'I'VE WORKED HARD TO BE IN A HEALTHY PLACE'

Fitness extraordinaire Kelsey Wells talks to Joanna Ebsworth about the harmful effects of diet culture on social media, the importance of exercising for our emotional wellbeing and how she's living her best life in her post-Sweat era

- Words: Joanna Ebsworth Images: Laurken Kendall

If there's one woman who knows all about the transformative power of home workouts, it's Kelsey Wells. Now a world-renowned mental-health focused fitness trainer with an online community of over five million across the world, the 35-year-old mum-of-one from Utah began her own fitness journey back in 2014 - a few months after the birth of her son, Anderson - when her doctor suggested she take up exercise to help alleviate crippling postpartum anxiety and debilitating body image issues.

As a self-confessed ‘stranger to regular exercise’ who had, up until that point, only ever viewed fitness as a tool to shrink her body, Kelsey was soon Googling ‘home workouts’ and attempting to train in the hallway of her one-bedroom basement apartment whenever Anderson fell asleep. Initially, she admits to struggling with what she perceived then as the most basic of exercises, as well as feelings of frustration from her lack of physical progress. However, those early strength-training sessions made an almost-instant improvement to her quality of sleep, energy levels and state of mind, and Kelsey quickly fell in love with fitness during her first year of training - not for the way it made her look in the mirror, but for how it helped her to heal and feel better in herself.

Fitness qualifications soon followed, including pre- and postnatal certifications in a bid to plug the knowledge gap surrounding the lack of information available for new mums wanting to exercise, and this quickly led to Kelsey creating her first home fitness programme, PWR-Post Pregnancy, for fellow fitness professional Kayla Itsines’ online training platform, Sweat.