SCI-MX PROMOTION
TV personality Davide Sanclimenti on overcoming body image issues, finding balance with his fitness, and breaking the news to his Italian mother that he was going to need to cut back on the pasta portions…
Having won 2022’s edition of Love Island, clocking up a hefty 1.6 million Instagram followers in the process, you could forgive Davide Sanclimenti for taking his foot off the gas as 2024 gets underway. But before finding fame – and love – on the ITV2 show, Sanclimenti’s original passion was fitness. A qualified personal trainer and entrepreneur, with degrees in economics and finance, he’s now become the brand champion of nutritional brand SCI-MX, to promote the importance of well-balanced supplements that place quality of ingredients front and centre.
Sanclimenti’s journey to becoming one of the UK’s most renowned fitness fanatics didn’t start easily. As he wrote on Instagram at the end of 2023, his focus on fitness started after a period of body shaming, which he suffered as a child growing up in Italy.
‘I was body shamed in school,’ he wrote. ‘I was classed as overweight as a teenager, so I started training. Running like I was in a marathon and swimming like an Olympian. I was eating almost nothing, until I lost an unhealthy amount of weight.’
“When you’re teenagers, if guys are going to make a joke about your body, they don’t keep it back,” says Sanclimenti when we speak over Zoom. “That happened a lot. I remember a friend who was like, ‘You will never have abs because you’ve got a belly.’ Many jokes like that, and they affected me back then.”
Sanclimenti says that after four months of hardcore running, swimming and playing tennis, he lost so much weight that his mum began growing concerned for his wellbeing. Her intervention meant he was able to find a healthier, more balanced approach to training. One that soon began to deliver the results he’d hoped for. He became a regular gym-goer at 17, initially focusing, in his own words, “...on the chest and the biceps, as those were what people appreciated more and probably what the guys wanted more.”
Learning from the best
However, he soon brought a passion for research into his fitness journey, studying how fitness influencers in the USA trained and what diet they followed. “From there, every day I was reading and learning about the gym or fitness or health in general. I started with three workouts a week, and then after one year I was training four or five times a week and have been the same for the last 12 years.”
He takes a multi-frequency rather than a mono-frequency approach. That means working multiple muscles in each workout, rather than having separate chest days or arm days. In d
