OCEAN Grove’s Max Jacobs recently started a personal training business, which he hopes will help curb rates of depression in the construction industry.
The 25-year-old recently quit his career as an engineer, and has long been interested in fitness.
But it wasn’t until a traumatic event in his youth that he became interested in it’s affects on mental health.
“Before then it was more about how I looked than how I felt,” he said.
In 2009, he said, a group of thugs attacked him during a night out in the city, just weeks before he started university.
The incident caused a nasty head injury, and while Max was never diagnosed with a mental illness, it affected him profoundly.
“I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t take notes and I felt really uncomfortable socially,” he said.
“I couldn’t even talk to people anymore – which was pretty difficult in my first year of uni.”
Max said he used fitness, mediation and nutrition to go from needing a personal assistant to being in the top 10 percent in his class.
He became hooked and qualified as a physical trainer during the last two years of his degree.
Max worked as an engineer after university, doing 60-plus hour weeks on a new Bendigo Hospital, when he noticed the stress creeping back in.
“I was turning into a different person and after continually taking my problems out on my partner, friends and family,” he said.
“I decided to quit my job as an engineer so that I could begin helping others in the construction industry.”
Max cited statistics released recently by the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention, which said construction workers were twice as likely to commit suicide.
He’s targeting local tradies in hope his business, Brain Performance Personal Training, can help change this.
