I began caring about my physical appearance around 6th grade. I didn’t think I was ugly or had an unaesthetic physique, but I began doing leg raises. I noticed my stomach begin to flatten out a little bit. It wasn’t until high school that I purchased a pull-up bar and began doing crunches. All that was cool but I don’t think it did much for me. I would occasionally use my dad’s 20 lb dumbbell to do biceps curls and the likes, until I learned a few more exercises. So at this point I was doing dips with furniture, goblet squats with the dumbbell, abdominal work and any other exercise I had heard/read about. I attained decent results, but never took nutrition into account with the aesthetics.
I took a weightlifting class as a freshman in college, and that’s when it hit me. My instructor was a grad student who had won several competitions (must have been powerlifting because he definitely didn’t look like a bodybuilder). He started me off on a program 3 days a week doing 3×8 of clean and press, bench press, squats, deadlifts, and 4 other complimentary exercises. I bombarded him with questions, many of which he was not sure of. I asked him if I could leave early, as I had finished my workout one day. He said “Dylan, you work harder than anyone in this class, you can do whatever you want.” I have never missed a day since, always planning around vacations and events that might prevent me from lifting.
Throughout freshman year, I was partially lifting to develop my physique, and partially because I enjoyed the health benefits from the sport, but my main motivation became the feeling of lifting a heavier weight than last time. I continued to rapidly progress, still following the same program, but discovering more resources, such as bodybuilding.com. I learned immense amounts of information from that website, and applied it to my training. I joined Xsports Fitness over the summer, and decided to switch it up to a higher rep/lower weight program in an attempt to lose some fat (I was probably around 13-14%). I followed it all summer, along with eating less food and being more physically active. When I returned to IU, I had reached around 12% body fat. I hit the gym and noticed that a lot of my lifts were much lower than they used to be. It took me a month on a lower rep program to get back to my original stats.
I have since tried many different lifting routines, namely staying in the 8-12 rep range. I have time and time again changed my schedule, altering the frequency, volume and intensity. I have tried dozens of different muscle groupings (which muscle(s) to work out which day) and have tracked a large amount of my progress. My bodybuilding has been interspersed with several powerlifting bouts, and many different dietary approaches. I consistently learn more about what my body responds best to and how it responds to all the different types of stimulus.
My most notable dietary experience was beginning Intermittent Fasting, as prescribed on the leangains.com website. This approach to eating not only tremendously helped my bodybuilding, but has done wonderful things for me in my day to day life. IF basically gives you a certain window of time in which you take in all your calories, and you don’t eat during the remaining hours of the day.
At first I started with an 8 hour window from 12-8pm. At first i was very hungry in the mornings, this lasted about 2 weeks. Gradually, the hunger subsided, and for about a month a only had hunger pangs for about 20 minutes in the morning. I noticed I would always be hungry after 8 and before bed, so eventually I decided to push the window back from 2 to 10, so I could eat up until going to bed. This worked well for a while, and the hunger became less and less consuming. The next change came months later, when I decided to lose body fat. For convenience, I pushed the feeding window so it began post workout (around 5:30 usually) and ended when I went to bed (around 10). This 4.5 hour window made losing body fat really easy. I was up and about all day, not hungry. When meal time came, I would have usually 2 meals, and would actually struggle to meet my minimum calorie requirements. The combination of food I was eating (mostly fresh fruits and vegetables for carbs, sometimes spaghetti. Grass fed local chicken and longhorn steak) and rather large daily energy expenditure helped me drop from 12% to about 7.5% in months. The effects of stimulants and caffeine seemed to be accentuated. Keeping my carbs low (high enough to train intensely though) made me look really lean, I was lean entire time I was cutting. During this time, I was lifting 3 times a week, bicycling or walking everywhere (I don’t own a car) and doing a good deal of martial arts. I would take 10 grams of BCAA before working out, no food was ingested until after training.
Presently, I continue to explore different exercise and dietary avenues, building upon what I have already learned. I highly encourage everyone to keep searching for a way to progress, whatever the domain may be. There is never an end, always something that can be done to further approach your goal. The trick is to find it, because if you were consciously aware of it, you would probably already be doing it.
“There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and we must not stay there.” – Bruce Lee