Hi! Tell us about yourself and your training
Hi! My name is Malin (known as Malin Malle on SoMe), I’m 28 years old and live in Sweden (where I’m born and raised). I live with my boyfriend Daniel who’s been by my side for five years now.
I work as a personal trainer online, with my social media channels and part time as a training model. I’m also a professional Calisthenics athlete (body weight training) and I’ve been active in the sport for about 4,5 years now. I’m the Swedish and Nordic champion three years in a row.
To be honest, the reason why I started with calisthenics is a lot thanks to my friend Dana and my boyfriend Daniel. They did this kind of training and thought I would be a perfect fit for it. At that time I didn’t really know much about the sport but I asked them to show me some videos of it.
After watching them I was terrified to be honest. I never thought that I would be able to do what they did, and I thought I was too weak. But they literally forced me into trying it out, and I’m so happy they did. I fell in love!
Little did I know that you don’t have to be crazy strong when starting calisthenics, however, you WILL become crazy strong by the time you’re evolving. And that’s what I did. I was hooked and have been training almost everyday since.
Since I’ve become pretty successful in the sport and with my social media accounts, I’ve got a couple of sponsors, which have been standing by me for over a year now, and I’m super happy with them!
What I like the most about my sport is that it’s an amazing community! It’s almost like knowing everyone even though you haven’t met them (much thanks to SoMe). Basically everyone supports one another instead of seeing them as rivals, even though they battle one another.
I don’t do that much besides from training and working, which I do every day, but whenever I find some spare time I like to spend it with my family and some few close friends.
Describe a typical day of training
My training is very ”skill-based” where I train to manage both strength-skills and dynamic-skills.
My philosophy could be described as ”train at what you want to become good at, and do it often”.
I train almost every day (two to three hour sessions) and I take rest days when I feel like my body needs it. My training is very ”skill-based” where I train to manage both strength-skills and dynamic-skills. I never focus on more than three strength-skills at the same time (period), for example, planche, handstand pushups and frontlever, and I train all those skills twice each per week. Once a week I do dynamic training, also called freestyle.
I train both alone and with others in my team. Sometimes I like to train alone since I can keep my focus a bit better, and sometimes it’s just more fun to train with like-minded people.
I always keep a training log that I can look back at to see for example how many pull ups I did on a session. I think that’s important because some trainings are worse than others, and you feel like you never develop, then I love to look back and see that either I did more pull ups before (so I know I can do it), or I can do more now so why am I losing the motivation..?
How I prepare for competitions is, of course, a lot of practice of the skills I want to perform with and trying to get them to perfection. But I also train a lot mentally (that’s usually the hardest part for me in competitions), I get super nervous and that’s why it’s crucial for me to prepare mentally before a competition.
Since my sport is very performance and strength-based, I don’t do either bulking or cutting, I just feel I’m getting the best results when staying healthy in my maintenance calorie intake.
How do you keep going and push harder?
Some days the motivation of going to the gym is low, and that’s ok. Even I have those days. What’s important then, and how I think, is to just go there and do what I can.
Maybe I won’t be able to do the tricks as good as the session before because I didn’t sleep as good this night, but there is ALWAYS something else I can do.
I KNOW that if I go get my ass to the gym and try my best, I will feel satisfied when I get home. If nothing goes as planned, I just tell myself that it’s okay and that I will fight another day.
I always strive to keep going and push harder, and that’s simple because my goals are so clear.
I know exactly what I want to achieve and I just have to work for them. I don’t think I would be able to go to the gym this often, put down this amount of time, and push myself as hard as I do if I didn’t have these goals.
I prioritize my training over almost anything (not work of course since I need to make money to be able to live and to train), but I make time for my training and I plan other things (like meeting friends and family) around that.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
At the moment, due to the pandemic I would say that my life isn’t going 100% like it usually does, but I’m absolutely doing what I can to make the best out of the situation.
Regarding my job, I’m pretty ok and I haven’t been affected that much, but my plans with competitions have, of course, been totally changed. I had at least two to three competitions planned to attend this spring/summer/fall but all of them have been cancelled so that’s very unfortunate.
Although, I’m trying to stay positive and look at it in a different way.. now I have even more time to practice and to prepare until they decides to open those competitions again.
My biggest goal in my sport (for the next five years) is to attend the world championships in Street Workout and to place high. Of course, I want to become the world champion but I wouldn’t be dissatisfied with a 3rd or 2nd place.
If I could change anything about my training journey is that I could’ve started the sport many years earlier… I started at age 23 and the girls I’m battling against aren’t older than 20 and they have been training for five, six, seven years so there’s where I feel I’m a bit behind.
The younger you are, the easier you progress with learning new skills, and the better you recover as well. So If I started when I was around 15 years old, I can’t even imagine how good I would’ve been today!
How do you recover, rest and handle injuries?
About injuries.. no one wants to get injured and neither do I. That’s why I’m doing my best to train smart to avoid and prevent injuries.
There are a couple of basics that I think most people know of, which is to get enough rest/sleep (I sleep for eight hours every night, and I don’t train the same muscle group within 48 hours), and then we have the food and water, which is super important that we get enough of.. lack of all the important nutrients will make it harder for our bodies to repair.
Even though I’m strict with this, injuries might happen.. and what I do when an injury appear is to work around it. I’ve only been injuries seriously once (when being active in this sport), and that was a ligament injury in my wrist, which made me have a smaller surgery and a rehab time of 100 days. Those were difficult 100 days for me since I could not do what I love the most.
In my sport, I use my wrist to almost everything so it was a very hard challenge for me to work around that. I did a lot of rehab (exercises that I got from the chiropractor) and I did more lower body that I usually do. I have to say that it was quite ok for a change.
How is your diet and what supplements do you use?
I prefer to eat an overall healthy diet and to make it a lifestyle, and then sometimes eat something that’s not necessarily healthy for pleasure.
I don’t follow a specific diet, I’m just having a balanced eating lifestyle. I don’t really believe in diets, specifically since that word is so ”heavy” loaded and I don’t like that you put yourself in restrictions. I prefer to eat an overall healthy diet and to make it a lifestyle, and then sometimes eat something that’s not necessarily healthy for pleasure.
What I love to eat is candy.. all kinds of candy, but mostly sour, licorice and chocolate. I’m such a sucker for sweets 🙂 I would say I’m eating some candy one to two days per week and that works for me. So if I’m going out to eat with friends or something I just take that day as one of my two days with eating ”unhealthier” and if I end up at that day on a high caloric surplus, I just make up for it the next day and put myself into a small caloric deficit.
I don’t do mini cuts pre competition because I want as much energy as possible and I want to feel balanced. Basically, I don’t eat differently on or off season.
I do take supplements daily. I take regular protein powder (whey or casein) but not necessarily because I have to, but more because I like it and it’s accessible. All my supplements are from my favorite Swedish brand Tyngre.
I also track my food intake so I know that I get enough of each nutrient. I’m using the app Lifesum to track my intake and I love it. My calorie intake is around 2000 kcal per day where my macro split is 50% carbs, 30% protein and 20% fat.
What has inspired and motivated you?
I’ve always been a competitive person. I love to challenge myself and I love to succeed and to win.
When I see successful people (in this case in the sport) I get SO motivated. I want what they have, but in my own way of course. I like to surround myself with like-minded people that are great at what they’re doing, and that’s where I get most of my motivation from.
I also like to visualize my future self and where I want to be in the future, and that give me drive to work towards getting those visualizations becoming realities.
I’ve listened to a lot of motivational speeches both from professional speakers (like Tony Robbins) but also from my boyfriend Daniel who is an amazing motivation to many people.
Advice for other people who want to improve themselves?
My advice to people who are new to training and want to improve is to start with the basics! And importantly, take help from experts.
There is a lot of knowledge you have on the web (for example YouTube) that you can start looking at and try to learn from. This way you will prevent all the beginner mistakes that is easy to do otherwise. That’s what I did when I started.
Are you taking on clients right now?
Like I mentioned earlier in the interview, I work as a personal trainer online.. At the moment, I help many clients that can’t go to the gym or feel unsafe going to the gym with training they can do from home.
My specialty is calisthenics (body weight training) so I don’t lift weights myself but I am a certified personal trainer in basic weightlifting as well so for those of my clients that want to lift weight, I can help with that. I do take on clients atm.
In fact, I want to help as many as I feel possible in these tough times. Some clients I’ve had for over a year, which has gotten amazing results, and some I’ve only had for a couple of months but they are already showing huge progress.
I usually have a minimum of three months to sign up for, since that’s what I recommend to make sure you will get some of the results you are looking for. But now that many people are having a hard time financially I don’t have any attachments. They can try for only one month if they want to.
Atm, I only take on online clients due to the situation we have in the world.
One of my most common training questions I get is ”How to learn handstand?”, and I love helping clients achieve specifically that.
Where can we learn more about you?
If you are interested to know more about me and my coaching, all the information will be found at strongbymalle.com
My SoMe channels:
Instagram: malinmallejansson
TikTok: @malinmalle
Youtube: MalinMalle
