Singapore #Fitspo of the Week Jeremy Tan: 'I became more deliberate about taking care of my health for my family'

Life goes beyond the digits on the scale and your body is capable of so much more! Yahoo’s #Fitspo of the Week series is dedicated to inspirational men and women in Singapore leading healthy and active lifestyles. Have someone to recommend? Hit Cheryl up on Instagram or Facebook!

Name: Jeremy Tan (@funksoulbutter)

Age: 39

Height: 1.83m

Weight: 85kg

Occupation: Owner of The Pulse Lab and The Row Space

Status: Married

Food: During the off-season, I eat pretty much in caloric surplus. Currently I am on a meal plan subscription that caters to my dietary needs for the cutting phase.

Exercise: I do weight training six times a week and get my cardio done from indoor rowing, cycling and running.

Q: Were you an active kid?

A: Growing up, I was exposed to a lot of sports but nothing competitive. Fun fact – I was in the Trim & Fit (TAF) Club in primary school, so yeah, perhaps my love for exercising came from that.

You got involved in a lot of sports as you got older.

Yes, bodybuilding was the very first competitive sport that I took up. Then I took a seven-year hiatus, which was when I switched to competitive indoor rowing and that led me to road cycling. I was never competitive in cycling, though I did toy with the idea of pursuing it.

How did you get into bodybuilding?

In 2006, after I completed national service (NS), I felt I was too skinny, so I wanted to bulk up to look better in clothes. That’s when I started going to the neighbourhood gym to work out every day at 7am. I made some friends with the older folks there and this particular uncle took me under his wing. After a year, I grew in muscle mass and he planted the seed then, telling me that I could potentially be a decent bodybuilder.

It was not until 2010 when I really got invested in bodybuilding. I was working as a personal trainer (PT) in a commercial gym and all the famous local bodybuilders were training at my work place. It was a very conducive environment for me to make my dream as a bodybuilder come true.

Some of the highlights of my bodybuilding journey include:

• 2012 HomeTeamNS Bodybuilding Championships (Open Category): fifth

• 2013 National Bodybuilding & Physique Championships (over-85kg): third

• 2015 Muscle War (Open Category): sixth

• 2016 Muscle War (Open Category): fifth

I'm intending to compete again this year. Even though I’ve stopped competing in bodybuilding for a few years, I don’t see this as a comeback because I never really left. I live and breathe bodybuilding.

How did you get into competitive indoor rowing then?

The first thing I did when I took a hiatus from bodybuilding was to revamp my training regime and protocol. I was adamant on making sure I focus on building a stronger aerobic capacity, so that I could improve on the longevity of my fitness career.

In 2016, I came across an article in a magazine that said one of the fitness tests in the world is to row 2,000m under seven minutes, among other tests. I thought to myself, “How hard can it be?” The next thing I knew, I hopped onto an indoor rowing machine and gave it a crack. Guess what? I couldn’t even make it to the halfway point.

I kept trying from that day on and it took me an entire year to row 2,000m under seven minutes. I went to look and found online indoor rowing competitions and was shocked to see that there is a huge global online rowing community. I wanted to be part of that world.

What led you to start The Pulse Lab and The Row Space?

The Pulse Lab is a PT gym that started in 2017. I had been a PT for six years and was approached by a client of mine, who wanted to franchise Anytime Fitness with me, but I preferred to start something of my own. I managed to convince him that we should create a brand of our own because I don’t like to replicate things. I wanted to create something from scratch and make sure I saw it through.

At that time, I was getting into indoor rowing and saw that it was one of the most underrated conditioning tools. I saw the potential in it and thus wanted to share it with my community. Thus, we ran indoor rowing classes concurrently with our PT sessions.

But I soon felt the need to create a rowing brand and give it its own identity. So in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, we took a leap of faith and opened The Row Space, Singapore’s first dedicated indoor rowing studio, next to The Pulse Lab. I wanted to provide proper education for people who are keen to explore this sport.

Have you experienced any incidents that made you feel insecure about yourself?

I guess being in the TAF club and growing up being bullied in the school bus made me insecure about my own looks and myself. The pandemic definitely made me, and all of us perhaps, view life differently. I became more deliberate about taking care of my health for my family.

When did you feel the least confident about yourself?

In 2020, when the pandemic first struck, I went into shutdown mode. I didn’t want to touch a barbell or a dumbbell. And believe it or not, that was the first time in my life I started to drink alcohol. I guess as a business owner, I was faced with the reality that I might lose it all because of the pandemic. I wasn’t resilient enough to tell myself to ride out the storm.

Thankfully, I had good people in my life that stood by me (my business partner and my wife) and they pulled me out of that depressive state and I’m glad I could snap out of it.

Are you satisfied with your body?

I am very satisfied with my current body because this is the first time I’m embracing this dieting journey openly and this is also the first time I am preparing for a competition in a non-traditional bodybuilding way.

Do you get any comments about your body?

Yes, mostly from new friends that I’ve gotten to know in the last three years. As I stopped bodybuilding during the pandemic, this is the first time that they see me in bodybuilding mode. I get the very common comments like, "Why are you doing this?", "Please take it easy", "Too lean already", "You look sickly".

I always laugh it off and tell them that they didn’t know how I looked like before 2020 so in a way, I’m doing this to remind all of you.