Meet Kirsty Godso the New Zealand trainer to the stars
She’s responsible for keeping supermodels, including Kaia Gerber, in picture-perfect shape.
Kirsty Godso is squatting, effortlessly, in goddess pose. She’s been holding the wide-legged stance for a few minutes now, which means her abductors must be screaming; the 10-centimetre Saint Laurent stilettos she’s wearing can’t be making things any easier. Did we mention she’s holding a set of Louis Vuitton dumbbells? You would never know. As the camera clicks away, the Nike Master Trainer responsible for keeping supermodels, including Kaia Gerber, in picture-perfect shape exhibits runway levels of composure herself. Then she cracks a smile, and the entire studio lights up. “I never wear high heels or dresses – I’m literally always in baggy jeans,” says Godso, her native New Zealand accent still thick. “But I feel really good in this!”
Feeling good is the core tenet of Godso’s philosophy. It’s an outlook that might not seem radical today, as fitness culture embraces a more intuitive form of wellness. But when Godso began her career in the early 2010s, exercising to feel good – not simply to beat your body into submission – was somewhat of a different approach. It’s also what gave Godso her authentic edge, and it continues to be the reason people, and young women especially, gravitate towards her workouts.
Unbeknownst to Godso at the time, her philosophy was informed by her upbringing. She grew up in Auckland, and played as many sports as possible in school, because that’s what kids growing up in the 90s in New Zealand did. “It was never a transactional thing, like you didn’t play sport to look a certain way,” she says. “Me and my friends just wanted to be fit.” When she reached university, Godso discovered the gym, structuring her finance and marketing classes around her favourite group fitness sessions at the local Les Mills gym. She says she had no desire to be a personal trainer, but Les Mills, a New Zealand-based global fitness sensation, was looking to launch a HIIT program and because she was always hanging around – and bringing her effervescent energy to every class she attended – the team approached her to be the face of this new workout.
“I was like, ‘no way’. It wasn’t very cool to be a personal trainer back then. The language gym instructors used was quite crass and aggressive,” says Godso. “But I was always really into marketing, and I was excited about being someone who could maybe change the way people experienced fitness. I just thought there could be a cooler way to talk about training.”
There was. A year after leading Les Mills’s “Grit” program, she caught the attention of Nike, who named her an official trainer in 2013. (“I think they saw me doing this fitness DVD, and they were like, ‘Who is this girl all the way from New Zealand teaching these crazy workouts?’”) Godso moved to New York and began designing and filming workouts for the sportswear giant – her hot-sauce burpees, a particularly intense double knee-tuck riff on the manoeuvre, earning her a reputation as a trainer who’s unafraid to spice things up.
She wasn’t just working hard – she was working out even harder. Eventually, her body buckled. The week of her 30th birthday, she was diagnosed with shingles, a viral infection that can be triggered by extreme stress. A comprehensive blood test revealed her hormones were also completely out of balance; she hadn’t had a period in seven years, and due to the extreme amount of exercise she was doing, her body fat levels were hovering around seven per cent. During recovery, the only workouts Godso’s body could handle were yoga and pilates, which at first she found “hard”. “But then I got into a rhythm with it … and I felt amazing,” she recalls. “That was the first time where I was like, ‘Why is no one really talking about how we’re trying to live?’ Rather than being like, ‘What do I really need today?’ We just tell our bodies, ‘You’re gonna do this.’ I did that for so long, and I really wrecked myself.”
Although it was a challenging lesson, Godso is grateful for the insight the experience gave her. Today, the notion of working with your body, respecting your mental health and understanding how exercise might impact your hormones factors into her teachings. “You just don’t need to live in sixth gear all the time,” she explains. “And while I’m big on plans and programs, it’s also important to be able to adapt to what your body needs within that plan. I’m always telling the girls, ‘It’s fine to just go for a long walk.’ I take them all the time,” she says. “And the crazy thing is, you’ll notice that women will start to feel amazing in their bodies the moment they slow it down. I have to teach people that your body is not just a machine.”
When Godso refers to “the girls”, she’s talking about her squad of A-list clients. In addition to Gerber, whose medicine-ball slams regularly feature on Godso’s Instagram, she also trains young celebrities, including Olivia Rodrigo and Lily-Rose Depp. She says she loves working with young women especially, and a lot of her clients are between 19 and 25 years old.
“It’s such a sweet spot, to meet them where they’ve probably already encountered some sort of insecurities with their body, and really working with them not to fall off the tracks where I personally did,” she says. “And these girls want to work hard. They want to be strong and fit. So often, people will say to me, ‘How does Kaia look like that? Does she just not eat?’ And I hate that mentality. I’m like, ‘Kaia can hip thrust 175 pounds [80 kilograms] and do 10 chin-ups. Like, that girl works hard.”
Godso has plenty of exciting things on the horizon. Soon, she’ll be bringing out her very own online fitness platform, where advice, programs and workouts from her network of fitness industry pals will live. She’ll also be launching Vogue Body, a series of 30-minute workouts spanning cardio, bodyweight-style strength and athletic-inspired pilates, available online for all Vogue Australia readers. The sessions can be done anywhere and some of her “favourite gals” will also make special appearances.
“What I always try to bring to my workouts, and what I’m excited to bring to Vogue Body, is changing this way we talk about fitness to ourselves, because as soon as we make it less of a pressure ‘thing’, it becomes so much more accessible in our daily life,” Godso explains. “I’m keen to take away some of the stigmas that exist around women and strength training, and really articulate the importance of movement, and how we can tap into what’s happening in our bodies.”
Vogue Body is coming soon to vogue.com.au.
This article appears in the March issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.