Liveing well
Alice Liveing built more than an app in those stay-at-home months - she's heading back out into the world with a whole new outlook. Here, she explains why finding her niche in the fitness industry - along with the 'right' therapist - has left her feeling happier than ever
‘People genuinely care about their health now – it’s wonderful to see’
Considering I haven’t set foot in a gym since the world – and in-person training – came to a sputtering halt more than a year ago, I’m pleasantly surprised by how well I’m faring. ‘Lovely, Kirsti,’ my personal trainer eggs me on from the left of the squat rack. I’m on my third set of barbell back squats and, as I push myself upright – on rep, what, seven? – she senses I haven’t got much left in the tank. Stepping neatly behind me, she lightly touches the bar with her fingertips as if to let me know she’s there if
I need her, but I’ve got this. ‘Big drive, big drive,’ she says, as I power through the last rep.
I’ve met Alice Liveing before. But when the 28-year-old greeted me in the pristine reception of Third Space in Soho, London, this morning – dressed head to toe in black, spun-gold hair pulled back into a neat bun at the nape of her neck, a black cap atop her head – I got the feeling I was meeting her no-nonsense doppelganger. Then again, I’m not here to meet Alice, the glowing host at the launch of her latest Primark range, or the charismatic panellist delivering a talk at WH Live, but Alice the PT. We’re here to do a workout from her newly launched app, Give Me Strength. And after a quick foam roll and some mobility moves, she guides me through three supersets; we do barbell back squats paired with a 90/90 hip stretch before moving on to Bulgarian split squats and rows, finishing with lunges paired with lat pull-downs. Forty-five minutes, a quick freshen-up and a – yes, I’m feeling smug about it – 30kg squat later, I find my way back through the labyrinth – past the climbing wall and a geometric chandelier roughly the size of my bedroom – to a cosy alcove near the reception area, where Alice is waiting for me. She laughs when I whip out my laptop in its Star Wars case – ‘Oh, [my boyfriend] Paddy would love that!’ – and graciously balances my phone in her lap so I can record our interview. With one Lycra-clad leg crossed over the other, I sense the shift from PT to the polished, stage school-trained influencer I’ve met before as we pick up where we left off on the gym floor.
MIND OVER MUSCLE
London is just beginning to come alive again on the day of our interview. Alice wasn’t bothered about getting back to a restaurant or the pub, but was in the gym the day it opened. How does it feel to be back? ‘When an everyday thing, like coming to the gym, is stripped away from us, I think we value it so much more,’ she begins. ‘If you pair that with an environment where everyone was in a state of stress, overwhelm, trauma, people really recognise that exercise boosts their mental health.’ Like most social shifts for which Covid was the catalyst, this one was happening already. Five years ago, Alice tells me, clients overwhelmingly came to her for weight loss. ‘But now, people genuinely care about their health. They want to exercise because it makes them feel good. It’s wonderful to see.’
It’s in the context of wellness’s shift from a scalesfirst approach to one that places health front and centre that Alice has finally found her feet in the industry she’s called home for seven years – and with it, the confidence to launch her app. ‘I always felt like I was a bit boring for most people because I don’t do the sexy “shredding for the wedding” and “get killer abs” and all that,’ she adds, wrinkling her nose slightly. ‘I had to work out where my place was. And, during lockdown,
I really found it – people were coming back to me because I offered credible, sustainable, solid workouts that were good for everyone… It gave me the confidence to be like, I know I’m a good coach.’ Alongside three gym-based programmes – Fat Loss, Muscle Gain and Energise, which targets both strength and mobility – Give Me Strength also features a constantly evolving Home plan. ‘We also offer advice on things like getting some steps in, meditating, your menstrual cycle,’ she adds, ticking them off on her fingers. ‘It’s not just about telling you how to exercise and what to eat, but trying to get you to embrace your wellbeing in a 360-degree way.’ For Alice, right now, that looks like three full-body strength sessions each week and a 30-minute walk every morning, soundtracked by a podcast or a playlist.
TALKING THERAPY
Of course, the past 18 months haven’t just been spent writing programmes, testing recipes and cosying up with her aforementioned boyfriend, Paddy, in their south-west London flat. During the first few months of the pandemic, the anxiety and disordered eating that Alice had been grappling with since she was a teenager flared up once again. In her last cover interview with WH, in May 2020, Alice described a debilitating period in which her anxiety manifested in acute
‘Investing in my mental wellbeing has meant I’m a better person to everyone around me’
fears about her health, culminating in a conviction that there was something fatally wrong with her. So I can only imagine how she’s faring after 18 months of mask-wearing, restrictions and apocalyptic headlines. Even she was surprised by how well she coped with the heightened anxiety around health that we’ve all been living with – she hasn’t seen her doctor with a suspected health issue once since last March. But her anxiety manifested in a different way, settling firmly back on food. ‘I definitely found myself falling into bad habits with eating,’ she recalls, adding that she’s referring to her relationship with food more generally as opposed to a diagnosed eating disorder. ‘It was just this completely unprecedented situation, and without all the other coping mechanisms that we usually lean on, like friends, family, going out, the gym, I really did find myself – particularly early on – leaning on food quite a lot and having a fraught relationship with it.’
The turning point was her decision, last August, to start having regular therapy. ‘[In the past], I’d almost done it as a tick-box exercise. And I’d end up leaving feeling so much worse. I’d go and pour my heart out and have a bit of a cry, and then I’d leave without them really “getting” anything or saying anything helpful,’ she explains. All that changed when she found her current therapist by chance on Twitter. After doing hour-long virtual sessions weekly for several months, she now has them twice a month. It is, she tells me, one of the best decisions she’s ever made. ‘I know that therapy is a real privilege. It’s not something that everyone can afford to do. And I’m quite mindful of that,’ she begins, weighing up her words. ‘But investing in my own mental wellbeing has meant I’m a better person to everyone around me, for my job, for my business. I just have more ability to be able to deal with things. You’ll still have bad days. But it teaches you how to navigate and deal with them so much better… It was really transformative. And something that I’m still investing in, as I don’t think the work is ever really done.’
I get the sense that the Alice emerging from the pandemic isn’t the one who went into it. When I voice this, she doesn’t pause to consider it – it’s already occurred to her. While quick to caveat the fact that finding silver linings in a global pandemic is a phenomenal privilege, she explains that the forced pause – and the period of reflection it gave way to – has allowed her to put to bed some of the worries that have followed her for years. Among the many lightbulb moments is the realisation that her friendships don’t have to fit a certain mould. ‘Female friendship is a really weird thing. There’s so much pressure to be like the Sex And The City friendship group and to have, like, your best friend. Sometimes, I’d get triggered when I’d see a group of girls all having fun and going out for drinks on a Friday night. I don’t have that.’ But gradually – through questioning who and what she was investing her time in, and redrawing the boundaries of her friendships accordingly – she’s increasingly okay with that. ‘I have a very small group of friends, but they are golden, golden people. And they’re people that I really value.
I’ve definitely shed a few
that I don’t need over the last year. And I found that to be massively helpful, because I just don’t have this anxiety around friendship any more.’
BODY LANGUAGE
On the morning we speak, we’re a few days out from Alice’s fourth WH cover shoot – a shoot that will make her one of our most prolific cover stars. Since bursting on to the wellness scene in the mid-2010s, she’s graced our cover no fewer than three times: all big blonde curls, sipping a green juice; striking an I-mean-business pose in thigh-high boots; and most recently, gamely frolicking in front of a flower wall in an assortment of bubble-gum ensembles for an ethereal Alice In Wonderland shoot. Suffice to say, it’s not her first rodeo. So I’m surprised to hear that she’s more nervous about this – comparatively understated – shoot than she was for any other. ‘It feels like there’s so much more riding on it than usual,’ she explains, referring to the launch of her app, which will happen just a few weeks before this issue hits the newsstands. What is it that she’s feeling nervous about? ‘I think part of it is tied up in the fact that my job and personal training are very connected to the way that I look,’ she begins, cautiously. ‘So, when I’ve been thinking about the app, sometimes I do get a bit nervous that maybe I don’t look how people think a personal trainer should look… And I’m not saying I’m in a bigger body,’ she adds quickly. ‘I’m still very petite. But I think you do have this sort of internal dialogue…’
That a negative narrative currently runs inside the mind of our – frankly, flawless – cover star shouldn’t come as a surprise. Research as part of our Project Body Love campaign reveals the inner critic to be the biggest issue affecting women’s confidence. But perhaps the greatest testament to where Alice is right now is what happened next. If Alice was nervous when she turned up at the Dalston warehouse that served as the backdrop to our shoot on an unseasonably cold Friday in May (urgh, remember May?), it didn’t show. Though she endured the arctic conditions for the most part in her gym kit – only bundling up in a fluffy brown robe between takes – she was, I’m reliably informed, a ray of sunshine all day. So how was it, I ask her, over the phone on the Monday morning. ‘I absolutely loved it!’ she gushes. ‘I arrived at the shoot and, I don’t know, I just felt really healthy, you know… happy. I do think body confidence comes in waves. There are always going to be things that challenge me, and days when I feel worse than others. Last week, I had one of those days. But I just worked through it,’ she pauses, before adding: ‘The way you look is such a small part of who you are as a person. And it’s just about reminding yourself of all those things that you are.’
After we hang up, I can’t help but think that, of the many sides of Alice we’ve seen so far, this one seems the most content. It’s not until I’m back at my desk transcribing our interview that I realise she’s far too smart to buy into such neat, wrapped-up-in-a-bow narratives. ‘There’s always a learning journey to be had,’ she said, towards the end of our interview. ‘I never want to stick a pin in a period of time and be like, “I’m here, this is the best.” But I think that I would say I’m definitely in a good place now.’
‘The way you look is such a small part of who you are as a person’