Interview 2: Erin Blevins

fitness, Erin Blevins, crossfit, connection, writer, blog, writing services, competition, growth, content creator

Erin Blevins is the founder of ShutupEAT and ShutupWORK. Erin strives for mutual growth and encourages positive self-image in her client relationships through hard work, amazing food, and physical challenges. She is a physical trainer, CrossFit competitor, author, and nutritionist. Her star-studded client list includes Henry Cavill, Major League Baseball players, Redbull athletes, and a Playboy cover model. Keep your eyes peeled for her soon-to-be released Carnivore cookbooks. It was a pleasure hearing from her exactly what kind of connection can come out of hard physical activity.

 

 

A:  How did you begin teaching fitness?

 

Erin: My interest in training stemmed from my desire to figure things out for myself. I wanted to become a better athlete —for me. I wanted to groom the people I was training to become my training partners for bigger goals. I took on a client this week who is prepping for a Playboy shoot. She will be such a fun client to challenge, and I get to challenge myself at the same time. The clients that I’m inspired to work with are prepping for an event, race, movie, photoshoot, state title, or competition; to work with me, their goals have to be challenging or something to work toward, not just wanting to look a certain way. Because that’s what I do when I train: It’s got to be something big or I won’t work for it.

 

A: How did food and fitness come together in your career?

 

Erin: I’ve always loved cooking & being a chef. I’ve worked with my dad in the kitchen for as long as I can remember. When I was vegan, I had to be really creative to figure out how to get the nutrients that I needed. Now that I eat meat (and have written cookbooks on the carnivore diet) I feel much better. But being vegan taught me to pay attention to how your body pulls energy out of food so that you can maintain a healthy lifestyle. Food tied into fitness for me when I took the skills that I’d learned with my dad and the vegan diet to thinking, “how can I manipulate this energy system into getting a good outcome for sports?” I really delved into that idea when I was a runner. I realized that if I wanted to compete at a high level, I couldn’t be vegan anymore. The process of tying in new sources of food and figuring out how they work with my body to become a better athlete sparked my interest in nutrition. And of course, everyone wants to look good, so defining body composition is an added benefit once you find out what food can do for you. I love to make food that still tastes good and gives you a phenomenal outcome. I’m still learning all the time.

 

A: What is your desired goal for the ShutupEat & ShutupWORK community?

 

Erin: This year I wanted to do something super fun for my community, so I launched a three phase 21-day challenge to train my participants to be in shape for a big event or competition of their choosing. My husband, Michael, and I wanted to take the winners to Spain, but this has been put on hold because of COVID. That’s really been a kick in the face, but it also inspired me to make home and online training more available to my clients. I want my community to have access to fitness even when the rest of the world is on hold. We also just purchased the rights to the USA Tribal Clash and plan to host the competition in Lake Powell after the COVID restrictions have been lifted.

 

A: What factors have inspired how you train your clients?

           

Erin: Experience from past projects always influences my current clients and projects. My newest client is getting our knowledge from when we trained Wonder Woman and the Amazonian women in Justice League. I’m also inspired by my clients’ goals; if they want to win a state record that challenges me to alter their training and nutrition to help them obtain their goal.

           

A: What is one of your favorite memories of competing?

           

Erin: In 2016, when we lived in London, I was competing a lot. We were training at this gym called Crossfit Perpetua. I walked into that gym not knowing anyone and I felt a bit like an outcast because of my tattoos and strong build. The woman running the competition team was Alexis Rufus. She looked at me and said, “I don’t like you.” Even though we didn’t like each other, we trained together and we were extremely competitive with one another. After months of training with her, she came to me and asked that I be her partner in a team competition. She thought that I was the only one strong enough to compete as her counterpart. We won first place at that competition together. After that, we just kept competing. We won first place together in nine out of eleven competitions all over Europe. All the while, I’d ended up becoming very close with Alexis. I’d consider her one of my best friends. Eventually, we signed up for this huge competition called Alpha Games. We had trained for this one competition basically the whole time that I was in London. During the qualifiers, we came in first place with ease. I went to Spain a few days before the competition to have a deload week (a lighter lifting week to encourage recovery before training harder) at our friend’s gym called Crossfit Mallorca. On our first day there, I jumped onto a box and tore my calf. I couldn’t walk on it and the competition was in four days. I called Alexis to tell her the news as she was buying our matching competition outfits. Alexis told me she’d be “so mad if I didn’t show up,” so I called a bodywork guy in Spain and had my ankle worked on every day until the competition. When we arrived in France to compete, I still couldn’t carry my own gym bag. Our coach gave me ligament oil and we tightly wrapped my calf. Halfway through the events, my calf was spiderwebbed with bruising, but I kept going. We ended up taking second place by one point. We stood on the platform and I just cried. I felt like we’d taken first place. That feeling of being so injured and persevering will stick with me as my most epic competition memory. I felt so inspired after that.

 

A: What has your career taught you about people?

Erin: It has taught me that most people are not willing to do work. I think tests and competition are necessary in life. Competition is hard, it’s stressful, and it hurts, but it shows me something that nothing else had shown me before. It shows me what I can get through. It reveals the negotiation that goes on in my head to push me past the point where everything in my body is telling me to quit. You can’t really get that from anything else. Competition taught me how to be assertive and how to put myself in a strategic position to push through adversity. I think that’s what makes me really good at what I do. I couldn’t help people do hard things if I didn’t put myself through the ringer first. I watch this same process happen in other people and I see them grow as human beings and it’s amazing. It’s watching people push past their own psychology. Whether it’s nutrition, training, or competing, the hard part of physical activity is what people learn from. You learn so much about yourself and those around you.  

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