I have had nine surgeries. Two of them were ACL reconstructions. A career as a professional soccer player that ended before I was ready to let it go. And one night I still remember clearly, where I hit my rock bottom and didn’t know who I was. 

That wasn’t a fitness problem. It wasn’t a nutrition problem. It was a me problem. And no training plan was going to fix it. 

That realization, painful as it was, became the foundation of everything I now teach, coach, and live. Because I’ve learned this: you can have the discipline, the work ethic, the perfectly structured program… and still be completely disconnected from yourself. Strength without self-awareness isn’t strength at all. It’s just noise. 

So here’s my take on life, wellness, and what it actually means to show up in your body. 

Your Body Keeps Score… So Does Your Mind 

After my second ACL reconstruction, I did everything “right.” I followed the rehab protocol. I hit the gym. I came back stronger, technically. But inside, I was falling apart. I was using training as armor, grinding through workouts to feel in control, because so much of everything else felt out of my hands. 

It took 18 months of real professional support to understand what was actually happening. My nervous system was stuck in survival mode. I wasn’t recovering. I was just performing recovery. 

The shift that changed everything wasn’t a new training block or a nutrition overhaul. It was learning to ask a different question: not “How hard can I push today?” but “Why do I even do this?” 

That’s the mental approach I bring to every training session now. I remind myself of what my sister said to me once: “As long as you can put your shoes on, you are going somewhere, you are moving.” I check in, not just with the program, but with myself. Am I here to grow today, and what can I do to make that happen? There’s a difference. And learning to tell the difference changed my life. 

Identity First. Everything Else Follows. 

I moved to California with two suitcases and a lot of uncertainty. No network. No blueprint. Just a belief that I had something to offer, and a deep understanding that who I was had to be bigger than what I did. 

This is something I see constantly with the elites I coach: executives, business owners, leaders who have built entire careers on achievement, but whose sense of self is completely tied to the output. Strip away the title, the role, the results, and they don’t know who they are. 

I’ve been that person. And rebuilding identity, not around what you achieve, but around who you are in the process, is the hardest and most important work there is. 

For me, that process involves three things I call my pillars: Training. Nutrition. Mindset. Not as separate buckets, but as one integrated system. You cannot fully optimize one without tending to the others. The person who fuels their body well thinks more clearly. The person who trains with intention sleeps better. The person who does the mindset work shows up differently, in the gym, in the business, in their relationships. 

These aren’t wellness clichés. They’re lessons I learned the hard way, built into a framework I use every single day. 

Movement Is Non-Negotiable, But So Is Why You Move 

I’ve been a professional athlete. I’ve also been someone who trained compulsively to outrun my emotions. I know both versions of movement, the one that builds you up and the one that quietly tears you down. 

What I teach now, and what I practice, is training from a place of respect for your body, not resentment of it. That looks different for everyone. For me, on most days, it means strength and conditioning work. Purposeful, structured, progressive. I lace up my NOBULLs, walk into the gym clear on what I’m there to do, focused on the work, not performing for anyone else. 

But some days it means backing off. It means choosing a recovery run and a good conversation over a max effort session. Because recovery is training. Rest is productive. And the discipline to know the difference, that’s an advanced skill. 

I used to think the strongest version of me was the one who never stopped pushing. Now I know she’s the one who knows when to. 

What “Wellness” Actually Means to Me 

Wellness, in my world, is not a spa day or a superfood smoothie. It’s the daily practice of choosing, consciously, repeatedly, to show up for yourself. 

It’s eating in a way that fuels your life rather than punishing or rewarding yourself with food. It’s training in a way that makes you more capable and more confident, not more exhausted and depleted. It’s doing the mindset work: the journaling, the therapy, the hard conversations, the quiet moments of honest self-reflection. 

It sounds simple. It is not easy. I know because I’ve had to rebuild all three of these things from scratch, not once, but multiple times. 

And what I’ve found, every single time, is that the rebuild always starts with a decision: I am worth doing this for. Not for the aesthetic. Not for the metrics. For the life I actually want to live, and the person I want to be while I’m living it. 

The Bottom Line 

I am a nutritionist, a mindset coach, a former professional athlete, and a woman who has had to learn, the long way, that strength is more than physical. 

The elites I work with are not broken. They’re high-functioning, driven, and deeply capable. But somewhere along the way, they stopped including themselves in the equation. My job, and my obsession, is helping them get back in. 

That’s what More Than Muscle means to me. A body that performs. A mind that leads. A life that actually feels like yours. 

You don’t need to hit rock bottom to start building something better. You just need to decide, today, in whatever shoes you’re standing in, that you’re worth the work. 

Author Bio

Snez Veljanovska is a nutritionist, mindset coach, and founder of Ausletics Performance Training and More Than Muscle, a coaching business built on the belief that true strength is physical, mental, and nutritional. A former professional soccer player whose career was shaped by nine surgeries, she turned her own rebuilding process into a methodology that has helped hundreds of high-performing executives and business owners transform their bodies and their lives.