Nico Bade, the jack of all trades, has settled in his adopted home of Bremen and since then has caused a degree of noise there that the sleepiest cosmopolitan city in northern Germany has never known in this form. Through the wodmagazin podcast, we want to convey to you how he managed to make waves despite his calm approach and how he manages a wide variety of projects with a heart for the community without (meanwhile) falling by the wayside himself. We can promise you: It will be unexpectedly emotional, profound and humorous all in one.
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About Nico:
Bade is in his thirties and immigrated from Mühlhausen, Thuringia to Berlin and now to Bremen near Oldenburg. He doesn't like to talk in big tones about himself, that's immediately noticeable. "I'm Nico Bade. What else can I tell you? Ask me something!” Nico's charm lies in this simple manner. He's a man who owns the word understatement. He has always been a sports enthusiast, with his finger on the pulse of the times due to his job as a bartender for many years in the Berlin nightlife, between underground and snobiety, night owls and day owls.
The sporting career as the cornerstone:
Even as a child, Nico was drawn to soccer. In the garden at home, but still. The constant back and forth in the intervals of the Mühlhausen parks drove him to athletics. The combination of sprinting, cross-country skiing and sporting support from my uncle's club gave me the drive I needed to keep going for a few years. But during puberty, priorities changed, away from athletics and towards doing nothing due to hormones. This was followed by episodes up to city championships in basketball, digressions into table tennis and games related to it. In short: Nico likes to test, Nico was and is hardly a fan of standing still.
Shift through pain:
But it came as it had to come: sports injury, accident, rehabilitation, upheaval. In principle, the plant of functional fitness began to grow in him here, without Nico Bade knowing what was happening to him. After another accident, he had to change from the inside out and began to gorge himself on knowledge. Through his research he also came to Crossfit, more precisely to Crossfit Aorta. The rest is history. The box that athletes like Hendrik Senf have in the squad ultimately appealed to Bade and sparked a fire from the start that can no longer be extinguished. The passion with which Nico jumps into the breach in our scene can be heard in every single sentence. Subliminal, of course, but all the more intense.
The pupil: The fitness league
Competitions like the Halfway There Throwdown, in which Nico took part himself and shot his life out in workouts, gave him the desire for more. How can you create a unified platform in Germany that allows boxes and individuals to perform functional fitness in championship style? The sporting background was there, as were the first contacts in the scene, role models such as the Boulder Bundesliga did the rest. Learning by doing has now become a business and a family reunion in one. Not only a Bundesliga, but also a second league was established in what is now the fourth season. Dozens of boxes, hundreds of people meet for four workouts to suffer together and destroy each other with a good portion of warrior spirit. If you haven't been there yet or at least been part of a live stream, we can only advise you to change that. Year after year, something grows here that will stay! To sum up our words, we quote Nico: "The community is very, very grateful!"
The Baby: The Mamba Gym
After the league is in front of the box. Corona inevitably created gaps in Nico's professional and sporting life. But Bade wouldn't be Bade if he didn't put the next iron on the fire right away. Running my own gym was both a dream and a logical next step. Innovative concepts are used that Nico was able to collect through the league and the contacts there. For example, WYSH by Joshua Wichtrup has shown for the Mamba Gym that a huge hall can accommodate several courses at the same time. In this way, one catches more interests, provides a home for more people and is more flexible without constantly overloading one's schedule. We are curious to see how the small family of Mambas will grow in the near future and are all the more hyped to accompany Nico as one of the three Mamba owners and not only to be able to regard him as Lord of the League.
The burnout: The unwanted breakdown
At some point there is always a shift. Course operation, self-employment, private life, league. Nico does a lot. So much so that to many of us on the outside, it seemed almost inhuman. And this workload was also inhuman. Only he realized it too late. The result: the void breaks out. Corona provided the impetus here. Nico was inevitably unemployed during the lockdown and thus lost perspective. A lack of energy and a lack of concentration were just two of the signs that something was wrong here.
It all culminated in Nico registering as unemployed. Despite enormous reluctance, there was no other option. Nothing worked. The simplest tasks piled up by pushing.
Even the interim job in a burger shop didn't help to "bend it straight" again. What helped was the therapy Nico went to. Even though he thought "I can handle it all", he had to overcome his own stigma as a "psycho". Lo and behold: it helped! Stress and the diseases it causes are normal, as bad as it sounds. To know yourself and know who you are. That's what makes Nico so impressive, we think.
With Nico Bade, wodmagazin provides you with someone who pushes you. In our opinion, the podcast with him will help you to question yourself and develop dreams. He helps you listen to yourself and let yourself do what you need and not what you have to.
What was your greatest added value? Share it with us with a comment!
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