Britain’s Nick Aldis was a skinny teenager a few years ago. Now he is the youngest wrestler on the TNA roster, appearing alongside the likes of Hulk Hogan and Kurt Angle. How did he do that?
“If someone had told me two or three years ago that all this would happen, I wouldn’t have believed them,” says Nick Aldis who in just a couple of years has become perhaps Britain’s best-known professional wrestler.
Nick, 23, spends half his life in Orlando, Florida, filming for Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, where as Brutus Magnus he is one half of the current world champion tag team. “I’m in America every other week now,” he says. “In one recent five-week spell I did TV tapings in Florida for TNA followed by some live events then I flew to Austria, Germany and Ireland for live shows and then flew to Minnesota and California for more live shows. Sometimes I have to remind myself how fortunate I am. Yes, there is a lot of travelling and stress involved and sometimes I wish I had a couple of weeks off where I could do nothing. But I love it.”
Nick spends the other half of his life in his native UK where at the age of 21 he was selected to play Oblivion in the revived Gladiators series on Sky One. He was the youngest Gladiator and now he is the youngest male wrestler on a TNA roster that includes Hulk Hogan, Kurt Angle and Mick Foley.
It’s a remarkable story particularly as a few years ago you would have struggled to find anyone less likely to make a career out of his physique. Growing up in sleepy King’s Lynn, Norfolk, Nick was a lanky teenager with little muscle. He competed nationally at tennis and swimming but his interest in real sports gave way to sports entertainment when he discovered the likes of Bret Hart, Hulk Hogan, Sting and the British Bulldog on TV in his early teens. “I’ve always been a showman at heart,” he says. “But at the same time I have had the desire to excel athletically. Wrestling was a way to become a great athlete, to look the part and to become a showman and performer. They are all the things I aspire to be.”
The problem was that at 6' 0" tall and weighing barely 150 pounds he didn’t exactly look the part. Most pro wrestlers weigh in the region of 220 to 250 pounds so Nick knew he needed to add at least 70 pounds of muscle just to have a chance. “I realised this was what I wanted to do,” he says. “But I looked at myself in the mirror and knew I was not big enough and didn’t have the best genetics for adding mass. So I knew I needed to start some serious weight training and bodybuilding. I fell in love with bodybuilding as its own endeavour and it made everything possible for me because without adding size I couldn’t have become a professional wrestler. We are talking about performance art – so much of what we do is aesthetic. So if any young guys ask me how to get into professional wrestling I say ‘get in shape now’. It will give you a head start when you begin. I’m totally against the idea that weight training is dangerous for young people. Of course there is a responsibility to educate them on how to train safely and effectively but there is nothing wrong with basic resistance training for teenagers.”
Nick’s introduction to the world of weights began with a cheap home kit purchased from Argos. He worked out in secret in his bedroom, worried what his parents might think. Slowly they came to accept his new obsession and six months later he joined a gym. Gains came quickly and by the time he was 16 he had grown to 6' 2" and weighed about 190 pounds. Since then he has continued to add mass and currently stands 6' 4" and weighs 230 pounds.
He started wrestling when a friend heard a training camp was being held in Norwich, Norfolk. Nick winces at the memory. “You get tons of abuse at these camps,” he says. “You really get battered. A lot of it’s just to test you to see if you are serious about being part of the business.” Afterwards he began driving every weekend to Dropkixx wrestling school in Essex to learn the moves. “Weight training helped hugely,” he says. “It helped me stand out. I’m not a great wrestler technically. But what I do have is charisma and I stood out from other prospects because of my looks. The Americans care even more about aesthetics but Britain has caught up a lot in recent years.”
At 19 he had his first match and soon he was on the roster of All Star Wrestling, an independent UK wrestling promotion. “The summer schedule was brutal,” he says. “You could be wrestling six days a week.” Nick estimates that only about a dozen British guys make a living from wrestling so the sensible thing to do at the time would have been to find an alternative career to fall back on and fit wrestling in around it. “A lot of younger guys try to wrestle and hold down a regular job,” he says. “I decided to dedicate myself totally to the industry, putting more pressure on myself to reach a higher level through experience and networking.”
One day he received an email for a casting to play a take-no-prisoners character called The Judge in a live bike show at the NEC in Birmingham. He was selected and so impressed the director of the show, who also happened to run a talent agency, that shortly afterwards the director asked Nick if he’d be interested in trying out for Sky TV’s Gladiators revival. Wrestling had given Nick a good physique, the ability to play characters and grappling skills – perfect for Gladiators. He went for a trial and the uncompromising character Oblivion, who according to the PR blurb ‘leaves nothing in his path and extinguishes the opposition’, was born. “Oblivion was an outrageous heel, a real bad guy,” says Nick. “He was a total contradiction to how I am as a person – I’m reserved and keep myself to myself.”
He loved filming Gladiators but after two series it was axed. “They made a mistake not continuing with it,” says Nick. “We were just starting to develop a fan base. If someone wanted to pick it up and carry it on I’m sure they would have success.” But two years of exposure on Sky TV had raised Nick’s profile “It gave me a lot of experience dealing with the press and was good for networking and ultimately it helped me attract TNA’s eye.”
Another contact put Nick in touch with TNA president Dixie Carter so he fired her an email asking about wrestling opportunities. Impressed by what she saw and what he’d done, Dixie offered Nick a two-year deal in September 2008 with her fast-growing company whose show Impact! airs on Bravo and Virgin 1 in the UK. TNA recently added probably the most famous professional wrestler of all-time, Hulk Hogan, to a roster that already included stars like Mick Foley, Kurt Angle and Sting so these are exciting times.
Nick fulfilled a childhood ambition last summer when he wrestled Sting. “That was something I never thought I would do let alone do in a televised live match,” he says. “For a second at the start it felt like I floated away from my body and I was watching it.” What is it that makes guys like Sting and Hulk Hogan so successful? “Their characters,” says Nick. “There are people in wrestling that cater to every-body’s tastes. But some characters are so powerful they capture a generation’s imagination. And they have the ability to reinvent themselves.”
Nick’s greatest TNA moment so far came in October last year when he and Reading-born Doug Williams, together billed as The British Invasion, won the World Tag Team Championship belt off Booker T and Scott Steiner. Welsh enforcer Rob Terry – another wrestler with a bodybuilding background – helped the Brits. “A lot of the principles that have come from bodybuilding have helped me with my career,” says Nick.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in his training, without which he would never have got noticed. “At 14 or 15 I became engrossed in bodybuilding,” says Nick. “I realised that I needed to add mass. I was like a sponge: I read everything I could find at the library, I bought Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding and a Muscle & Fitness subscription. My training is still very bodybuilding orientated, because wrestling is such a visual thing, I train for ‘show’ as much as ‘go’. I am very inspired by the physiques of the golden age: Arnold, Frank Zane, Dave Draper etc.”
WEIGHT TRAINING AND NUTRITION
Today, Nick weight trains at least five times a week and changes his programme every two to three months. When we caught up with him in the run-up to TNA’s UK winter tour 2009, he was following a four-days-on, one -day-off cycle. He trains for two hours a time, resting for up to two minutes between sets. “I enjoy training and like to take my time,” he says. He typically does four or five exercises per bodypart, although for smaller muscle groups this decreases to three or four exercises, and four sets per exercise, beginning with compound movements then switching to isolation movements. “For compound movements I go as low as six reps but otherwise I usually do eight to 12 reps,” he says.
“I usually have one ‘power day’ where I do Olympic lifts and plyometrics and for self-preservation I do neck work about once a week, either with a neck machine or just neck bridging.
Because I’m so naturally skinny my neck has been a particular concern.” He loves training chest but says his back is probably his best bodypart. “My chest came on quickly when I started training but for a long time I had no back width,” he says. “It drove me crazy. One day I read an article by Arnold about the ‘50 principle’ for chin-ups, which says that you should try doing 50 chin-ups no matter how many sets it takes. You just keep going until you do 50. Since I started doing that my back width has really come out. I now start chins with a 20 kg weight strapped to me.”
Nick’s best lifts include 140 kg for bench press and 160 kg for squat. For diet, he aims to eat at least six meals a day. “Sometimes it’s hard to be as strict as I would like with all the travelling but as long as I’m getting about 350 g of protein daily I’m happy,” he says. “I supplement with whey in the morning, and after workouts, and casein before bed and before long travel days, although my hand luggage always has protein bars in it anyway.” Sponsorship by supplements company LA Muscle helps.
Despite achieving so much so soon Nick still wants more. “I want to be a contender for the main event at TNA and to become world heavyweight champion,” he says. He is also eyeing opportunities outside the grappling game. “I next have my sights set on acting, having had a couple of small roles, including pantomime in Norwich,” he says. “I’m always looking for the next move to advance my career.” He says he’s had talks about appearing in an American movie. It sounds incredible for someone who just a few years ago was a skinny Norfolk teenager. But the way Nick makes things happen, don’t rule it out. M&F
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