PT Jay Cardiello has trained the likes of JLo and 50 Cent and shares how his traumatic life events have shaped his teflon-like self-belief. He shares his motivational approach to getting tabloid-worthy fitness results, whatever your age.
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Find out more about Jay’s 12-week KALIO transformation here and for The 2025 KALIO Summit, see here. For more on Jay, see @jaycardiello or via his site here.
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Oh hey, welcome to Extra Healthy Ish, the big sister podcast to Healthy Ish from Body and Soul. I am your host, Felicity Haley. I'm joined today by an A list celebrity trainer. Yes, he has trained the likes of j Loo and fifty cent and has done a pretty good job, hasn't he. His name is Jay Cardilio, and he joins us from New York to share how his traumatic life events have shaped his tefon like self belief. He also shares how he's managed to get a tabloid worthy fitness results with his celebrity clients and how you can too. Yeah, this actually could be one of the most motivational speeches you have ever heard, well, at least for a very long time. I enjoy chatting to Jay. Hope you enjoy listening to the interview. Jay, thank you for joining us on X Healthy Shoulday. Nice to have you on the podcast.
Felicity, thank you so much.
And it's an honor to be here, and all the way from New York City, a very exciting place to listen.
It is an exciting place to live and never goes to sleep, so even though it's late here, it's still hustling. And bustling outside.
Oh, I bet listen as it is. I think it's about ten. Is it ten o'clock where you are when we're recording this podcast. I thank you, yes, dying out light. Now, I do have to ask you the big question that I ask everyone who comes on this podcast, how do you stay extra healthy? Is in your life?
I do what they call an hour of power, and that's I call it an hour power and I express it to other people as my hour of power. It's my morning routine. Each morning I wake up, and every every day that you're blessed with is and never another opportunity to to share love, to be creative and really take forth everything that you've been blessed with in this world. So each and every day it's definitely a gift and should be celebrated. So when I wake up, I jump out of bed and I'm like, yes, thank you so much for this day. And I get down and pray and say my thanks for the day, and then I get into meditation and I do about a ten minute meditation and then I go into what they call an incantation, which I'm really I say. I By December thirty first, twenty twenty four ij Cordielli will accomplish this by doing this, this, this and this, and it gets me excited for the day. Then I go into prayer, then I go into stretching, and then I work out for only ten to twelve minutes and people are like, what are you doing ten to twelve minutes. I go on the treadmill and I run a mile and I run it as fast as I can. And I while I'm running the midle, I listen to affirmations because I find myself when I was just lifting weights and going it wasn't you versus you? Getting on a treadmill for me and this is just for me is a way that I can better myself by beating myself. Because adding on the treadmill, running as fast as you can just for one mile, you get a lot of negative self talk going on. It's like you gotta stop, you gotta stop. But I press on and I go for it. After that, I take a ten minute ice bath, which I take every day. I fill up my bathtob dump ice in it, and then I take an ice bath and that's my hour of power.
I like that, And does that change or is it quite set?
In Stone's I've been doing it for five years now. Every day I don't miss a day unless I'm sick.
And how's it changed your life? What sort of impact hasn't happened?
Oh, my goodness. It sets the tone to allow me to be the best version of myself for other people. Because you never know when you're going to get an opportunity for a person to be in front of you. You can make a difference in their life. So I do the best I can each and every morning to make the best of my mind and make the best of myself so I can give people the best version of me when they meet me, and that I hope that my words can inspire them to be the best version of themselves and have the best day ever. So by focusing on my morning ritual of my hour power sets the tone for what I want to be and how I want to show the world and what I want to give to the world.
That's an incredibly empowering mindset, and no doubt that comes from your very tumultuous and tough upbringing. Tell us a bit how what happened to you as a child and what you went through has shaped who you are today.
Sure, so I always tell people I went through the worst of times to give people the best of times. You know, I talk openly about this and involved in charities as well. But from the ages of six to nine I was sexually abused by a neighbor, and it took me thirty years to actually come out and talk about it. I struggled a lot with depression growing up. I was a cutter. I talked about that openly. It was I just didn't like the skin anymore, and I would shower all the time. And it was a very hard time. But it was a blessing, I say, because it made me the man I am today. And without that happening, I wouldn't be where I am today, nor would I have the strength to empower people the way I have today. Next, I went through a very, very tumultuous divorce which left me bankrupt and homeless. It was hard being you know, I'm gonna get choked up now, but it was definitely hard to be a father and at the same time be homeless.
That would have been so hot.
And not anything. Also, too, during my college years, I broke my spine during a track and field accident. I came down wrong in a jump and my discs went forward if vertebrates went backwards, and I cracked the tailbone in half. And then I got the top portion of my spine fuse and the bottom half of my spine fused from that spiral injury. So I was in a body brace for six months, laying in a hospital bed. I didn't know if I was going to walk again. But felicity, I say these things not to bring the audience down. I bring this to incite them, to enlist them, to invoke them to want to be the best. And that's why I developed this twelve week program. See a lot of people say, you know, where did you learn this? How how do you reach people when you know you're in the fitness and you were an English major and you didn't don't have the studies or degrees. Why would someone come to listen to you? And I say, because I've been through the experience. Anybody can study a textbook. Anybody can pick up a book and read and then tell you what it is like to go through a situation. But when I am sitting across from a client, whether it be on zoom, whether it be in front of me, whether it be on the phone, I create a rapport with people because people say, he gets me, he's been through the worst at times, like I've been through the worst of times. And when you have that rapport, when you have that connection, you have that respect not only of yourself but from others. And that's one thing I really wanted to bring forth with this program. You know, I spoke at Ted of White at Ted White diet exercise makes you fat.
And people are like, watch that. That was very interesting.
Yeah, and people are like, well, die in exercise, they don't make it fat. And it was a play on words because what I wanted to tell people, it's all about your mind creating habits. See, we all have potential felicity, but what happens is we take little action, we get poor results, and then our belief system is See I told you so, I can't do it. Jay, You don't know what you're talking about. But what I do and what I've been and what I've been through gives me the opportunity to sit tell people you have the potential. All you have to do is take massive action with great strategies. Then you're going to get better results and your belief system is not going to be a BS system. It's going to be a belief system of yes, I can do it. So the trials that I've went through and the tumultuous upbringing that people may have said that I had, I look it out as a blessing because I beat it. I won. I'm not a survivor, I'm a liver. I live for life, and all I want to do is give people the opportunity when everybody else has told them no, that they can and they will accomplish anything that they can put their minds to.
Your rare braiding in many ways, because people who have gone through what you've gone through would be still suffering. But you've managed to turn into a strength. I mean, how did you actually do that at the time, through all these let's call them hurdles that you've gone through in life, how at that time were you able to tap into your self belief and say, no, I can actually use these to my advantage.
I had a great father. My father passed when I was young, but I had a great father and he mentored me. And I remember one thing he told me so poignantly. He said, five percent of the people in this world make things happen. Fifteen percent of the people in this world, watch things happen, and eighty percent of the people in this world don't even know what's going on. And he said, what percentage are you going to be? And I said, I'm going to be the five percent. And then he asked me one thing. He said, never ever, ever let yourself ask the question what if right before you die, because the majority of people do, They ask what if right before they die because they work too hard. Should have taken more vacations. You know, everybody wishes for things besides spend more.
Time with the people you love.
Spend more time with family, spend more time with people they love. So how I got through this is because my father taught me so much about life. We didn't grow up with money. You know, we were at one point on food stamps, and my dad and my mom really showed me that everything's going to be okay. And that's what I tell myself, everything is going to be okay. And I thought to myself, if I can beat whatever is out there that goes into my life and brings trial and tribulation to me, if I can actually resurrect myself from it, I'm going to be a pillar to others who want to say like, hey, listen, it can be done. You know, there's nothing great about me. I'm just a normal, everyday person. What I've realized is this, we all are going to be okay if we just rely on ourselves more. We have so much talent. We are one in four hundred trillion. There is nobody born in the exact same time, by the exact same parents and the exact same day with the same DNA as us. We are celebrities. We just need to celebrate life more.
We'll be back out to this short break with more from Jay. How do you celebrate life now?
I have a birthday every day and people may say, well, what do you mean you have a birthday of a birthday cake or you you blow out candles. I say no, I celebrate the day like it is my birthday every day. If you think about it, you know, when you when it's your birthday, everyone says happy birthday, and you feel so great. Why can't we have that each and every day? Why can't we have that same happiness, that same celebration. Are people scared? Our people, you know, don't want to love that way? Is because we're not shown that. That's one thing my parents did. They showed love to me so much, and we celebrate it each and every day. And I'm so happy the way I grew up. I'm so happy for all the trials that I've been through because it has allowed me to celebrate each in every victory like it's my birthday every day.
I mean, I almost want to take all that you're saying and your mindset and put it in a pill, and then we can take this pill. I mean, you know, you're incredibly inspiring the way and you've got incredible self belief. I mean, so many of us struggle with this, especially listeners of this podcast. I mean, I know whenever we do episodes around this concept, they go very very well. So self belief, I mean I see it a bit like a muscle that can ebb and flow throughout your life. I mean, how if we are having a low day of self belief, whether it is in fitness, whether it's work as a parent, what are some tools and some things that we can do to pep ourselves up.
One of the greatest things we can do is starting a morning routine. Majority of us don't have our goals written down, but yet we want to do something with our lives. And I always tell people to regress to progress. Go back to when you were a ten year old child and you had the dream of becoming an astronaut, a teacher, a doctor, whatever it may be. But someone along that line told you know and what happens is you gave up on your dreams. So if you're having a bad day, take a piece of pen and paper and write down your goals. Write down just one goal, and be as descriptive as you can, as detailed as possible. I felicity by December thirty first will accomplish this. I'm going to get it in there, and you make it as meaningful as you can. And then when you start writing, you start feeling good about yourself. When everybody has bad days, I have bad days. We all get frustrated with all this. One thing I do is I focus more when I'm getting in a bad day. Is I focus. I carry what they call it an index card to my pocket each and every day, and I write, and I have written down my five goals. So whenever I'm frustrated, I just reach into my pocket and just the feeling of the paper inside my pocket tells my brain it's going to be okay. And that's one thing that people it's so important. People will always say, like if you had one quote to tell people. I always say, it's going to be okay. Days are going to be bad. But remember success is preceded by failure, so you have to understand a lot of times everything gets catabolic just before success. That's why I tell you it's going to be okay. Focus on your goals, have a good morning routine, and smile.
The most important thing, really it is.
It isn't and listening, you know it. Maybe people think, oh and smile, Oh that's cute, But if you think of about it, gratitude and anger can't reside simultaneously in the brain at the same time. It's kind of hard to spell the words smile and not smile. It's also kind of hard to smile and be sad simultaneously. So I always tell people smile and have gratitude.
Yeah. Absolutely. Now I do have to ask you about the celebrities you've worked with. I mean, that's what people also want to hear from you, not your self belief tips. What if they taught you about self belief? Have you learned anything along the way. I mean, you've worked with some pretty amazing people.
Yeah, so I always say one of the greatest mentors, and I will call him a mentor. But even though he was a client, he mentored me a lot in life how to be curtised At the scent Jackson is because he and I had a lot of similar paths. Not you know, he's in music, I was in fitness, but our upbringings were a lot alike. We both went through trials, we both went into tribulations, we both went through hard times, but we both had He had his grandparents where I had my parents who showed us what is right, what is wrong, and who told us how to love and how to care for people. So I would have to say fifty was very impactful with me during the fifteen years that I was with him, because each and every day there was a fire to be put out, and I watched him and he always remained so calm and in control of himself, and it was almost like this aura that he carried that it was just like everything is going to be okay, and he just stay focused on his goals. He stayed focused on what he had to do and he became a success from it. So he has taught me a great deal, and I am very thankful and I'm very humbled by him for what he's not only been through, but what he's shown the world and how he's become such a success.
That's a superpower, isn't it to saycom in the face of chaos?
Yes? It is.
Now you are coming to Australia soon. You've recently helped develop a twelve weight program in conjunction with a wellness brand from Australia called Kylo. You're a mindset coach? You what's this mean? Tell us about the upcoming summit next to year.
Sure, So, I'm the mindset coach from a twelve week behavioral program that Kylo and I have put together and we have five coaches. And what we really wanted to do by setting up five coaches. We have dietitians, we have breathwork people, we have nutritionists, we have behavioral coaches, we have fitness coaches. What we want to do is to be able to give people the opportunity to connect with people who care. And what I mean by this is this, so many times you enter into a program and it's like, Okay, here's the fitness aspect. Okay, well, where's the nutritional aspect, or maybe it's a nutritional aspect, but where's the food aspect or where's the exercise or how do I cook this? Or whatever. We wanted to make this a seamless process where people can come to a situation and what I mean by situation a twelve week journey where they can feel comfortable in their own skin. And the reason why I chose to be the mindset coach is this, I've been through the trials, I've been through the tribulations, and I want to create a safe haven for people when they're so nervous. Because, if you think about it, whenever we make change in life, when someone wants to make a change, maybe they get married, to get to lose weight, to stop a habit or an addiction, there's a fear and then there's like, oh no, I don't want to do it, but I know I should do it. We offer a safe haven for people set up with five coaches, with five personalities that care, that are loving, and that are kind, and they're going to show people that it's okay to be where you are, and we're going to teach you and educate you and work on your mindset to get you over everything that you're going through, because if you think about it, you know, we've talked about fitness and nutrition, but when you think about the mindset, when you change your habits, when you have conviction in your mind, there's nothing going to stop you. The only person that can stop you is you. And that's why we work on things like trial to traumas. We work on things like tribulations. We've worked with people who've gone through divorce, addiction, whatever it is that if we're thrown at, we have five coaches that can actually take this, help the person and get them on a path success. And we've had over a thousand people go through the program, so we're really not only proud of it, but very in a sense. Got to a point where we realized we had something good that people can feel safe and happy and.
Yeah, well it sounds it sounds amazing. Where do I sign up? Jay?
Anyway?
Thank you so much for joining us on Extra Healthy Issue. Yes, well we can sign up next to you when you come to Australia at the summit.
Ah. Well, thank you for having me, Felicity. It's been an honor.
Wow. I just felt like I had the most amazing self belief, pep up talk from Jay. We can do these people, We can get out there and hit our goals. I can see why celebrities enlist him to help them get on track with their fitness, because wow, yeah, pretty inspiring, isn't he. Anyway, I will leave a link to all the things that Jay chatted about in the show notes. If you do want anything else, you know where to go bodyansoul dot com dot you followus on socials, grow a print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper. Ideas for upcoming episodes before Christmas DM me at Felicity Holly. Thanks again for listening and we got these people stay extra helping you