BANTER BUILD: Approaching Exercise With a Self-Nourishing Mindset

About Olivia

Hi! My name is Olivia Park and I’m a women’s health and performance coach. I live in South Korea but originally come from New Zealand. I help women get strong in and out of the gym by helping them to redefine health on their terms. 

As well as coaching women with strength training, fitness, mindset and nutrition, I’ve also had my own battles when it comes to exercise and my body. For over a decade I abused myself through exercise and food as a way to be smaller but I masked it through my athletic pursuits (as a bodybuilding competitor, CrossFit competitor and being a coach—the societal standards and expectations I thought I had to live up to with performance and aesthetics). What I believed for so many years was I had to look a certain way in order to be accepted as an athlete, a coach and by society. When in fact my athletic pursuits turned into disordered behaviours with both exercise and nutrition.

After many years of abusing my body through overexercising and undereating I was in chronic LEA (low energy availability). This resulted in the loss of my period, a number of other endocrine dysfunctions, missing out on life experiences and being an ongoing battle of never feeling good enough no matter how much exercise I did to try to manipulate my body.

Although my hormonal health is still mending my mental health is far from what it was. I no longer see exercise as a competitive thing or a means to an end to fix my body. I work on strength training, fitness, learning new physical skills, mobility, stability, balance, coordination all to enhance my life; I no longer use movement to make my body smaller—but to live big.