Passengers boarding a recent flight from Shanghai to Beijing were treated to the extraordinary sight of a burly, military-trained Briton supervising a group of youngsters as they performed vigorous press-ups in the aircraft aisle.
Few Chinese people would have been totally surprised by the scene, unlikely though it sounds. The instructor, Tony Nicholson, is a familiar face in China, thanks to his regular television appearances promoting fitness.
A 1.9 metre (six foot, two inches) hunk of rippling muscle, Nicholson is regularly asked to perform on-screen feats of strength and endurance to demonstrate his formidable levels of fitness, honed over many years of training for a minimum of four hours a day.
The impromptu preflight session was in response to a selfie request from the group of 10-year-olds. “I said if you can do 10 perfect push-ups you can have a picture with me,” he says. “So they did, and everyone was there with their phones taking pictures and parents came up and said they were massive fans because their kids listen to me. Little kids always seem to find me and, if they are shy, they reach out through their parents.
“On another occasion, there was a group of airport security guys waiting when I got off the shuttle train. I thought I was in trouble! But they all lined up and said in unison, ‘We love you Tony, we follow your app and do the planking and the push-ups and the squats’!”
Nicholson’s commitment to ultra-fitness began many years ago when he was a cadet with the famed Royal Marines. In signing up for a career with the elite fighting force he was on course to follow in his late father’s footsteps, and he had been targeted as potential officer material, but a fascination with China sidetracked him indefinitely.
Instead of heading off to combat in Afghanistan or Iraq, like so many of his cadet-school classmates, the teenager committed to two years of learning to speak, read and write Chinese, studying at a university in China’s Guangdong province.
Nicholson, 34, is both sharply focused and unapologetically ambitious. His next career move after university was to start a personal trainer business. It did well but, he reasoned, could likely do better with input from more experienced professionals.
So he embarked on a series of motivational courses run by the world-renowned coaches Tony Robbins and Stedman Graham, who later became personal friends. They said his fledgling business should charge significantly higher fees – if he was top class, and unique, the figures should reflect that.
Even at prices boosted from the initial US$50 to US$500 and even US$5,000 for a personalised session, Nicholson had a full roster of clients. Ultimately, he built up a client list that included many of China’s wealthiest and most influential entrepreneurs.
Early high-level publicity and endorsement came when the then US ambassador to China, Gary Locke, hired Nicholson as a personal coach. Locke’s programme began with a session of planking: lying flat on the ground, pushing up to straight arms and holding the position for as long as possible.
“When he first found me, he was 62 years old and had never done any serious exercise,” Nicholson says. “When Gary first tried planking, he got up to 30 seconds and collapsed, then I got him up to five minutes and eventually got him to 51 minutes, and he then did 60 perfect push-ups straight after.”
Locke later competed in a friendly push-up challenge with Pan Shiyi, co-founder of property developer Soho China, supervised by Nicholson. Pan was captivated by the charismatic trainer’s enthusiasm and professionalism and, under a personally tailored programme, became a seriously motivated amateur athlete who runs marathons.
“I said that [Pan] had the power to inspire a lot of people to get fit, so we did a Guinness World Record of 2,300 people planking simultaneously,” Nicholson says. “We then started running 5km [3.1 miles] and 10km and then did the New York Marathon. When everyone saw that he had run a marathon and lost 10kg [22 pounds], all his friends also wanted to start training, which was good for business.”
A later assignment as a bodyguard to Keanu Reeves during the American star’s visit to Beijing piqued Nicholson’s interest in acting. He was inspired to sign up for a Hollywood course to learn the basics of the acting trade and how to make an impression at casting calls.
It worked, leading to a number of roles in Chinese action films, although the neophyte movie star admits he is usually typecast as the bad guy, a hulking, muscular 112kg man who throws punches, wrestles people to the ground or blasts them away with a semi-automatic rifle.
The filming of one scene left the actor clutching a sore arm – and deeply wary of blindly committing to potentially hazardous shoots.
“On my first day, they brought in a real police dog to attack me, and it was snarling,” he says. “They put my arm in a plaster cast, but when the dog first attacked me I could feel the bite coming through, and I am a pretty strong guy. On the second take, they placed the cast only around my forearm, although nobody could explain why the dog would definitely target that area.
“I took a massive leap of faith out of the desire to do the job well; however, I was terrified because I could feel the pressure of the bite. The director loved the take but people I know in Hollywood said ‘no way man, you can’t do that.’ I learned my lesson.”
For all the offers of movie, television and personal trainer work, Nicholson plans to move in a different direction, with a business that does not rely so heavily on physical attributes. “I am only one injury away from not being able to do anything,” he says.
He has spent the past two years studying for a Harvard Business School executive education qualification. He now uses that business knowledge at his health food company T&T, which sells fresh-pressed juices, protein bars and ready-packaged meals. The Ts in the name stand for Tony and his business partner, the upscale T11 Food Market in Beijing.
The bestseller is a HK$30 [US$3.90] juice of avocado, broccoli, cucumber, celery, green apple and a hint of ginger. The plan is to produce it in much greater volumes, with a longer shelf life, so bottles can be shipped to other major cities.
There is also a scheme to link sales to a campaign that encourages people to lose weight, with a billion kilograms total as the ultimate target. Reaching that figure relies on the juice- and meal-buying individuals submitting their weight-loss figure which, the theory is, should cumulatively reach a billion kilograms in five years.
There are many ways to become familiar with Nicholson’s fitness methods. People can download the Tony’s 8 Minutes fitness app; tune in to his posts on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), which attract 5 to 25 million people a time; buy his book, which has already sold 46,000 copies; read his Weibo posts; or join the 20,000 viewers who watch live evening broadcasts as the man himself streams home workouts from a strategically placed iPhone.
The crammed Nicholson day starts around 4.30am with a regimen that includes push-ups and weightlifting, followed by a lunchtime run of 10km or more in a nearby park and workouts at night. Dinner is simple, nutritious and alcohol-free, in keeping with a strictly teetotal lifestyle, and bedtime is usually 9pm.
During the day, Nicholson can often be found conducting free fitness sessions at local and international schools. Weekends are spent with his mother Beryl and brother David, both teachers at international schools in Beijing, or pursuing his distinctly un-macho hobbies of model building, origami and fish-tank construction.
Despite being one of the fittest men in China, Nicholson had to make an unscheduled hospital visit recently. The reason, he explains with a rueful grin, was to treat a painful, workout-related injury, the result of weights crashing down on his foot.
“I bought all this home equipment and one of the ring clips was shoddy,” he says. “It slipped off when I lifted the weight and it slammed smack down on my foot. It broke the toe and nail; my nice white shoes went all red from the blood.”
