Ayden Moses poses in the gym. Photos submitted
By Tom Victoria
Ayden Moses guides others along their fitness journeys. The fitness trainer is also an aspiring bodybuilder.
The Canadian fitness coach explained why fitness and self-improvement are important.
“It's more of a way of life now,” he said. “When I first started it, it was more to fix the negative aspects of my life. But as you go through the motions and actually start to improve, it just doesn't take over, but it becomes a good chunk of your life and your future goals. And it intertwines with everything you do in life.”
Ayden, 20, follows a fitness regimen.
“I work out three days on, one day off,” he said. “I follow a push-pull-leg split and cardio a little bit every week.”
Ayden focuses on online clients.
“I try to do strictly online,” he said. “Just because there's more money to be made. I'll be honest here. And it's a lot easier to scale than in person.”
After Ayden enhanced his own fitness, he opted to help others do the same.
“I remember when I first started, looking back, there's so much information out there and a lot of it is misinformation,” he said. “As a beginner, when you're trying to lose weight, there's a lot of things even stupid myths like carbs are bad for you, things like that. I wanna help people so that way they don't have to sit there and deal with all the trial and error. They have a system that's designed for them and tailored around their life, and they don't have to spend three hours in the gym every day not knowing what they're doing just spinning their wheels, making no progress.”
Ayden speaks to his YouTube followers.
Ayden stressed people starting their fitness journey should focus on improving themselves, not trying to look like someone else.
“You shouldn't compare yourself to somebody who's a Mr. Olympia, obviously, because they're on enhancements and they're the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent,” he said. “Most of these people, they just want to lose 20, 30 pounds and they'll be happy and look like they're in a lot better health and conditioning in general over the years.”
Ayden stressed the importance of becoming fit sooner rather than later.
“You don't have to be constantly chasing to be the biggest person in the room, but if you work out just two, three times a week for a quick hour,” he said. “If you don't enjoy running, most people don't. It is pretty hard on the joints, but doing some form of cardio just to get in that zone 2, zone 3 range, whatever your preferred choice is. When you get older, it'll slowly deteriorate. So if you're able to keep those healthy habits from a young age until your old age, it's going to save you and you're going to be a lot more agile, flexible and on the go when you're older, and your body's not going to give out on you nearly as easy as it would if you were somebody who wasn't as active. So it's definitely important for everybody to be some sort of fitness, whether it's weightlifting, calisthenics and so on, just some form of physical activity.”
Ayden said people need to work on their entire bodies.
“People have a tendency to skip legs,” he said. “I don't know why it's been so normalized to be honest. I'm kind of like a meathead sort of in that aspect. I just like training, so I like working out legs. I don't care what it is, as long as I'm training, it's a good day for me. So I never got the whole skipping legs thing. But people tend to skip the importance of their lower body.”
Ayden said another problem people have is working solely on strength and ending up with a protruding gut.
“I find that that can happen a lot, too, especially when people do start taking enhancements,” he said. “They go about it wrong, very wrong and they don't do proper protocols, cycling or even dieting. And they could do a lot of long-term damage that could have been prevented.”
Ayden explained the most common mistake people make is not adjusting their diets.
“I wouldn't even say the forgetting about legs is the biggest issue,” he said. “It's got to do a lot with the dieting aspect. People think that working out burns more calories than it really does. Unfortunately, working out doesn't burn a crazy amount of calories. It's the cardio that does burn your calories. So people think they can eat whatever they want, and then they're fat and don't look the greatest. But they're like, oh well, I work out. I don't understand why I'm not making the progress. They don't comprehend that you do have to be on track with everything. It's not just the gym. The gym is just a part of overall fitness and trying to get in better shape. Diet is probably 60 to 70 percent, sleep's a good 20 percent, and the rest is training. It's really what you do outside of it in your daily habits and routine that make the difference.”
Ayden said determining the acceptable calorie intake is crucial.
“That's why I like to do custom, one-on-one coaching,” he said. “On a week-to-week basis, I'll check in with them and see what they're looking like and compare them to previous weeks. Maybe we should up your calories a bit or we could lower them a bit because you're getting a little too much extra fat tissue there. And just wanna make sure people aren't getting outta their healthy body fat ranges and stuff like that.”
Ayden said some folks don’t realize they would be happier being fit than eating whatever and how much they want.
“I'd rather be in shape and happy,” he said. “A very common phrase people like to say, oh well, it's too late now, I'm already fat and happy. It's never too late to change. And the excuse is my metabolism slowing down because I'm over 30. That's not really the case. What happened was is you slowed down, so therefore your metabolism, it slowed down with you. Your metabolism doesn't just say, all right, you're 35 years old, I'm gonna go to bed now. That's not how that works. So if you build these habits now in your 20s and even before then, if you really can, and build them up through your lifetime, you're gonna be in a lot better place than 90 percent of the population.”
Ayden said people often don’t have a fair comparison to judge weight.
“A lot of the issue is the obesity rates are going up and up,” he said. “So the average person, when you're looking at them, they're not even in a healthy body fat range. So when you're comparing and be like, oh well, this person's not that fat, when realistically they're 6 to 7 or more percent out of the healthy body fat range. But because it's so normalized, people's perceptions of what a healthy body looks like is now getting warped.”
Ayden said people don’t understand the dynamic between calorie intake and metabolism.
“A lot of people get metabolism and thyroid mixed up,” he said. “They do work together. However, they are two separate things. It's tricky trying to figure out a simple explanation on it. But if you are constantly not eating, think of your body as a furnace. If you're not putting fuel to the fire, it's not going to be burning as hot. It'll still be burning, just not as high as it should be. So think of that as your thyroid, and if it's your thyroid's slowing down, then your metabolism is also going to slow down with it, and you're not going to be burning as many calories at rest. That's when people are thinking that they're eating what they should be, but they're really eating over their natural baseline calories. And that's how you get into an easy trap, just not enough movement and not enough food or the right foods.”
Ayden said body positivity shouldn’t be people living unhealthy lifestyles.
“I'll tell you from my experience, I grew up fat, pretty overweight,” he said. “The feeling of being fat and having people treat you differently as I've experienced it firsthand, people do treat you differently whether people like to admit it or not. Looks do matter. Unfortunately, that is just how society works. It's how it's always worked and that's how it's always going to work. So with the whole body positivity movement thing, it made a lot of people complacent. It's not good being fat. It's bad for your health. And your mental health in general, too. You feel lethargic and the amount of brain fog you feel. Once I got into shape and started working out and dieting properly, I feel like my brain can function at a better consistency and I can actually use my brain again.”
Ayden said there’s no advantage to being overweight.
“Being fat, there's really no benefit to it,” he said. “That's a simple way to put it. It's kind of blunt. Some people might get offended by it, but that's really the reality of it. There's no benefit to being fat.”
Ayden said folks just need to moderate what they consume.
“Let's say you go to a movie every two months,” he said. “You want to go get that bag of popcorn. It's not like you're eating it all the time. As long as you stay active 90 percent of the time and do the things that you need to do most of the time, you're probably not going to get fat again. It's not that hard.”
Ayden said there’s no reason to not try to lose weight.
“At the end of the day, people can make as many excuses as they want but it's not gonna excuse the fact that there really is no excuse to be overweight,” he said. “People can sit there and say, well, I can't afford healthy food, I can't afford a gym, the list goes on. You don't need to go to a gym to lose weight. You don't necessarily need to eat healthy food to lose weight either. At the end of the day, it's calories in, calories out. Now the problem with that, obviously it is easier to lose weight with healthier foods. I'm not going to deny that fact. But people will make excuses and just try to cope instead of taking accountability and sitting down, be like, damn, I can actually change this, but I'm just too lazy and I don't want to do it.”
Ayden said anyone wanting to be a fitness trainer needs to set a good example.
“I see a lot of personal trainers who aren't even in shape themselves,” he said. “How are you gonna give advice when you're not in shape yourself? That boggles my mind. And then on top of that, they almost make the client progress too slowly so that way they keep them longer and generate more revenue. It doesn't sit right with me. I try to progress people as much as possible, as fast as possible. Now, if I'm able to keep them on after our time is done, let's say I take them on for a three-month, a six-month, or a 12-month, whenever our term is up, if they still want to keep me on, that's great. But at the end of the day, my goal is to try to help somebody get to their desired physique as quick as possible in a realistic time frame.”
Ayden decided he needed to change his lifestyle a few years ago.
“I was 17 and in a pretty rough spot,” he said. “I was contemplating ending my life. So it was either that or something had to change. And I really don't know what it was, but my friend kept telling me to go to the gym and eventually — I had a lot of things going on in my personal life — I just said, fuck it, let's give it a try. I don't know what it was, but anything to do with fitness, I just fell in love with the process and it gave me goals to keep going. Over time, it has slowly built up my confidence to the point now where I went and got my certifications and now I'm trying to do this for a living and help people full-time and become a bodybuilder myself.”
Ayden is planning to compete in 2027.
“I have two shows that I'm in the process of getting ready for to compete in next year,” he said. “So it's overall changed my life for the better. A few years ago before I started, I wouldn't have even had the confidence to be able to come onto a call like this and talk. It's crazy, the mental things that fitness can do for you. It's not even just the physical, it's the mental things it can do is insane. It's given me more opportunities for better jobs, just overall, meeting new people, talking to women for instance. Even something like talking to the other gender, whether you're a male or you're a female, doesn't matter. When you look better, you're gonna get more compliments. People are gonna respect you more because they see you take care of yourself. It's just in human nature.”
Ayden wants to eventually train other people to become fitness coaches.
“I'd like to be able to grow my personal training business to a pretty large scale if possible and have trainers under me, new trainers that have the knowledge and skills but don't necessarily have the capabilities of starting something on their own,” he said. “So giving potential career opportunities to other people. And then in terms of fitness, I would like to be a pro bodybuilder someday.”
Ayden is using a coach to train for bodybuilding.
“It's two different playing fields,” he said. “There's one thing between lifestyle and just losing weight, and there's another between prepping for a bodybuilding show. So I do actually have a coach. He'll be helping me through that process and everything. And maybe someday, I'd like to coach bodybuilding clients as well, but in my head why coach somebody on something you have no experience in? I've been fat, I know what it's like. I've been in the shoes of these people that I'm trying to help now lose weight as well. So it definitely makes a difference.”
Ayden said a person’s temporary or permanent limitations doesn’t prevent them from focusing on fitness.
“If there's a will, there's a way,” he said. “There's people that are in wheelchairs and they are still active. There's a bodybuilding division dedicated to people in wheelchairs. There's a Special Olympics. These people, some of them are paralyzed and they somehow still do these amazing feats. So if there's people that are in worse positions than you and you just have a broken leg or something, there's going to be a way. Figure out what your caloric intake is. Obviously, you're not gonna go do some squats if you have a broken leg, but you can maybe go for a walk. I know it's a pain in the ass with your crutches, but you can still move. There's always gonna be another way around the obstacle. You just gotta keep pushing through and find a way around that wall.”
Ayden already was making social media content when he switched the focus to fitness.
“I've liked making videos for years,” he said. “I used to make gaming content back when I was a young teenager, 13, 14. So when I started getting into fitness, after my second year of being in the gym, I decided screw it. This is the way these days in order to get the reach that you need to build something bigger than yourself. So I took the risk and got a lot of hate for it in the start, but I pushed through that obstacle. And now I'm slowly starting to see the growth and the payoff from all the work I've been putting in almost a year now. And looking towards some sponsorships and brand deals here soon. So social media can open up a lot of pathways and opportunities. I've met a lot of people through online that I can that have been helping me, and now I've been able to generate a little bit of revenue from social media, just behind the scenes kind of stuff.”
Ayden wants his followers to improve their lives.
“As corny or cheesy as it is, just be yourself and try to be better than you were yesterday and try to be better than the person you want to be,” he said.
Ayden doesn’t need to rely on motivation to work out or train for new endeavors such as bodybuilding.
“I don't need to be motivated or disciplined because I just love doing it,” he said. “I just enjoy it.”
Ayden advised others starting to work out to find their motivation.
“For somebody who just wants to stay motivated or disciplined, you got to have a deeper and bigger reason for why you started,” he said. “Because why you started, it might not be what keeps you going in the future, but it's something you can go back to whenever you need that little bit of discipline or motivation. Part of the reason why I'm pushing for the goals that I have is because it can lead me to an opportunity. Yes, I'm helping people, which is awesome, but I can also get to a point where I'm working for myself and generating enough revenue where I can take care of my family. If you don't have a bigger reason why than something selfish, I wanna get jacked so I can get a bunch of girls, you're probably not gonna stay motivated because you're gonna get that goal. Once you get there, you're gonna stop doing it because you got the goal and that there's nothing bigger. There's nothing more to strive for. The goalpost didn't get moved.”
By embarking on a fitness journey, Ayden went from people thinking he wouldn’t stick with it to being the de facto moving guy with friends and family.
“That's the worst thing,” he said. “It does feel good at the same time. I was like, all right, you're known as the guy that can do it. It's nice to have people be able to rely on you for something like that. That is a good thing. I know a lot of people can probably relate to this, too. When I first started working out, my family made fun of me for a bit because they thought it was just a phase where you're just gonna go do it for two months. Cause most people do. They give up before the three months. And then after my first year and then second year, and then I'll be coming up on my third year, now they see it's not just a phase. This is something he actually wants.”
Ayden said it’s vital for people to tune out others’ negative reactions.
“People gotta push through dealing with the negativity from other people,” he said. “If it's a goal you really want, people will eventually start to see your vision once you put in the work and show the dedication. And that's not even just a fitness aspect. That's in all terms of life, whether you're starting a business or going down a certain career path. As long as you see the vision and you work towards there, it doesn't matter how many people say stuff to you. Once you get there, then they're gonna not say nothing anymore. You just prove people wrong.”
Ayden dispensed advice to those about to begin their fitness journeys.
“Take one week before you even do anything and write down your daily habits and what you eat on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “This will get your brain thinking like, damn, am I really eating this badly? Then you can go down from there, break down what's the issue, and then start working out. And reaching out to some sort of a coach. If I were to go back and restart my fitness journey, I would get a coach if I'm in a financial position to do so. I offer a financing plan because I want to make it as affordable as possible to people. Just getting a coach and getting a proper plan and regimen put into place and really learning and taking the time to invest in yourself.”
Ayden said fitness trainers should have the desire to help others more than anything else.
“You have to actually want to help people more than make just the money from it.”
Ayden’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aydenm0ses/
Ayden’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Ayden_Moses