‘People were calling me the Joe Wicks of Bristol’

Six minutes into the HIIT Man online fitness workout, I decide I’ve made a terrible mistake.

I thought it would be easy. Pop onto the Zoom call, do a couple of stretches, jog around a bit.

Cut to 1.06pm on Friday. I’m holding myself above the floor, in the plank position, rhythmically jumping my legs together and apart, resisting the urge to curl up into a ball. In the following 14 minutes, I run through curtsey lunches, star jumps, climb-the-mountains and leg raises. By the time I stumble away at twenty past, my legs have had enough. If you treat us like that, they say, don’t expect us to be supportive.

It was, in fairness, my own ambition to not look like a flake that made the workout so gruelling.

“It’s only as hard as you make it,” says Nick Bamber, known as the “Joe Wicks of Bristol”.

“It’s quite funny because I get feedback from some people saying that it was so hard – but for the exact same workout, someone’ll message me saying it was easy. I’m like, well I’m not able to control your effort level! I’m not there forcing you to do anything.”

The 28-year-old from St Andrew’s has been running the workouts since the first lockdown. They are for anyone to get involved with, whatever ability or age, with Nick saying: “My dad has joined recently and he’s 66.”

HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training. It is what it says on the tin: short bursts of high-energy exercise, broken up by 15 second rest breaks, for a total of around 20 minutes. It’s an efficient way of getting fit, one that takes much less time and incurs less of a risk of injury. Nick’s workouts fit that model – with a big dose of silliness added in.

“Every two weeks I’d do Fancy Dress Friday,” he says. “There would always be banging tunes, everyone dressed up, I’d be there in a dress….”

Nick’s Instagram pays testimony to this. An array of wacky workout outfits are on display, including a jelly bean leotard, a leopard-print coat with matching baseball cap, and even full cricket whites.

“HIIT Man just became a platform where I was able to share my personality,” Nick says. “I love fitness, I love music, and I love spreading positivity. So I found a way of combining my three passions.”

Nick has a talent for dressing up. His favourite workout outfit so far is “a revealing bright blue leotard”. Photo: Nick Bamber.

There was never an intentional start to the HIIT Man project. The workouts began simply with Nick saying yes to his friends’ request to help them get fit during lockdown. “The first session was just me and four mates – no music or anything; it was just me explaining exercises.”

The sessions became daily, and soon his friends were bringing others along.

“I didn’t know what was coming,” Nick says. “We’d have someone in Scotland doing it, someone in France…. People from all over were joining in.”

The social side proved a godsend during the dark days of the first lockdown, when Nick’s education recruitment start-up was placed on shaky ground by school closures.

“It was that part of the pandemic where I had massive anxiety and stress for my business. And the HIIT Man carried me through it,” he says.

“I was sat there lonely at home, then all of a sudden I had a flood of messages coming in. Every day I’d be catching up with two or three mates who I hadn’t spoken to in ages. It was so nice. It just gave me that something to focus on.”

Nick is the kind of fitness enthusiast for whom Dry January means not only giving up alcohol but getting up at 5am and going for long runs. The son of a British squash champion and an ultra-marathon runner, and the brother of a professional squash player in New York, his commitment to working out isn’t surprising.

A few years ago, however, the story was very different.

“I was in a four-year relationship, and in the final year of (it) I got myself in a rut. I stopped gyming, I was playing loads of PlayStation, I wasn’t seeing my friends as much. When the relationship ended, it was a massive slap in the face. I was like, why have I wasted that year of my life?

“That was the wakeup point. And I’ve been pretty much six days a week in the gym ever since.”

Nick revolutionised his fitness regime after a break-up two years ago. Photo: Nick Bamber.

The HIIT Man is hard work to orchestrate, Nick says.

“The night before, I’ll write out the workout, line up the tunes, think about what I’m chatting and get my messages out to make sure people are coming. It’s very time consuming. It was probably taking me six hours a day (at first).”

But he says it’s all made worth it by “the amount of really nice messages I get saying, ‘you’re workout is the highlight of my week.’

“I really feel like I’m helping people.”

Main photo courtesy of Nick Bamber

Read more: ‘I want to empower people to feel great in their bodies’