Lucy wants to inspire others to follow their passion (Picture: Michael Lloyd Photography)
Watch any of Lucy Wyndham-Reed’s videos on YouTube, and you can’t help but feel motivated to get your trainers on.
The fitness influencer makes exercise look fun – and crucially, easy – and manages to burpee, jog and lunge, all with a smile on her face.
At 52-years-old, she’s one of the most popular fitness Youtubers. In 2020, she was ranked the most popular fitness YouTuber in the UK, beating the likes of Joe Wicks to the top spot, with her channel racking up nearly half a billion views.
But Lucy’s fitness empire was born out of unimaginable tragedy. She was 21-years-old when her childhood sweetheart – the love of her life – passed away in a horrific accident. As she tells Metro.co.uk, ‘Losing Mike totally changed the direction in my life.’
Lucy wasn’t exactly a fan of exercise growing up. She says: ‘I had been rubbish at any kind of fitness at school. I came from a family of creatives – my mum is an artist and my dad is a folk singer.
‘I was always the last one to get picked in games. I was the one sitting on the bench – no one wanted me. I was bullied too.’
Lucy says she was the ‘least likely’ person to join the army (Picture: Supplied)
But things changed for Lucy when she joined the army cadets. ‘I started to build my fitness and strength and started to feel more confident,’ she says.
It was here, that Lucy met Mike, when they were both just 15. ‘I was so in love with Mike,’ she says. ‘He was such a wonderful soul. He was funny and sweet.’
Inspired by her time in the cadets, Lucy says ‘when I got the chance to join the army for real – I did.’
She says it was like a scene from Private Benjamin when she arrived for her initial 12 weeks’ training at Aldershot Barracks, Hampshire, in July 1989. ‘I was there in a flowery dress and was met by the girls in my barracks with skinheads and tattoos and massive rucksacks,’ she laughs
Mike also joined the army, and after a tour in Botswana, he proposed to Lucy, just before her 18th birthday. ‘No one was surprised in the least when we got engaged,’ she says.
By 1992, Lucy had been serving for a couple of years, while Mike was due to come out of the army – he had applied to join the fire service and got accepted. Meanwhile, Lucy was also training as a dental nurse, a career she planned to pursue once they’d both left the forces. ‘We were planning a life together,’ she says.
She says they were planning a life together (Picture: Supplied)
But one night, at his army barracks in Northern Ireland, Mike and his friend played a game that went tragically wrong.
While putting away their weapons, Mike and another soldier would play a ‘pretend Russian Roulette’ game – they would empty their guns of bullets, but then place them in each other’s mouths, and pull the trigger. Only this time, the other soldier had forgotten to remove all his bullets. Mike was accidently shot dead at point blank range.
‘That night I was staying with a friend, and the military police were trying to find me because I wasn’t at home,’ says Lucy. ‘In the end, they called my mum and dad, who insisted the police didn’t tell me until they were there. When the police found me, they asked me to come into the office in the middle of the night.
‘My first thought was Mike. “Has a bomb gone off [in Belfast]?” I asked. “No,” they replied, “a bomb hasn’t gone off.”
‘I went to the office on the army base, and as I arrived, I saw my mum and dad get out of the car. One look at their faces, and I knew. I just shouted “Mike” and I just started to run away.
‘I ran and ran for around 20 minutes before they found me. I didn’t want to face what they were going to tell me.’
She described Mike as the most ‘wonderful soul’ (Picture: Supplied)
Lucy went back to her parents’ home. ‘In the car, my dad was driving, and he’s got one hand on the steering wheel, and the other hand is holding my hand. My mum was in the back of the car, holding my other hand. I was so lucky to have my family around me.
‘They loved Mike like a son and for my sister he was like a brother. It was a very tough time.’
But throughout it all, Lucy says that fitness helped her cope with her feelings of grief.
‘It doesn’t help you overcome it because I don’t think you ever do. But it helped me navigate the overwhelming feelings.’
Lucy says that losing Mike changed the course of her life. ‘If that hadn’t happened, perhaps I would have two children, who would be in their early 20s now,’ she says.
‘I’m too scared of loss and of having children. But I think I channelled all my love and nurturing into my fitness business. I couldn’t change what happened to me, but I could focus on helping others.
‘I wanted to give people the gift of health; I wanted to help people feel back in control of their lives, to feel alive and confident again.’
She channelled her grief into fitness (Picture: Supplied)
Lucy left the army, trained to be a fitness teacher, and was running free aerobics classes in her local village hall in Reigate.
‘I was grieving, but focusing on my fitness helped me deal with the negative emotions. I launched my business, offering fitness classes, and in my first class, three people turned up! It was really tough trying to build up the business. One day I had hardly enough money to put petrol in the car. Mostly, I had been travelling to PT appointments on my bike.’
But one day, everything changed for Lucy. ‘I trained a TV presenter who lived in the area,’ she says. ‘She did an interview in a national newspaper about her health journey from my training in just 6 weeks. I came back to my little flat, and 47 people had left messages on my answering phone who wanted me to train them.’
Slowly, Lucy built her personal training business. ‘I felt like Mike was always there, helping me and guiding me,’ she says. ‘There were days when I felt like giving up. I was driving one day and said out loud, “Give me a sign if I should continue.”
‘And I’m not kidding, a van that made signs drove past, and it had the word sign all over and the number plate was MBL—which is Mikes full initials!’
When YouTube was launched in 2005, Lucy decided to set up her own fitness channel.
‘I had no equipment,’ she says. ‘I would literally prop my phone up on a cereal box and present a fitness class in front of a window so there would be natural light.
‘I would get a few hits every day, but it was the positive comments from people that enjoyed the classes that kept me going. Even if I could help just one person, that made me feel like it was all worth it.’
Lucy’s channel is going from strength to strength (Picture: Supplied)
Over time, Lucy went from getting three views to nearly half a billion. What’s the secret of her success?
‘When I was just starting out in personal training, I worked in a gym, and the owner told me that he had 1800 members. I looked at the equipment, did the maths and said, “but you don’t have enough equipment.”
‘He laughed and said something that shocked me to the core: only 11% of people who join a gym ever go. I realised that I didn’t want to be a fitness instructor that worked with those 11%. I wanted to be the trainer who worked with the other 89%, who feel intimidated by the gym and who want to get fit at home in their pajamas with no make-up and holes in their t-shirts. This was my tribe, and that’s who I focused on.’
Nearly 20 years later, Lucy’s perseverance has paid off. Her channel is going from strength to strength – and her story is one of resilience.
‘Never give up,’ she says. ‘Do something that you’re passionate about and keep focused on how you can help others.’
You can watch Lucy’s videos on her YouTube channel.
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‘I was so in love with Mike. He was such a wonderful soul.’