She’s only 23 but Rachel Dillon’s Townsville-based body transformation business is already booming and she says High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is the secret.
It has taken North Ward resident Rachel Dillon a lot of hard work and a radical rethink about her fitness approach to get where she is today. Your typical cardio fanatic, Rachel would do hours and hours of workouts and restrict what she ate but she still wasn’t getting the body she wanted.
“It wasn’t until I started researching that I realised my approach could’ve been detrimental to my metabolism, nutritional intake and overall health and wellbeing,” Rachel says. “I spent more and more time studying the theoretical and physical aspects of training and nutrition and when I met my business partner Jaryd Terkelsen, who introduced me to weights and high-intensity functional training, I saw my body transform before my eyes.
“Resistance training went against everything I thought I knew. I thought doing weights would make me bulky and manly but that wasn’t the case. Once I started lifting, everything tightened up and I began to see the muscle tone I’d been trying so hard to achieve.”
Keen to share the secrets of her success with others Rachel started personal training, working with clients one-on-one. Her business, Bodies by Rachel, really took off in 2013 and has been snowballing in popularity ever since. The team now includes Rachel, Jaryd Terkelsen and Emma Dillon and they offer High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) camps as well as personal training. Convinced that HIIT incorporating weights is the key to building lean muscle while shedding fat, Rachel says the good news is that these workouts are only 20 to 40 minutes.
“Life isn’t about looking a certain way or trying to impress other people, it’s about being happy within yourself and setting your own goals and smashing them.”
“The sessions are fast, fun and extremely effective,” Rachel says. “I’ve also produced a guide that offers a way of eating that’s lifestyle-based rather than diet-based.
To me it isn’t about calorie-deficient diets and trying to lose a lot of weight in a short period of time. If you fuel your body with the right foods you will then be able to maintain a healthy lifestyle all year round.”
Last year Rachel competed in the World Beauty Fashion and Fitness (WBFF) show on the Gold Coast and walked away with a PRO card that qualified her to compete at the WBFF Worlds in Toronto 2016.
“I trained hard for nine months leading up to the event and finally found myself on the world stage in August,” Rachel says. “I was up against some of the most spectacular and beautiful girls in the world but took out first place as the WBFF Bikini World Champion.”
Everyone has different motives that drive them but for Rachel it’s the dislike of giving up that keeps her pushing forward.
“Nothing is better than the feeling of accomplishing what you may have thought was impossible,” she says. “Life isn’t about looking a certain way or trying to impress other people, it’s about being happy within yourself and setting your own goals and smashing them.”
