How Love Island Contestants Get In Shape: Training Secrets From the PT Behind the Transformations

By Vanessa Rodriguez

Sophie Piper & Michael Baah boxing training pre Love Island

The first thing Michael said to me wasn't about exercise.

He looked at how I was standing. Shoulders curved in slightly, arms close to my body, the way you stand when you've stopped quite believing the space you're in belongs to you. And he said, "Before we talk about training, tell me what you actually want."

Not what I wanted to look like. What I actually wanted.

I didn't have a clean answer. I knew I wasn't comfortable in my body anymore. I knew I'd stopped looking at full-length photos of myself. I knew there was a version of me, not thinner, not some airbrushed ideal, but a version of me that felt capable and solid and real. And I hadn't seen her in a while.

That's where it started.

How I Found the PT Behind Love Island's Biggest Body Transformations

I found Michael through Sophie Piper.

If you don't know Sophie, let me fix that. She is one of the most recognisable faces to come out of the Love Island world. She appeared on Series 6 in 2020 and came back for All Stars in 2024, making it all the way to the final. She is also the half-sister of Rochelle Humes. Yes, that Rochelle Humes. Singer, founder of My Little Coco, former This Morning presenter, and one of the most effortlessly magnetic women in British entertainment. The kind of woman who has built a career not just on talent but on being genuinely, consistently herself. Sophie carries that same energy. Different path, same warmth.

What drew me to Sophie's content wasn't the famous connection though. It was the way she looked and carried herself. Not polished in a filtered, edited, clearly-not-real way. Genuinely strong and at ease. The kind of woman who looks like she has a real relationship with her body rather than a complicated negotiation with it. I had followed her on Instagram and TikTok for a while and I kept noticing the same name appearing in her content. Workouts on his stories. Training clips. Sessions that looked nothing like a brand deal and everything like actual work. The trainer was Michael Baah.

I started paying attention. His name kept appearing in press beyond Sophie's feed. Women's Health. British GQ. The kind of coverage that doesn't happen for trainers who are good at content. It happens for people who produce results that journalists write about without being paid to. He had trained some of the biggest names to come out of Love Island and I went to the same gym as Sophie. I had seen her there. This wasn't a world I couldn't access. It was the same postcode, the same equipment, the same floors.

So I reached out.

@SophiePiper_ Via her Instagram Story

What People Get Wrong About Love Island Bodies

A lot of people assume Love Island physiques are the product of six-day gym weeks, extreme dieting and a fairly unhinged relationship with the mirror. Michael told me that's almost never the case with the clients who get lasting results.

"The ones who come in wanting to look a certain way for a certain date, they get somewhere and then they lose it," he said. "The ones who come in wanting to feel different, those are the ones who keep going."

What he builds instead is a structure. Not a programme in the glossy 12-week-PDF sense. An actual structure. Workouts that fit into a real life. Nutrition that doesn't require you to weigh your food in a restaurant. Habits that are boring enough to be sustainable.

And here's the thing nobody tells you. That boringness is the point. The results that look dramatic from the outside are almost always built on a foundation so unglamorous it would disappoint anyone expecting a secret. It's just consistent, ordinary effort, repeated across months. That's it. That's all it ever is.

For Love Island contestants specifically, the prep often starts three to six months before filming. Not a crash. A slow, deliberate build. Strength training four times a week. Two sessions of cardio, usually low-intensity and long-duration. A 45-minute walk more often than a sprint session. Protein anchoring every meal. Sleep treated as seriously as training itself. Then they arrive in the villa and have to maintain all of it in a gym the size of a living room, surrounded by emotional chaos, for the better part of two months.

The Exact Training Week Michael Uses With His Clients

Michael's approach is built around compound movements. Not machines. Not isolation exercises chasing a single muscle group. The fundamentals. The things that build real, functional muscle and change the shape of a body in the way people are actually hoping for.

Here is what a week in that structure looks like. This alone is worth writing down.

Monday: Lower body. Squats, Romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, split squats. Four sets of eight to ten reps. The non-negotiable principle is progressive overload, meaning the weight or difficulty increases over time, even incrementally, so the body continues to adapt rather than coast. That continuous adaptation is what separates training from just going through the motions.

Wednesday: Upper body. Bench press, dumbbell rows, shoulder press, face pulls. Same structure, same patience with the progression.

Friday: Full body. Power-based movements. Conventional deadlifts, kettlebell swings, box jumps if your joints are happy.

Saturday: Active recovery. A long walk. Mobility work. The session your ego doesn't want to count but your nervous system needs more than the others.

Tuesday and Thursday: Low-intensity cardio. This is deliberate, not lazy. High-volume intense cardio done repeatedly without adequate recovery puts cumulative stress on the body that works against the goal. Your training should challenge you, not grind you down. The walk that feels too easy is often doing more than the sprint session that leaves you wrecked for two days.

One important note: this was a structure built around my specific body, history and recovery capacity. A good trainer builds the programme around the person. What Michael assessed I could handle is not necessarily what the person reading this can handle on day one. If you are new to training or returning after a break, start with three sessions a week and build from there.

What the Love Island Villa Gym Is Actually Like

This is the question every Love Island fan asks and almost no one answers properly.

The workout area in the villa is minimal. Dumbbells, kettlebells, a bench, a pull-up bar. That is roughly it. No cable machines. No Smith rack. No leg press. Just the basics, available to contestants who are also navigating recouplings, fire pit conversations, and the specific psychological weight of being watched by millions of people every night. The summer series films from a villa in Mallorca. The Winter series and All Stars editions move to South Africa. The equipment is similarly basic in both locations.

Michael's view on this is clear and worth hearing. "You can maintain and build with very little. People overcomplicate equipment because it is easier than doing the work."

The villa gym is not a disadvantage. It removes the distraction. You cannot hide on a machine. You do the basics well, you rest, you eat, you sleep. In an environment designed to be socially chaotic and emotionally heightened, and if you have watched Love Island you know exactly what that means, the simplicity of that structure is what protects results.

The contestants who arrive in the best shape and keep it through those eight weeks are almost always the ones who had a foundation before they walked in. Not a six-week shred. A real foundation built over months. The ones who added it for the cameras tend to lose it fast when the routine breaks down. The body remembers what it was built on.

The Nutrition Plan: What I Actually Ate

Michael doesn't do calorie counting for most clients unless there is a specific medical reason. What he does instead is something far simpler, and far more sustainable.

Before he explained any of it, he said something I have thought about almost every day since. "Most people are undereating protein, undersleeping, and overdoing cardio. Fix those three things before you change anything else." If you are reading this and wondering where to start, that sentence is your starting point.

Protein anchors every meal. Meat, fish, eggs, Greek yoghurt, legumes. The evidence-based target for someone in active training is roughly 1.6 to 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day. For a 65kg person that means between 105g and 145g daily. Most people are hitting half that and wondering why they are not seeing muscle. Spread it across three to four meals and you give your body a consistent signal to build rather than break down.

Vegetables as volume. If you are hungry, eat more vegetables before you eat more of anything else. This is not deprivation. It is sequencing, and it works.

Carbohydrates around training. Rice, oats, potatoes, bread. These are not the enemy. They are fuel. Time them around your sessions. Eat them before and after training. Reduce them on rest days. Do not eliminate them.

Fats matter more than most people realise. Avocado, olive oil, nuts, oily fish. These regulate hormones, manage inflammation, and make a significant difference to how your body handles stress. Michael was firm about this. Women especially tend to undereat fat because of decades of bad messaging. Fat is not the problem. Processed food eaten in volumes that exceed your energy needs is the problem.

Then there was the alcohol conversation. Michael does not tell clients not to drink. He tells them what alcohol actually does. It blunts protein synthesis. It disrupts sleep architecture. It elevates cortisol the day after. It makes you more likely to eat poorly in the 24 hours that follow. He laid all of that out, calmly, without judgment and then he said, "I'm not your parent."

He left a silence after it. Long enough that I understood what he meant. He was not telling me what to do. He was making sure I could not pretend I did not know.

My Transformation: What Actually Changed

Vanessa's incredible fitness progress shared on social media since training with Celebrity Trainer Michael Baah.

I started training with Michael when I was a UK size 12. Over the following months, my top size dropped to a UK size 2-4. My bottom half went to a UK size 6. I gained 6 pounds of lean muscle and my visceral fat, the internal kind that doctors actually care about, reduced significantly.

Those are the numbers. They are real and I am proud of them.

But about eight weeks in, something else happened. I was doing Romanian deadlifts and I noticed I was not watching myself in the mirror to check if I looked okay. I was watching myself because I was genuinely interested in what my body was doing. The weight, the movement, the tension in my hamstrings. I was present in a way I had not been in years. Completely, quietly present.

There is a difference between looking at your body and being in it. I had not been in mine for a long time. That session was the first time I came back. I did not have words for it then. I am not sure I fully have them now. But if you have ever crossed that line yourself, you know exactly what I mean without me needing to explain it further.

I started standing differently after that. Not because I was trying to. Because something had shifted underneath.

The Quotes From Michael I Still Think About

"Motivation is a feeling. Discipline is a decision. You cannot wait for the feeling."

"The goal is not to be perfect. The goal is to be consistent enough that your bad weeks do not wipe out your good months."

"The body you want already exists. You just have to stop undermining it."

The Answer to What You Actually Came Here to Find Out

Most Love Island contestants started months before they ever set foot in that villa. Most of them follow a version of exactly what is described above and most of them will tell you the hardest part was not the training.

It was deciding, on one ordinary Tuesday, that they were going to take it seriously.

That Tuesday is available to you too. It does not require a villa, a camera or a reason anyone else would consider significant. It just requires you to stop waiting for the right moment and accept that this one is as good as any.

Michael Baah trains clients in person in London and online worldwide. If you are done guessing and ready to build something real, you can find out more and enquire about working with him [here].

Vanessa.