go on it and get ideas.”
And, with over 100 exercises available at the minute, the footage is raw and the experiences realistic.
“People will see it, I’m out on my feet, I’m making mistakes and that’s the one thing we wanted to get across, that if I was making a mistake, I corrected myself.
“I didn’t want to be one of these people where it was like, ‘Jesus Christ, Aidan O’Mahony did 100 press-ups there, he must’ve cut it and added on and added on’.”
He doesn’t need any tricks because all he’s done is documented his own training methods but, suddenly, there’s a catalogue there particularly for GAA players all over the country to browse.
It’s one of the sure-fire things in online media that perks the ears up of the sporting population: star players’ diets, their exercises – basically the secret that we can all copy.
Well Aidan O’Mahony has laid bare everything he did and everything he does. If he never practiced it before, he doesn’t preach it. And it’s accessible as of Friday 27 April for everyone to use.
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