My Story
Way back in 2009, when I was just a skinny little 16 year old kid, I hated the way I looked & felt. Now, that’s probably not that uncommon for a teenager, what with the hormones crashing around and all, but for me it was different. For me I used to look at my slim frame, with bones sticking out where they weren’t supposed to and muscle severely lacking where it should have been abundant, and feel sick.
I was a mad football fan and I played nearly every day — in my lunch hour at school & on the weekends with my mates. I loved football, and I was pretty good at it, but the thing that always bothered me so much was that no matter how hard I tried I would always get bullied off the ball by almost every other lad on the pitch with ease.
I was skinny, I was weak, and I was well and truly fed up of it.
I wanted to put on some muscle and strength. I didn’t care about being Mr Olympia or being the biggest guy on the planet but I just wanted so much not to be so skinny & weak anymore. I wanted to have bigger arms, shoulders, chest, back, legs, everything really. Anything that would give me some kind of shape, that I’d not be so ridiculously embarrassed to take off my shirt in front of anyone else.
I also wanted to be stronger. Again, not the strongest guy in the world, I didn’t have any Eddie Hall like aspirations — I just wanted to not be so weak. I wanted to go for a 50/50 challenge when I played football and just occasionally, come out on top.
All of that was really important to me, but what was more important than any of that was the deep, real reason I wanted to stack on muscle & strength. I wanted the confidence to be better with the opposite sex. I used to lie awake at night thinking about how cool it would be to have a girlfriend, or even how cool it would be to have the confidence to ask a girl out. That all felt so far away from where I was at that time that I couldn’t really even imagine it.
Around this time me and a few friends of mine had started going to the gym after school. At first we only went once a week, but after a while we started going more often. We were adamant we didn’t need anyone’s help, and so we spent 2–3 hours in the gym each night using the machines & dumbbells, mainly doing chest & biceps exercises (poorly, I might add).
As you can imagine, this resulted in pretty much no change to any of our bodies, and one by one, all of my friends lost interest. This meant I was the only one still going, and I doubled down on my efforts — believing that if I could just put more time in, the gains would surely come.
And so that’s what I did, I upped my frequency to 5, 6 and 7 days per week. I stayed in the gym longer, did more reps, more sets and more exercises. I did as much as I knew every time I went, and I made sure I had absolutely no energy left by the time I walked out.
This went on for 2 long years, and by the time I was 18 I had barely made any progress whatsoever. I was completely disillusioned, demotivated and dissatisfied with my results. I was still getting thrown around with ease when I played football, my body still looked like that of an 8 year old girl, and I was still worse than useless with the ladies. I was about ready to throw in the towel, cancel my gym membership and resign myself to a life of making Peter Crouch look stacked — when I came across an old bodybuilding website that offered free programs & workout advice. In my absolute arrogance, it had never even occurred to me to ask for help or advice or even to look things up on the internet (because I’d always thought I knew it all), so I had to put my ego in check for 5 minutes to see what it was all about.
What I learned absolutely fascinated me. A quick 5 minute look turned into months of research, following workout programs to the letter and a total and complete transformation of the way I trained. I realised there and then the power of research & vowed to put my ego in check and never think I knew everything ever again.
The epiphany I had was this: doing long, marathon workouts and training every day was KILLING my gains, not giving me more muscle & strength like I thought it was.
Now, to some people this may seem obvious and self-evident, but 18 year old me had his mind absolutely blown by this. I’d never even considered that doing more work in the gym could be anything other than beneficial to my muscle mass. But here’s the thing:
You don’t grow when you’re in the gym. You grow when you’re outside the gym.
^^Read that again.
You see, what I realised that day was that when you’re training, you’re actually causing damage to the muscle, not “building it up” like I’d originally thought. Your nutrition & recovery helps to repair that damage and grow the muscle — your workouts are just the stimulus for that to happen.
This meant that 3 hour workouts and 7 day a week training was a thing of the past for me, and my approach to muscle building was about to radically change.
From that point on I set about researching everything I could find on this concept, and applying it to my own training. I shortened my workouts to 40–60 minutes, dropped my sets on each exercise in favour of more intensity in each set. I was super nervous at first because it was so alien to me not spending hours in the gym, I almost felt like I was cheating a little bit.
After the first couple of weeks not much had changed with my physique and I began to question whether this stuff actually worked. I started to think maybe I’d got all excited over nothing, maybe it wasn’t possible for me to build muscle, maybe guys like me had to take steroids if they wanted to get anywhere with their training?
But I pushed on, I kept consistent with the programs I was following and the approach I was taking to my workouts. And, slowly but surely, my physique began to transform. I started to see the separation between my shoulders and my arms, and my shoulders actually looked like they had muscle there instead of a massive bone sticking out!
The same happened all over my body. Muscle started to develop, and I started to get stronger at the same time. I was lifting more weight in the gym and when I played football I was starting to become the guy that pushed others aside instead of the other way around.
By that time the bit was between my teeth with this stuff and I doubled down on everything I’d learned. I continued my crazy passion for learning as much as I possibly could about intelligent muscle building, and I hired coaches, went to seminars, took courses, watched endless hours of videos, read thousands of articles & listened to a mountain of podcasts all in the pursuit of more knowledge about building muscle & strength.
In 2014 I had accumulated so much knowledge I launched my own personal training business, helping guys in the same position I was 5 years earlier to fix their training and transform their physique. To date we’ve had 1000s of lads come through our programs and stack on more muscle & strength than they ever thought possible.
But the real achievement of all of this was that I met and am now with the woman of my dreams. I realised that while having the best physique on the planet isn’t necessarily the deciding factor in whether you get an amazing girlfriend or not, the confidence it brings you absolutely is.
If I’d never gone through the process of building muscle & boosting my self-confidence, I never would have asked my girlfriend out and I’d probably still be single and unhappy.
Learning how to properly build a physique gave me all the external things I wanted like more muscle & strength, but the internal things I didn’t share with anyone are what’s without doubt made the biggest difference to my life.