Body-Building

TALKING ABOUT EVOLUTION
A NEW THEORY OF MENTAL AND PHYSICAL HEALTH CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN YOUR LIFE

By TOM SOTER
for MUSCLE MEDIA, August 1998

Clark Bartram, ex-marine, personal trainer, and model, recalls a recent encounter he had in his local gym. He was working out with weights when a young man who had also been exercising came up to him and asked, “Can you tell me, are you happy with your body?”

The question surprised Bartram. “Why, yes, I am,” said the 5-foot, 8-inch, 195-pound bodybuilder.

The man sighed. “Yeah, I thought so. You know, I’ve never felt very good about the way I look.” He walked off, head bowed, and Bartram thought to himself, “Gee, that’s kind of sad.”

Touched, Bartram went over to the man and asked a few questions about his workout regimen, his nutrition, and the way he looked at himself and the world.“I asked him about his lifestyle and about how he was eating. In my opinion, he wasn’t eating properly or consistently enough and I saw that he wasn’t doing cardiovascular consistently enough. I told him that. So in two easy questions, I think I answered that guy’s concerns and also gave him a road he could go down to get the results that he wanted.”

But there was a more important principle that the encounter crystallized for Bartram. “This guy was depressed when he compared himself to me. But he didn’t realize that he shouldn’t try to have a body like mine. He should try to be the best that he could be personally. If you measure yourself against all the people you see in the magazines, men and women alike, you’re going to be bummed out about yourself all the time. You have imagine how you want to be, set a goal, and then create a plan to achieve it.”

Bartram knew what he was talking about – and it was “The New Theory of Evolution.” He had practiced that theory on himself only a few short months before, losing 15 pounds and gaining muscle in roughly 10 weeks. “I got out of shape,” he admits. “I got to 11 percent body fat even though I try and stay at around 5, 6 percent body fat year round.”

The model notes that it is easy for anyone – including him – to slip. “Because of my body structure, weight can be a problem for me. I’m short so I put on pounds quickly. I have to be careful.”

In fact, he had gained weight – a pound here, a pound there – until he was way off his regular regimen. Bartram then talked with Kal Yee, Muscle Media’s creative director, and Bill Phillips, its executive editor, whom he often worked for as a model, and both said he was a good subject for an idea that both men were pushing, the so-called New Theory of Evolution.

A combination of Eastern and Western concepts, the theory exemplifies many of the ideas that the Experimental and Applied Sciences (EAS) group has been developing for years. Essentially, it proposes that a sound mind combined with a sound body and a lot of discipline can get excellent results. Sounds simple? Not to everyone.

“In western culture,” Yee notes, “the body and mind are often divorced.The new theory is that two things – the mental and the physical – go hand in hand and that as you train and work on your nutrition and otherwise make choices, you’re not really just working with your body, you’re working with your body and your mind.”

Yee adds that “a lot of the difference in this idea is just focusing and admitting that there is a connection and that the mind can influence your progress. Many times, we grow in the direction that we believe we grow in and that we focus on. There are thousands of exercise techniques which are really all aimed at shifting something in your body. And just as when you emphasize, ‘I’m going to get thinner buns or flatter abs through an ab cruncher,’ [with this theory] you’re really focusing your mind and your physical energy on making a transformation.

“Now, if you’re going to focus on building a better body, which in general would be an increase of muscle tone and a decrease of fat, you’re going to be focusing on how you feel, how you’re thinking, how much energy you have, and your sense of purpose. The sense of purpose, for instance, may be to get flat abs. That ties in with the theory of evolution because you are combining the mental – your purpose – with the physical – what you’re doing to achieve it.”

The first thing to do in practicing the new theory is to set a goal, whether it be flat abs or overall body health. “The initial step is recognizing that the change is very dynamic and that how you think will affect your body and how you treat your body will affect your mind,” Yee notes.

“Everything’s a mind-body thing as far as I'm concerned,” Bartram agrees. “Here I was at 210 pounds, the worst shape of my life, with 11 percent body fat. And I walk in to meet with Cathy Sassin, the nutritionalist, and I was justifying things to her by saying, ‘I don’t normally go around like this; I’m normally 6 to 7 percent body fat.’ I’ll never forget what happened next. She looked me straight in the face and said, ‘But you’re this way now.’

“Right then, I realized, ‘Hey I’m out of shape and it doesn’t matter what I used to be like. I’m in bad shape now.’ So I had to make up my mind at that point that I was going to get back to where I was. I thought, ‘I’m 35 years old and it doesn’t get easier, as the years go by.’ I knew that I had to get busy.”

The next move in the evolution was to design a plan to achieve the goal. Working with Sassin, Bartram mapped out how he should proceed. The bodybuilder already knew how to work out and eat right, but a crucial part of the new theory was to set markers on the road to good health. Sassin helped him do that

“There’s a lot to be said for accountability. I became accountable to her on my nutritional programs,” Bartram recalls. “I checked in with her on a weekly basis for her to go over what I was eating and how it affected me. Every week, she opened up my book and would question me on things. She’d say, ‘Do you really think two California rolls of sushi has enough protein in it for your body?’ I had to say no. And she’d say, ‘Well, why did you eat it then?’ And I was embarrassed, I felt my face turning red.

“But that helped me,” he adds. “With the California roll, my body was not getting the type of nutrients it needed to get into the type of condition I wanted. That’s what happens. People slowly justify more and more things in their life. You get off track one inch, and at the beginning it’s one inch but when you go two or three weeks down the road, you’ve gotten so far off the track that your body is no longer responding. You’re not getting the results that you want.”

From then on, Bartram stuck to his plan. For breakfast every morning, he consumed six egg whites and two whole eggs and two-and-a-half ounces of oatmeal with a cup of non-fat milk and a little bit of jelly.Three hours later, he would have six ounces of tuna, two pieces of seven-grain bread, a half-tablespoon of mayonnaise, an apple, and a banana. In another three hours, he would drink a Myoplex shake with bananas mixed in it. Three hours after that, he would eat eight ounces of chicken breast, eight ounces of broccoli, seven ounces of yam, and add a tablespoon of natural peanut butter on the yam. In three more hours, he would repeat one of the earlier menus, for a total of six meals a day. For supplements, he was taking Phosphagen HP, Cytovol, and CLA

“In each meal I had, I was getting a perfect balance of all the macro-nutrients I needed for my make-up,” Bartram explains. “So I had enough calories and enough proteins, and enough carbs and fat for my body to become lean and muscular.”

He also was drinking at least two gallons of water daily. “Water is the best thing you can drink as far as keeping you hydrated, keeping your body and water balanced, and helping you flush out toxins,” he notes. “It actually will help your body burn fat better by getting the toxins out.”

Thinking about the effects and the taste of food was another important element in practicing the new theory of evolution. “Everything that you put in your mouth is going to cause some kind of effect in your body,” the bodybuilder notes. “Taste is temporary, but there is always a long-lasting effect. For me, I have come to realize that for the two seconds of pleasure of chewing a tasty piece of food, it’s not worth the long-lasting effect of being out of shape.”

Bartram also worked out religiously. His training routine consisted of exercising one body part a day: the chest on Monday, the back on Tuesday, his legs on Wednesday, his shoulders on Thursday, and his arms on Friday. On alternating days, he would do calves and abs. He also worked cardio on a treadmill, starting at about 40 minutes a session.

“And then I bumped it all up in the final two weeks. In the last few weeks, I was increasing the cardio. I also stepped my calories up; I even added another meal in there. Towards the end, I increased the frequency of my meals so I added more calories to my caloric intake as I upped my cardio.”

The entire evolution process was tied in to yet another schedule: shooting photos for an ad display for Muscle Media. Phillips and Yee both saw an opportunity to promote the new theory by documenting Bartram’s progress. If this super-model could gain weight – and lose it – then anyone could. Bartram would dramatically demonstrate the ideas that were a cornerstone of the new theory.

“We could offer dramatic proof of these ideas,” Yee explains. “We thought it would catch people’s attention, especially in a Western society where people always want something quick; they want the magic bullet. The new theory is not a quick fix, but visually, [the ad campaign for it] grabs you [because it seems quick].”

Bartram was the guinea pig. He stuck to his time table. Every picture took place almost three weeks apart. “I knew each week I had to be in that much better condition,” admits Bartram. “I had my plan, then I had my goal, which was to be ready for each shot, to be in that much better condition so you could see a big difference in each photograph. It’s important to set deadlines. Without a deadline, you don’t know what you’re shooting for and you can easily get off track.”

Yee says that when many saw the “New Theory” photos, there were doubters. “I actually shot the photos as they appear in the magazine over a period of nine to ten weeks,” Yee notes. “But the difference is so large that I knew many people weren’t going to believe it. There is no body make-up to contour Clark and there is no computer retouching. And it’s really important to know that. I mean, I could take someone’s face and put it on Tarzan’s body and blend the two, but what good is that? This is really his body.”

Yee, a licensed physician who currently does not practice, feels that such suspicions about the physique transformation are not surprising, considering the traditional approaches to fitness and body-building which the new theory challenges.

“Only to a society with a very physical mentality would this new theory seem strange. It wouldn’t be considered mystical to someone with an Eastern mentality. For them, to see someone getting liposuction – sticking a tube in and trying to remove fat cells – they would think you were stupid. To divorce your mind and your body to that extent would be something that they would think is ridiculous.”

Yee notes that when he was training as a physician it was very clear to him that his patients and most of his colleagues regarded the body as “an almost mechanical object that could be rearranged through surgery or pumped up through chemicals and that your only choice [in making a major health change] is to go through the physician. That’s where the mind part stops. It’s a completely unholistic model. The Western model is, ‘I’m the doctor. I i fix you, you really have nothing to do about it. You’re broken, you’re like a car. I will change the parts and then you will run fine.’ But man is not a machine.”

The new theory of evolution, according to both Bartram and Yee, is to visualize what you want to be and then, through discipline, hard work, and a well-concieved plan, achieve it. “If you don’t have a concept of what your best body is, if you don’t have a goal of it, you can’t possibly get to it,” Yee notes. “The fact that you think you’re moving towards it can have has a huge impact on your achieving results.”

Bartram agrees, adding: “The thing I’ll hear from people all the time when I’m setting up a training program for them is, ‘When do I get my ‘cheat day’?’ And I say, ‘That’s the wrong mentality, If you’ve eaten junk food all these years that’s how you’ve gotten this way. Why do you want to concentrate on that? Let’s concentrate on getting you into condition first and then we’ll slowly introduce that food back into your program. People have their priorities out of line when it comes to that kind of stuff. To succeed, to evolve, you really have to concentrate your efforts. If the first thing you’re concerned about is when your cheat day is, the mental thing is not there yet.”

For Bartram, cheat days are the furthest thing from his mind. Being back in shape, at a fighting trim of 195 pounds, is too wonderful to squander. (And he lost the weight just in time for a new cable TV workout show, American Health and Fitness, set for the winter of ‘98.) “I worked hard to lose what I had gained,” he observes, “and anyone who thinks it was easy because I’m a bodybuilder is wrong. I busted my butt to do it. Once I made up my mind, and then set my goal, it was just a question of following my plan of action and not deviating from it.

“I’m not going to let myself get out of shape again,” he adds. “That’s what I see a lot of people doing. They get on fad diets that cut off the carbohydrates completely, or else they do other fancy things that work but cannot maintain them forever. They don’t think it through. I think that’s partly what the theory is about. People need to understand that fitness is more than a one-time thing. It’s a lifestyle. You’re going to be doing it for the rest of your life. You have to have things you can eat forever in the right combination and the right amount. And you have to continue to practice proper eating habits once you get into shape. When I reached my goal, I didn’t say, ‘It’s done. Now I can party.’ You have to stick with the program.”

Yee feels that the new theory of evolution is also about rethinking why you are working out and eating right in the first place.“I would emphasize that the whole idea of evolution is the evolution of the mind and the body. Some people just do the body to become a sexier person. Sure, they tell you it’s for their heart rate and general health, but most Americans don’t exercise because of their heart rate; if they did, they’d eat differently, or they’d reduce their stress, or they’d make a thousand other conscious choices. They lose weight so they can look better. They feel physically more attractive and they feel sexier.

“But the new theory says there’s more to it than that. You should think about the mind-body connection. You can gain in life from fitness. Your physicality is linked to your energy states and your mental states and your performance.” Being fit, both physically and mentally, “gives you a sense of accomplishment. Fitness is not just about getting a flat tummy because you have been feeling miserable. If you do, you could find out that you are just as miserable with a flat tummy as you were with a fat tummy.

“Some people can discount the new theory and say, ‘Mind and body? That’s no big deal. I know that anyway,’” adds Yee. “But they do they really know it? If they did, they’d live their lives that way. I think the new theory coincides with the entire evolutionary idea of what America is going through, the east-west mind merge and the incorporation of alternative medicine. The concept is a consolidation of all that. To my mind, it’s really fairly radical.”

Book Reviews: Health

THREE BOOK REVIEWS
By TOM SOTER
from MEN'S FITNESS

THE SURVIVOR PERSONALITY
WHY SOME PEOPLE ARE STRONGER, SMARTER, AND MORE SKILLFUL AT HANDLING LIFE’S DIFFICULTIES...AND HOW YOU CAN BE, TOO.
By Al Siebert. Perigee. 284 pp. $12.00.

Walt Disney could have been a failure. But he turned bad luck – an unethical employer stole his first cartoon character – into an opportunity, learning from his mistakes to create and own Mickey Mouse. So begins Al Siebert’s The Survivor Personality, a self-help page-turner that alternates dramatic real-life examples of crisis survivors – such as downed fighter pilot Scott O’Grady who made it to safety after days behind enemy lines – with useful advice for the average Joe.

Siebert, a Ph.D. who has conducted extensive survivor personality research, draws a compelling portrait of the typical survivor type: individualistic but a team player, thoughtful yet impulsive, cool in a crisis but emotional, with a solid sense of self and humor. Contradiction is the point: Siebert says all of us have the capacity to be survivors by breaking away from dangerous typecasting (“I’m pessimistic, he’s optimistic”) to tap into whatever trait is needed. Flexibility increases “survivability by allowing a person to be one way or its opposite in any situation...Having a variety of available responses is crucial when handling variable, unpredictable, chaotic, or changing conditions.”

Siebert offers many practical guidelines – in dealing with angry people, for instance, he suggests listening, asking clarifying questions, and finding areas of agreement – but also warns that his book is only a tool to help understand why some survive better than others; since no two situations or people are exactly alike, the main rule is not to slavishly follow rules. As Siebert notes: “The school of life arranges for great learning opportunities for people who react to difficulties by learning new skills.” We may not all have to cope with kidnappings, starvation, or torture, but we can certainly benefit from others’ experiences.

HOW TO BE A GREAT COMMUNICATOR
IN PERSON, ON PAPER, AND ON THE PODIUM
By Nido Qubein. John Wiley & Sons. 288 pp. $16.95.

Quoting everyone from Winnie-the-Pooh to Hitler, Nido Qubein’s How to Be a Great Communicator demonstrates how to succeed at business by really communicating. “By some estimates, 85 percent of your success in business depends on effective communication and interpersonal skills,” observes Qubein.

Communicator offers valuable common sense tips on what you need to know to speak succinctly and effectively, on the job or off. With straightforward examples and practical advice, the book discusses self-image, body language, listening skills, the difference in male-female communication, and how to create a dialogue with those around you. Whether you’re writing a speech, drafting a letter, or talking with your boss, Qubein insists it is essential to communicate through images that both inform and inspire.

Even more crucial: don’t think good communication depends on an exhaustive vocabulary or an intricate understanding of grammar. “People will sometimes go to great lengths to avoid usage that somebody has pronounced ‘ungrammatical,’” Qubein notes. “In the process, they forget the most important rule of communication: Make it clear and understandable.” And, he adds, they also neglect the best rule of thumb of all – communicate as though you were talking to Winnie-the-Pooh. “I am a bear of very little brain,” said Pooh, “and long words bother me.”

THE SECRET TO CONQUERING FEAR
By Mike Hernacki. Pelican. 112 pp. $7.95.

Mike Hernacki and Franklin Roosevelt have one thing in common: both agree that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. As president, Roosevelt used that catch phrase to help America recover from the Great Depression. As the author of The Secret to Conquering Fear, Hernacki offers similar advice on coping with the Big Fs: fear of failure, disappointment, and death.

Hernacki says fright can legitimately paralyze us but also underlines its frequent irrationality (Bob Hope, after 70 years performing, still faces stage fright before going on). The whys are stressed less than the whats; Secret doesn’t get into psycho-babble, offering a straightforward behavior modification program for overcoming anxiety.

The “secret” of the title is remarkably simple. Ask yourself, “If I weren’t afraid, what would I do next?” Then act as though you aren’t afraid. The “What’s next?” process may not remove fear from your life, but from the examples cited, it sounds like it can offer a way to operate in spite of it. And it can have great benefits. “When you conquer your fear,” Hernacki notes. “You become larger than the fear. The fear still exists, but somehow it’s less than you are.”

Brian Hodous

BRIAN HODOUS:
A PASSION FOR PERFECTION

By TOM SOTER

from MUSCLE MEDIA, July 1998

At first glance, Brian Hodous seems like a typically ambitious corporate type on the move. As the senior director of retail sales at the $725 million global confection company Adams USA, he manages a 700-plus full- and part-time sales force. He travels across the country at least three times a week, planning and implementing strategies to increase sales, and, in his own words, “evaluating competitors and developing attack/defense plans.” And he has been successful, too. His company has exceeded retail distribution for each new item he has pushed.

Yet in many ways, the 5-foot, 6-inch Brian Hodous is not such a typical exec. He is up at 4:30 every day – not to strategize but to exercise. With his wife and training partner Micki, Hodous is hard at work doing cardiovascular exercises for at least an hour. He then has his first of six small but well-balanced meals and vitamin supplements. And then it’s off to his New Jersey office, where from 7 to 9 A.M., he claims to “get more work done than 90 percent of Americans do at that time.”

What does he attribute it to? Clean living – and bodybuilding.

Brian Hodous is a phenomenon. An up-and-coming corporate executive on the move, he is also an accomplished bodybuilder, as muscular in his brain as he is in his brawn – an honors student who lifts weights and sets records. And he does it all while climbing the corporate ladder.

“I always wanted to be the best,” he notes. “I worked very hard. I might not have had the natural ability to do some of the things I’ve done – I may not have been the strongest guy out there on the mat or I may not have been the smartest guy in school – but just through sheer tenacity and sheer will, I’ve been able to get there. I work very hard at trying to excel.”

Hodous’s habits began in youth with a near-tragedy. Born in Downer’s Grove, Illinois, in 1963 in a family of four brothers and one sister, Brian was just a few years old when his father, 38, had the first of many heart attacks. “One of the things that probably guided my life and my lifestyle was my father’s health,” Hodous notes.

Although his parents, both working in the Illinois school system, were physically fit (his father was involved in football and wrestling in college), Hodous admits that the family eating habits had not been the best.

“My dad had terrible food habits. He was athletic but he grew up relatively poor and he would eat whatever was around. Plus, he was a Type A: very high- strung. He was going after his doctorate degree and had another job, along with a full-time job, along with building a house with his two hands. So he was just burning the candle. And I think it just all came crumbling down in his late 30s.”

With the heart attack, everything changed. Soon, Hodous began a life-long obsession with eating properly. “I grew up on no red meat, chicken, fish, non-fat powdered milk,” he recalls. “This was in the mid-sixties when obviously that wasn’t really the norm. My mother was real careful about what she actually fed us.”

Hodous also began exercising at an early age. He was a diminutive boy so, in the third grade, his father encouraged him to get involved in wresting competitions. “My dad said, ‘Here’s a great sport. It doesn’t look like you’re going to be a tremendously big kid, so football’s probably not in the cards for you. Let’s go up against a person that’s the same weight as you.’”

The boy took to the sport the way a monkey takes to bananas. In high school, he was the team wrestling captain, the state wrestling qualifier, and then earned a wrestling scholarship to Marquette University in Milwaukee. There, he was again the team captain and a national wrestling qualifier. In 1984, he was a trial qualifier for the Olympics.

“I liked wrestling because it was a one-on-one type of competitive sport but it had a team spin to it,” he notes. “The attraction was that I was going up against a person of similar weight, so I wasn’t going to be outdone by someone who was larger than I was who would win because of that.”

Through it all, he didn’t abandon his studies, working twice as hard because he had a double major, which he had decided on after a two years of pre-med studies. “I had taken business courses, and decided that business would be my forte,” he notes. “Because I was pre-med, unfortunately, I really had to jam. I had a double-major in marketing and management, so I was taking about 21 credits per semester, which is a pretty heavy load. But I had to make up an awful lot. Plus, I had to wrestle for my wrestling scholarship.”

Nonetheless, he juggled his sports with his studies, and still ended up on the Dean’s List (he had also been on the National Honor Society in high school). “Business appealed to me because of its competitive nature and the intrigue of building a business,” he says. “It was something tangible.”

After graduation in 1985, he joined the health and beauty care company Smithkline Beecham in the Houston office as an area manager covering southern Texas. Personable with people, Hodous supervised nine sales representatives, two key account managers, a field manager, and eleven part-time merchandisers. Within a year, he had increased the area volume of the $14 million business by four percent.

All the while, he had not given up his interest in athletics. The executive was regularly wrestling in competitions. But he had also begun searching for another fitness outlet. “Wrestling is not a casual sport because it is so intense,” he explains. “I don’t think you can jump in and out of it.”

Hodous found his sport in 1989. At the time, he was coaching others in wrestling and going to his local gym in Houston for workouts. “I knew nobody. I was in the gym working out and everyone I met was saying, ‘Geez, Brian, when’s your next contest?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What contest?’ They said, ‘Bodybuilding.’”

For the next six to eight months, he kept hearing similar comments, until one day someone suggested he enter the bodybuilding tournament being staged by bodybuilder Lee LeBrada. “I said, ‘If everyone thinks I’m going to be entering this stupid thing, let me give it a whirl.’ So I prepared and did hit-and-miss diet kind of stuff. In the contest, I did really well, finishing second out of forty guys. It felt good.”

Hodous was soon as obsessive about bodybuilding as he had been about everything else in his life. In his first competition, the 1990 Lee LeBrada Bodybuilding Tournament, he placed second in the NPC Men’s Lightweight Division. He followed that with second place in the 1990 Muscle Beach Bodybuilding Extravaganza, and placed first in both the 1992 Mr. Minnesota Bodybuilding Championships and the 1992 Mr. Midstates Bodybuilding Championships.

“I really got into the sport of bodybuilding,” he recalls. “I don’t know how long I’m going to keep it up, though. I’m 35 years old and I don’t know if I’ll ever compete again. That really doesn’t matter to me. What matters is the fact that I stay healthy and I feel good and I look good. I use it to augment, to help guide my passion for success and happiness. Getting on stage is not the sexy part of bodybuilding. What is important is the lifestyle that it helps you to get to.”

That lifestyle was created by intense focus and discipline, in which Hodous created a regimen that he follows to this day. Rising with his wife at 4:30, he does his cardiovascular exercises. He arrives at the office by 7. At noon, he goes out for a half-hour “quick walk” on the running path around the office campus. Then, at quarter to seven, he meets his wife at the gym where they both work weights.

The weight training is on a “four days on, one day off” schedule (Day 1: abs, bi, tri, calves; Day 2: abs, chest; Day 3: abs, legs, calves; Day 4: abs, backs, shoulders). He says he believes that variety is important in working out because “constant muscle confusion” constantly challenges the muscles to adapt and get better.

“We sort of nurtured this whole routine along ever since we started getting into the competitive sport of bodybuilding,” he adds. “It’s just been an evolution based on reading, watching, trying, evaluating, assessing, and then implementing.” When he travels, he sticks to the regimen, using neighborhood gyms that he has selected before arrival.

Besides the workouts, Hodous believes that proper nutrition is essential. He consumes six balanced meals every day in his off-training season (consisting of 15 percent fat, 35 percent protein, and 50 percent carbohydrates). When he is in training for bodybuilding contests, he has four whole food meals and two supplemented meals (a Myoplex Deluxe shake or bar). In the time leading up to a contest, he consumes seven balanced meals daily. His key supplements are Myoplex Deluxe, Betagen, Phosphahen, multivitamin, and vitamins C, E, & A.

Breakfast consists of the Myoplex deluxe shake and a bowl of oatmeal. His 10 o’clock snack is usually six to eight egg whites and a piece of fruit. The 12 o’clock meal consists of tuna mixed with some complex carbohydrate such as rice and a piece of fruit. The 2 o’clock snack consists of another Myoplex shake. The 4 o’clock “pre-workout meal” consists of another shake or six to eight egg whites. Then dinner: a carbohydrate, a vegetable, and a fish or chicken.

And usually, about once a week or once every two weeks, he has red meat. “I think it [red meat] fills you out. The fat is actually good for you,” he notes.

Hodous finds it challenging to maintain his eating and exercising schedule in the corporate world. “In the business environment, my lifestyle is clearly not the norm,” he observes. “At the staff meetings I’m in, many times I bow out at 10 o’clock for ten minutes and grab my meal. People are getting used to it. The people I work with need to understand that this a lifestyle not something I do two months a year. The biggest challenge I’ve had is overcoming the stigma of living a healthy lifestyle.”

One key to success is his discipline, which he says is born out of dealing with the fickle nature of life. “I try to control the controllable. However there are a lot of ‘fire alarms’ at work – a lot of things going on every day that are unpredictable. If I don’t control what I can control, then I’ll get behind. And I won’t allow myself to get behind.”

When he travels, he plans everything from the gym he will be working in to the meal he will be eating. “Organization is my thing. So before a trip, I’ve got my gyms chosen and my meals planned and ordered at restaurants. If I have customer meetings, I always pre-order so when I come there, I can say, ‘My name is Brian,’ and they say, ‘I’ve got it.’ So we don’t have to go through the embarrassment of, ‘I’d like 15 scallops, so many cups of brown rice,’ and so forth.”

He feels that keeping his workout/nutritional schedule on the road is helpful for him physically. “I’m traveling in all kinds of different venues and I get into some of the best gyms in the country,” he observes. “I get to work out on different machinery, different angles, and that challenges the body in different ways. Variety is key to working out. It also provides variety in my life.”

The psychological aspect is just as important in keeping to his routine. “Time management is very big with me,” Hodous says. “You have to make everything count and believe in what you’re doing. After all, why spend the time if you’re not going to get 100 percent out of it? I really take that approach in business, as well. I maximize my time.”

Such preparation, organization, and drive have combined to form what Hodous calls his “passion for perfection.” And that passion for a perfect body has, he believes, directly led to his successful career. “Your head has got to be clear when you’re training,” he explains. “But my head has got to be clear in my corporate world, too. When I do something at work, I say, ‘Nothing else matters today except the topic at hand.’ So the focus that I’ve had in the sport of bodybuilding and the bodybuilding lifestyle has helped in my corporate job.”

There are also physical aspects that help him succeed. “My diet of five to six meals a day keeps my metabolism at an even keel, so I don’t go through the highs and lows of that 2:30 swing of energy, where you’re looking for some sort of candy bar to bring you up in mid-afternoon. I don’t really get those. What happens is I end up having an elevated metabolism all day, and, actually, the difficulty is in winding down at night. I require much less sleep than I used to and certainly less than most people in my business require.”

Although he now enters fewer competitions, he still keeps up his regimen. “I used to compete twice a year, but that was getting too demanding and I actually found myself dieting too hard for them. I decided that the whole sport of bodybuilding is an offshoot of the lifestyle,” he observes. “If you look at it that way, the competition part becomes incidental. I haven’t decided, but I may now just do it once a year to keep in shape and give myself a receipt on the gains I’ve made throughout the year.”

In his spare time, the executive keeps up his relentless pace. He and his wife built their own house (their fourth) in Mendham, N.J.; he practices archery at his own range in the back of his home; and once a week he volunteers at the Market Street Mission, helping individuals with substance abuse problems regain employment by teaching them new skills.

His raised metabolism, short sleeping hours, and iron discipline may allow Hodous to cram two lifetimes into one, but he also says that support from his family and colleagues is crucial. “My folks have never missed any of the competitions, be it the wrestling or the bodybuilding,” he notes. “They’re very supportive. And the first question asked at any family function is, ‘What does your diet look like today? And what do we need to do to accommodate it?’ And I couldn’t do any of this without my wife.”

Hodous’s advice to others? “The first step is to get there. Get into the gym and begin getting some direction. Personal training is one method. I would also encourage asking questions. Most people who are into lifting want to talk about it. A lot of times people are focused [on what they’re doing] in the gym and that’s interpreted as being arrogant. But if you get those people aside – and I knew this early on – they’ll talk. When I started, I wanted to tap into their minds as far as how they did it. The nutritional aspect is key, as well. Eat right.”

He adds that people should not let false fears stop them. “A lot of people believe there’s a stigma out there that, ‘If I lift, I’ll get huge.’ I’ll be the first one to tell you that that doesn’t happen overnight.”

The executive feels there has long been a larger stigma associated with bodybuilding. “The perception of the public has been negative. If you say, ‘I play basketball on weekends,’ it has a different spin to it than, ‘I lift weights.’ And the perception of Americans is ‘big, dumb, bodybuilding’ type of thing. That’s something lifting needs to overcome. I think we’re getting there.

“Right now, the masses are starting to get involved,” he continues. “I see it on TV. I see it on the news. And that’s helping to soften the stigma. The evolution that we’re making is a good one. It’s a lot easier to diet today than it was 10, 15 years ago. Back then, there were very few supplements. There was no research done on supplements, so you didn’t even know what you were getting. You were shooting in the dark.”

No matter what others do, however, Brian Hodous, corporate executive and bodybuilder, will continue following his own path. “I think that my lifestyle is guided by doing things at 100 percent,” he says. “And I believe you have to make sure you enjoy it. It’s all about focus and targeting in on the keys to success. The one thing is definitely connected to the other. For myself, I need to continue to have that passion for excellence. If I don’t keep pushing myself, I’ll slip. Fitness is important. It keeps me happy. It keeps me on my game.”

Cancer Treatment

PROSTATE CANCER
By TOM SOTER
from ONE SOURCE, MAY 1995

Cancer is scary. And for men, prostate cancer – which kills some 24,000 yearly – can be the scariest of all. But finding it sooner rather than later can mean the difference between living and dying.

Robert A. knows. Diagnosed with prostate cancer at 53, the financial loan consultant is now cured after having his prostate removed. “I had to make a decision,” he says. “I felt radiation was like trying to shoot a duck with a BB gun. You might hit it or you might not. I don’t like mights. When you’re dealing with cancer, I wanted the biggest baddest weapon I could find. Surgery may be the atomic bomb approach, but that made sense to me.”

Because it was detected early, Robert’s cancer was stopped. But others are not as lucky. The American Cancer Society estimates that 244,000 people will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1995 and that 40,400 will ultimately die from it.

The key to a cure is early detection. “The biggest problem is that men don’t go for check-ups,” says Dr. Ian Gale, a urologist and director of the Prostate Center at the West Hills Regional Medical Center in West Hills, California. “It’s not like breast cancer and women, where it’s an accepted practice to visit the doctor regularly.”

One problem is there are few ways to discover the disease yourself. An enlarged prostate and its symptoms – obstruction in the outflow of urine, delay in getting a stream started, dribbling – may indicate prostate cancer but only a doctor-administered test can tell for sure. That means men over 45 should have an annual digital rectal exam and a PSA (prostate-specific antigen) blood test. If the PSA count is even slightly elevated, an ultrasound-guided biopsy is the next step.

If you have prostate cancer, the treatments include:

Surgery. Dr. George Miquel Jr., a urologist at Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, says surgery has “the edge now” over radiation as the primary treatment. With a radical prosectemy, the entire prostate is removed in a day-long procedure. If the cancer has not already spread, Gale says there is a 90 percent probability of cure. The side effects include blood loss, impotence, and leaking urine, but Gale reports that modern treatments can reduce the incidence of all three.

“The prostate is like the appendix,” Gale notes. “It makes seminal fluid for the sperm. Once you are no longer interested in making babies, it has no value.You can still have intercourse after it’s removed.”

Radiation. There are two ways radiation is used: through an external beam or with radioactive “seed implants.” The implants are placed in the prostate using hollow needles and ultrasound guidance, but the method is controversial and has had limited success. Gale says complications in any type of radiation involve bowel and bladder irritability, incontinence, and impotence.

W.M., a 77-year-old from Georgia, successfully employed external radiation therapy. After discovering the cancer through a PSA test, he had an ultrasound biopsy (which he calls “a wicked, painful thing”) Additional biopsies confirmed it, so he went through a series of 32 10-minute radiation treatments. His PSA dropped remarkably, and he was declared cured. (One unusual side effect: W.M.’s sex drive increased.”My doctor didn’t know why,” he recalls, “but he told me to relax and enjoy it.”)

Cures are not always certain, however, which is why check-ups follow at six-month intervals. “With radiation treatment, recurrence varies,” notes Dr. Rashmi Chobe, a radiation oncologist at the Florida Cancer Center in Jacksonville. “Late detection means the chance to cure decreases."

Other treatments. In the past, treatments have included removing the testicles and ingesting female hormones, but the latter is rarely done now because patients have developed heart problems or strokes. There is also “watchful waiting,” usually for those 75 or older, which means monitoring the spread of the slow-moving disease.

There are also newer, experimental drugs being tested: Miquel cites lubron [lupron], which prevents testicles from producing testosterone, a “fuel” for the cancer. Biomune Systems in Salt Lake City, Utah, has also developed a drug that may retard the growth of prostate cancer tumors. Research showed an 11 percent decrease in the growth rate of cancer tumors treated with the drug.

But, observes Gale, “the best way to reduce your risk is early detection before it has spread.” Agrees W.A.: “I encourage any male over 40 to have the PSA test and a regular physical check-up of the prostate. Do not stand back. I read a lot of articles that say maybe you’ll outlive the problem. But I could never live with myself knowing a malignancy existed inside me.”

David Darcangelo

for MUSCLE MEDIA, November 1998

When Diana Diaz first met David Darcangelo she thought he was aloof and self-absorbed – in her mind, a typical bodybuilder. “I had this misconception that most bodybuilders are into themselves,” says Diaz, a newscaster/reporter for WSBN-TV in southern Florida.

Yet Darcangelo had come highly recommended to Diaz, who was interested in physical fitness and wanted a good personal trainer. After she worked with him regularly, she began to realize that what she had initially perceived as self-involvement was actually an intense dedication to the science of fitness and the art of helping others better themselves.

She also saw that he didn’t simply play lip service to those ideas, either. She noticed that, when she needed help, he worked overtime with her – at no extra charge – and that he did the same with many other clients. As she got to know him, she also saw that he was assisting a younger man become a trainer. She didn’t think much about it until she started dating Darcangelo and he revealed the man’s story.

“David was shadowing this guy as he worked, spending lot of time with him and supervising him,” she notes. “I found out that the kid had been in trouble with drugs and that David wanted him to get into training so that he would clean up his life. David helped him on road to certification and then helped him get clients as a trainer. David believed in him.”

It paid off, too. Darcangelo and Diaz recently attended the wedding of the young man, who has now become a fully certified trainer. “David made a big impact in changing his life,” claims Diaz. “I think he saw something in that kid that he also saw in himself. The kid had a drive to change things but just didn’t know how. David showed him.”

If David Darcangelo did indeed see himself, what he would have observed was a young man struggling with a debilitating mental disease that could have stopped him. Cold. A disease that he overcame through principles that he would later carry over into his high-profile work as a champion bodybuilder and model: hard work, discipline, and a determination to succeed. For David Darcangelo has dyslexia, a reading disorder that could have severely retarded his chances at success. Despite that, however, he has placed in the top ten of every regional, state, and national competition he has entered. And he holds a complicated job at an orthopedic supply house.

“David is probably one of the most determined people I have ever met,” says Diaz, who will be marrying the bodybuilder in April. “He knows his weaknesses and he works doubly hard, harder than anyone else, to better himself. He is very disciplined.”

Darcangelo, currently 5’8” and 190 pounds, was born 29 years ago as the youngest of six brothers and one sister in a warm and supportive Italian Catholic family in Rome, N.Y. His father, now 72 and retired, was the civilian foreman at an air force base. His mother is a housewife.

The Darcangelo family was healthy, and ate well (if unscientifically), beginning habits that David carried over into his adult life. “There’s no one in my family who is overweight,” he notes. “There was always food. That’s probably one of the reasons why I never got out of shape. I never longed for anything as a kid. My mother made six-course meals every night. And you ate a little bit of everything.

“I think people crave things because they are deprived,” he adds. “I ran into that when I began doing bodybuilding shows. When you start, you think you’ve got to cut out everything and you can’t eat fat or dessert. I think that does more damage to a person because you build up all this anxiety. People around you are miserable because you’re miserable.”

David’s dyslexia was diagnosed while he was still in the first grade. The disease is a disorder in which the victim reads letters and words in the wrong order. “If it’s not caught, you end up falling behind your reading level, and, as other kids are excelling in reading and writing, you’re just stuck in a little bit of a rut,” he notes. “I was really, really fortunate to be diagnosed that early because our school system had remedial classes where I’d go for 45 minutes a day and get an idea of what my problem was. It doesn’t have anything to do with someone’s IQ. You just interpret letters in a different way.”

Nonetheless, at first the boy was frustrated and angry, unclear about why such a fate was inflicted on him. David initially bullied others and got into fights before he realizing that it would be better to channel his anger into more productive pursuits.

“You don’t understand why you have to go to a special class, you say, ‘Why am I being separated?’” he recalls. “No one likes being different and I was different. But I was fortunate to be diagnosed so young. Throughout my high school years, I saw kids who were diagnosed later. By then, it’s too late. They’ve had years of disrupting the class and they’ve had expulsion problems.”

Darcangelo worked hard at reading and writing. “I had to train myself to recognize words. Once you learn the basic order and how things look, you catch on.”

He also discovered the gym, going to work out with his older brother. “The original reason I started working out was simple: with five brothers, everyone was in shape and we all played sports and you had to keep up. One day, when I was in the seventh grade, my brother Donald, said, ‘You’re going to the gym.’”

David began lifting weights. “I was disciplined in high school,” he explains. “We had an extremely good weight-lifting program along with a football program, and we had a coach who had played for the Jets, and he had a regimented lifting system. Once you get into a good program the first time, that benefits you more than anything. I learned the right way the first time.”

Later, at Ithaca College in upstate New York, David continued fighting to improve himself, both physically and mentally. He soon found his approach to dyslexia affected his bodybuilding, learning early on how important it is to be disciplined.

“When I did my homework, I didn’t have the luxury that a lot of other people had whom I went to college with: ‘Oh, I’m going to study tonight and I’m going to pass the test tomorrow.’ I had to say, ‘Here’s a test in four weeks and I’m going to gradually study for that test over the next few weeks.’ Because if I tried to sit down that night and read for a test that was the next morning, I would have never accomplished it.”

He says the same holds true for fitness. “When it comes to bodybuilding, I have a certain amount of time to get things done,” he explains. “So I go in with a game plan of what I want to do that night or what I want to do that week, or what I want to accomplish over the next four weeks. It’s never, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do today and what comes tomorrow comes tomorrow.’”

When training, David divides everything up into body parts, working out five days a week. The first day he exercises the chest and calves, the next day, back and abs, the third, legs and quads, the fourth, hamstrings and shoulders, and the fifth, biceps, triceps, and abs.

“When I try to get a little more size, I’ll increase the amount of weight I lift,” he explains. “I won’t go for reps; I’ll go for lower number types, as opposed to when I’m trying to lean down a little bit. I might increase my number of reps to 10s instead of 4s. When I’m in the bulking up phase, I’ll use lower reps and heavier weights.”

As for diet, he usually has about six meals a day. He wakes up at 6 and has a liter of water before 7. “Water is a great transporter of electrolyte,” he observes. “It keeps your body from retaining water. It keeps everything moving better.”
His first meal will consist of five egg whites and two yokes, a bowl of oat meal, and fruit. The second meal will be a half a Myoplex bar. His lunch is generally a tuna sandwich on pita bread with low-fat dressing or barbecue sauce for flavor. He will have a protein shake an hour to an hour-and-a-half before going to lift weights, generally at 6 P.M. He will take in a small protein shake after that. Ninety minutes later, he will have dinner, often low-fat chili. He does not eat immediately before bed at 11.

When he wants to gain size back, he switches to a higher calorie diet, taking an extra Myoplex shake during the day, an extra meal, and nine egg whites in the morning. “I’ll also have a much bigger dinner, which incorporates two chicken breasts, an extra helping of some kind of food. I usually don’t measure my food. I don’t go buy six ounces of that or four ounces of that. I can eye it and know how much I need to be taking in.” He also uses supplements: Creatin once a day and Andro 6 Precision Protein, twice. He also takes Phen Free and Phosphogain.

Darcangelo advises flexibility in dieting. “I’ve learned to take a day off or two days off during the week where I can eat pretty much what I want as long as it’s within reason. It’s not the biggest thing in the world to eat a small piece of cake. If people watch what they eat all day and ate little portions, they would be much better off.”

Such a regimen developed gradually. After college, David got a job as an intern in a management program at the 2,500-member Vero Beach Sports Club, his brother’s fitness center in Vero Beach, Florida. There, he learned how to “manage the place, run the books, deal with equipment sales, capital sales, things along those lines.”

He soon began working as a certified trainer – which in turn led him to enter his first bodybuilding show. “One of the trainers said, ‘If you do a bodybuilding show, you’ll create interest. People in the gym will want to know what you’re doing. They want to see you’re pursuing the fitness aspect as much as they’re trying to. That you’re trying to push your body to the next level.’”

Setting an example for those he was trying to help – and the challenge of succeeding at something new – appealed to Darcangelo. So he entered the four-county Florida Treasure Coast show in 1994, placing second.

The competition left him with mixed emotions. On the one hand, he was pleased with his success. “It felt good that I had spent 12 weeks of training and accomplished a certain goal. I wasn’t upset that I got second. I’m always happy with the results because I know I’ve tried my hardest. No one can take that away from me.”

On the other hand, he was unhappy with the way the promoters treated the contestants. “In the majority of bodybuilding shows, they take your money and entry fee, and the contestant is the last person that the bodybuilding promoter has in mind. There are very few that put the contestant first.”

Nonetheless, Darcangelo continued to enter contests. His next show was also the Treasure Coast; after that he appeared in the West Palm Classic, a state-wide competition; the Florida Natural; and the ANBC nationals, where he placed sixth out of forty. Last year, he ranked third in the Mr. America show in Orlando.

“I feel it’s important to have a good time at these events,” he observes. “If you take it too seriously, like anything in life, it ends up ruining your personality. You’ve got to remember it’s just a show. You’re there to display yourself and have a good time. People notice when you’re having fun on the stage.”

After years as a trainer, in 1998 David moved on to a new position as a sales representative for orthopedic equipment. As such, he had to have a complete working knowledge of all the products going into a patient and all the tools used in surgery. “My job is to have the surgery run as smooth as possible,” he says. “I need to know what the surgeons need so they can have all the basic equipment there to complete the surgery.”

To gain that knowledge, he had to take an intensive training course, observing the doctors at work, sometimes from 7 A.M. until 4 P.M., as they operated on patients. “I was seeing instruments, products, and a wide range of situations coming up,” he recalls. “The surgery could be fairly straightforward or extensive. I learned a lot.”

He is amazed at his success. “If you’d asked me ten years ago when I was in high school, ‘Where do you think you’re going to be in ten years?’ I would never have pictured myself able to converse with a surgeon about a technical procedure. I got here because of my approach. It’s all been about taking little steps and setting little goals. Just like in bodybuilding. You take little steps to achieve your goal.”

Darcangelo’s surprise is not false modesty, either. Diaz notes that people told her David used to be shy. “After he started training, he gained confidence in himself and I think it has brought out his real personality,” she observes.
David himself feels that fighting his disability has been helped by his bodybuilding. “When you’re doing a bodybuilding show, you’re trying to push your body to the next level. It’s the same when I am dealing with my dyslexia. I continue to try and push myself to the next level.”

Dealing with dyslexia has also taught David to be even-tempered and helped him reach out to others. “When he’s at the gym, he’s always talking to people he doesn’t know, helping them work out,” says Diaz. “These are not clients, either, but perfect strangers. He’ll talk to them and, if he doesn’t have the information about a supplement, he takes their number, gets the information, and calls them back. He is dedicated to health and wants to make a difference in other people’s lives.”

Nowhere is that philosophy more evident than in the story of a teenager who came to visit the bodybuilder. A 15-year-old who had seen David’s photographs in Muscle Media magazine wrote to Darcangelo. The bodybuilder wrote back and even talked with him on the telephone. Thrilled, the teenager visited Coral Gables, Florida, where Darcangelo lives.

“David spent the day with him,” recalls Diaz. “He took him around, gave him a workout, and had a meal with him. And then, later, the boy wrote David a letter thanking him and saying that no celebrity had ever responded to his letters before. He said that the day had been very special for him. But David does things like that all the time. He’s a kind person. He wants to help people improve.”

Darcangelo may be self-effacing but he does have definite ideas about the way things ought to be. He has just begun running bodybuilding shows and says he has tried to make them different. “I run the Natural Mr. Florida now,” he explains. “Last year, we did our first show and we tried to give it a family feel. I kept in contact with the contestants coming up to the show. I called them during the week to find out how they were doing. Then we had fruit for all of them after the show. I wanted to show them that I was concerned.

“You should go that extra mile,” he adds. “You should make it more of a social event. I did that because I know how I am as a competitor. I want to go to the shows and have fun. I don’t want to go there and have the organizer of the event acting like he’s doing me a favor by holding the contest. Because that’s not the case. The competitor is doing the promoter a favor by being there and by bringing his friends and family there. And the person who gets fifth place is just as important as the person who got first place because that fifth place person is going to want to come back and win first place, if the show is run right.”

What Darcangelo won’t reveal but which Diaz does is that the bodybuilder donated a portion of the proceeds from his first Mr. Florida show to the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. He also had Lani Deauxville, who bodybuilds from a wheelchair, emcee the show. “She impressed David because she has been paralyzed since she was 16 when she was hurt in an accident,” explains Diaz.

It’s not surprising that she moved him, either. Because overcoming adversity is not just a task for David Darcangelo. It is a cause, and one which the bodybuilder believes must be done naturally. “When I was starting out, I had thought about taking drugs,” he admits. “But I educated myself. I realized there’s got to be an inner goal driving you to the next level. That’s what amateur bodybuilding is. It’s an individual trying to take his body one step further. To do that, the natural way is the better way. It just blows my mind that you’re trying to improve your body but at the same time you’re pumping drugs into yourself. That is totally ridiculous.

“You can only eat an elephant one bite at a time,” he adds. “You’ve got to take everything carefully and plan out what you’re going to do. You’ve got to keep ahead of the game. I find that people get in trouble when they don’t plan for that little bit of adversity. But, you know, adversity happens. That’s life. If you don’t plan for the possibility of a traffic accident, you’ll be late for an appointment. In bodybuilding, as in life, you have to be prepared for the unexpected. You’re not always going to be dealt the cards you want. But, somehow, if you look for it, another door opens up.”

Greg Dowd

DOWD BUT NOT OUT
Nothing Stops Greg Dowd,
Bodybuilder, Businessman, and Entrepreneur
By TOM SOTER

for MUSCLE MEDIA, August 1998

How do you spell entrepreneur? Try D-O-W-D, as in Greg Dowd, a 26-year-old bodybuilder/businessman who has used his passion for physical fitness to get ahead in life – and who offers a cliche-breaking role model for others in the field.

Greg Dowd is not your stereotypical hunk. Besides earning a Bachelor of Sciences degree, he has has a Masters in Business Administration degree and is about to begin studying for his doctorate in information technology and engineering. Not only that: he spends hours working out and has also found the time and energy to launch an online physical fitness training center which has already signed up 150 clients.

Impressive? Dowd says it comes with the territory: a place that could be called Healthtown, U.S.A. “Bodybuilding helps promote success in just about every aspect of your life,” he explains. “I feel that bodybuilding helps develop higher energy levels, increased self-esteem, a greater mental capacity, and improved self-discipline. All of which are characteristics of highly successful people in all walks of life. And I guess I have an intrinsic motivation to want to make the most of my God-given capabilities.”

Dowd has always worked at excelling. But healthy living didn’t come naturally. Born and raised as one of three siblings (he has a brother and sister), in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Greg and his family were neither fat nor thin. His father runs a paint and decorating center and his mother is an interior decorator and neither are particularly health-conscious. “When I was growing up,” Greg notes, “none of my family was into sports or fitness or even a healthy diet. My parents focused a little more on the academic side.”

Greg had an early interest in two seemingly disparate interests: corporate business and physical fitness. Indeed: at age 10, he wasn’t reading Spider-Man but Fortune and was also spending a great deal of time playing high school sports – a different one every season: soccer, baseball, then wrestling. He finally latched on to wrestling. “I got involved in wrestling because of my size,” he recalls. Although he is now 5 foot 10 and 200 pounds, in high school he was 5 foot 6 and 100 pounds. “I was a smaller guy, so basketball was out, football was pretty much out; but my size leant itself well to wrestling.”

Yet something else appealed to him about the sport, an idea which would carry over into his later business and bodybuilding careers: the concept of self-reliance. “The individuality of the sport is very attractive,” he explains. “I am very goal-oriented. And with team sports, there’s a lot of reliance on others. With wrestling, I like the ability, similar to bodybuilding, to be able to set individual goals and basically depend only on yourself to meet them. Wrestling had that individual characteristic.”

Wrestling also had another element that is part of Dowd’s nature: “There’s a lot of strategy involved in how you wrestle; it’s not just brute force. It’s a matter of learning moves. So the sport integrated my mental aspects with the physical strength.”

Dowd wrestled professionally at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania for two years, from 1989-91, but then turned his attention primarily to bodybuilding. “Basically, throughout high school and college, I would bodybuild between wrestling seasons. It wasn’t typical for a wrestler to keep trying to gain weight but I just enjoyed wrestling in the higher weight classes and being stronger than others, who were dieting down and losing weight. I really enjoyed bodybuilding. After two years, I wanted to move more towards just bodybuilding than wrestling and bodybuilding, primarily because I could do it on my own time. I thought that would free up more time for the schooling and other social activities. With wrestling, I was tied to a schedule of matches, practices, and training.”

Before graduating with a degree in computer engineering in 1993, Dowd was recruited as a computer specialist by Bell Atlantic. After graduation, he moved from Lancaster to Arlington, Virginia, and then began a fast and impressive upward journey. After only 4 1/2 years and five promotions, he became, at 23, the youngest management executive in his division.

“I designed their internal computer network, so it very much utilized my education in computer engineering,” he explains. “It was an excellent job to start off with.” He admits to being pleased at his success: “There were 150,000 employees at that level. I was only 23 and a manager.”

Nonetheless, while climbing the corporate ladder at Bell, Dowd was still following his own, well-regimented path. He had decided he wanted to learn as much as possible about the job. “I wanted to eventually go off on my own and start my own business,” he observes. “I’m pretty entrepreneurial by nature. So I thought it would be good to get experience now in the corporate world. I eventually want to run my own computer-related company.”

Dowd already had his B.S., but he wanted to add to his knowledge. While working at Bell Atlantic, he studied nights and received a graduate degree in business administration. He says it was all part of “The Plan.”

“I had mapped out my career,” he explains. “I need to know a lot. So I got my masters, and soon I’ll begin studying for my doctoral degree.” He acknowledges the discipline involved: “I average around 12 to 15 hours a week on my studies, and that’s on top of a 40- to 50-hour work week. And I keep my bodybuilding workouts in there, too.”

In fact, with all the academic and business activity he is undertaking, Dowd – amazingly – still keeps to a strict regimen of physical fitness. He trains whenever and wherever he can. “I do each body part once a week; sometimes I’ll combine two smaller parts,” he notes. “It’s important that you be consistent. Consistency means developing a commitment to religiously fulfilling all components of physique development. Those components include using proper exercise form, performing sets to failure, maintaining a well-balanced diet and a supplementation program, and allowing sufficient recuperation. All the components are equally important and all must be met consistently.”

His schedule for strength training is, he says, a “five-day split. 3-on-1-off, 2-on-1-off.” It is simple, divided into two different day parts – Day 1: Monday, 6:00 AM: Calves, Cardio, 5:30 PM: Quads; Day 2: Tuesday, 6:00 AM: Abs, 5:30 PM: Triceps, Delts; Day 3: Wednesday; 6:00 AM: Calves, Cardio; 5:30 PM: Biceps, Hams; Day 4: Thursday, Off – Rest and Relaxation; Day 5: Friday, 6:00 AM: Calves, Cardio, 5:30 PM: Chest; Day 6: Saturday, 11:00 AM: Back, Abs; Day 7: Sunday, Off – Rest and Relaxation.

For each body part, he alternates the intensity routine and the volume routine every other month. And on a day with two body parts, he works the intensity muscle routine first and the volume second. He also believes that cycling routines ensures continuous muscle growth and that he should train weak points immediately following a day off.

Dowd is usually up at 6 AM and in bed by 11 PM. His training is split into two parts because of his hectic schedule which often finds him, working or studying by himself, at meetings, or on the road. “I am able to stay consistent – which is the most important thing – just by fitting in gym time whenever I have the chance, whether it was very early in the morning, or late at night. But I always make sure I got into the gym when I am supposed to.”

Dowd does cardio work about two days a week, because, he says, “I’ve found I’m in good cardio shape and my normal; training seems to maintain my cardiovascular conditioning I have a high metabolism and generally it takes a lot of healthy food to meet my caloric intake. With my busy schedule, I don’t want to have to eat even more.”

His diet is also precisely balanced. “I eat seven meals a day. It has become a kind of a two-way street. When I started keeping a good diet that helped me manage my time and that then helped give me the energy to do everything [at work and studies]. And while I was doing all that, I just made sure that I kept on my diet, which meant carrying baked potatoes between meetings and drinking protein shakes all day and generally looking like the oddball in the company.”

Dowd eats about every two to three hours. His schedule – Meal 1: Breakfast, 7:30 AM, egg whites, oatmeal, raisins; Meal 2: Snack, 10:00 AM, Myoplex Deluxe, bagel; Meal 3: Lunch, 12:00 PM, pasta, chicken salad; Meal 4: Snack, 3:00 PM, Myoplex Shake, baked potato; Meal 5: Post-Workout, 7:30 PM, Myoplex Mass, HMB / Phosphagen HP; Meal 6: Dinner, 9:00 PM, rice, tuna, vegetable; Meal 7: Bedtime Snack, 11:00 PM, Protein Shake or egg whites.

“I try for low-fat, low-sugar, low-sodium foods,” he explains. “I think small meals (500 to 800 calories each) are best. I also look for high-quality protein sources; complex carbohydrates sources, and I include one or two green vegetables or salad daily.” His calorie breakdown: 50 percent carbohydrate, 35 percent protein, 15 percent fat.

“I am very research-oriented,” he says, “so I studied a lot on nutrition and on training. Besides being a certified trainer, I have read many books and magazines on the subject, and I also experimented with different workout programs. I’m constantly trying to come up with the best program. I try to set up long-term goals and reach them.”

Dowd notes that working out and eating right were initially hard because of peer pressure. “It’s not easy in the corporate world,” he admits. “It is difficult to balance the two. I travel a lot now to meet with customers. When I have to go out to dinner and lunches that makes it even more challenging because I’m there ordering things like white rice with no butter, no sauce, and egg whites for breakfasts. But I’ve done it. I haven’t worried about the image thing as much as I used to and I’ve just kept with it. And you know, you end up earning respect for it. People admire you for sticking to your guns. I think, initially, people are just afraid to go out of the normal boundaries.”

The bodybuilder’s favorite supplements: Creatine, Phosphagen HP, HMB, V2G, and whey protein supplements (Myoplex). “I find noticeable gains and benefits using them. I started using EAS products before I read Muscle Media. The products, especially Myoplex Plus and Phosphagen HP, allowed me to gain weight while staying lean, which is very tough to do. They allowed me to recuperate better, feel more energetic, and get better workouts. I can honestly say I’ve had at least one Myoplex every day for the last two years.”

He knows the right and wrong types of additives, too: when he first started bodybuilding, he admits to using anabonic steroids. “I did experiment with them in college. There was a lot of temptation. The biggest drawback is what everyone says. Once you get off them, you lose most of what you gained. And while you’re on them, they’re not as great as everyone makes them sound.”

Dowd is an all-natural man now, participating in three drug-free competitions: taking second place in the Collegiate Nationals; first overall in the Arlington Bodybuilding Show; and fourth in the Pennsylvania Classic. “It’s definitely very, very rewarding to be in your top shape and to win over a lot of competitors who are in good shape,” he says, adding: “I’ll only take part in natural competitions.”

As for the idea of competition itself, Dowd supports it: “I am fairly competitive internally and mentally the way I think about meeting my goals, I think I am sort of competing with myself. So I don’t worry about competition while I’m at the gym, or while I’m working out. But it is nice to once in a while measure up and enter a competition. It’s definitely not for everyone.”

Staying the course, Dowd adds, is crucial to success – with bodybuilding in particular and life in general. “I’ve found that by trying to stay as regimented as possible just helps in all aspects of life,” he observes. “When I have a set schedule, I just put in the time at work and I know I’m going to the gym later, so I do that. Just that structure and discipline helps in all areas, mentally as well as physically. I truly believe that the weight training, and the diet, and the motivation, and the regimen all have helped to contribute to my success in the corporate environment just by providing me with more self-confidence.”

Dowd has high hopes for his internet training program, “Mind and Muscle Fitness,” which went online (at http://www.mind-muscle.com) in June 1998. “We all can’t all afford to have a personal trainer take us through our fitness programs day after day,” Dowd notes. “My web training page provides all the guidance, knowledge, and instruction needed at a fraction of the cost. I wanted something that would serve as a one-stop reference.”
With his business partner and his wife, Dowd set up the personal training web page, which offers both free information about diet and working out, and a paid ($49.95), personalized section. In that, a customer completes a profile questionnaire. Based on the information provided, the trainers will create a web page for the customer with links to their well-rounded health and fitness program. He adds that the program is customized for different customer preferences: weight training, cardiovascular exercise, flexibility training, nutrition, and supplementation.

“With the page, we are dedicated to providing practical and enjoyable ways of living healthy for minimal cost,” Dowd notes. “Many health and fitness programs are impersonal. They include programs that are based on one person’s goals and experience level. Of course, what might work for one person may not work for you. You need a program that recognizes your goals, level of experience, and amount of time commitment. ‘Mind and Muscle Fitness’ offers easy-to-understand and easy-to-follow recommendations that will help people change their lifestyles in simple and effective ways.”

He hopes the initial success with the page will grow: “We haven’t done a whole lot of advertising yet. It’s more work than you expect to put a full web site together. So it’s only been a good two months that we’ve been basically in production and starting to advertise in the search engines. We’re ramping up and getting about five to ten responses a day. Right now, we recommend that clients have a new program designed every 12 weeks, based on their progress.”

Although he is strict in his approach to life, Dowd knows how difficult it can be to follow a regimen. “I know why people avoid workouts,” he says. “Sometimes your energy levels are down and it’s tough to do it. And I’d say there’s generally a slow progress to working out and making gains in size and strength. So sometimes you have to come over and battle it all mentally. I’d say the three primary components are diet, training, and then the mental effort that goes into both of those.

“In fact,” he continues, “50 percent or more is mental – sticking with it and concentrating consistently. You must train hard and smart. You have to focus with your mind on every set of every rep, and push through your mental barriers to reach your physical limitations to shock your muscles into growth. Finally, you have to plan how you will achieve your long-term and short-term goals and then stick to that plan.”

He finds the results are worth the extra trouble. Besides the health and energy aspects, being a bodybuilder has “presented a lot of opportunities for me,” he notes. He has modeled for magazines (including a Muscle Media cover), and appeared as an extra in Rocky V. The success has had financial rewards, too. It allowed him to buy his first home, as well as a BMW Z3 roadster, a Suzuki Katana motorcycle, and a high-tech home theater. He also takes occasional scuba-diving excursions to the Caribbean.

Dowd left Bell last year and currently works out of his home as a senior systems engineer for FreeGate, a Silicon Valley-based company. “I left a very secure and successful career with a Fortune 500 company to pursue a high-risk job with a start-up company,” he notes. The new position involves much travel, in-depth technical knowledge, interpersonal sales skills, independence, and long hours.

“The job is a kind of pre-sales, technical support position,” he explains. “I work with other sales managers and provide technical expertise to sell our internet-access related equipment. I took it primarily to round out my experience. I wanted to partially get into the sales end but also keep my foot on the technical side. All this information will be useful when I start my own business.”

On top of all that, he also found time to get married to what he laughingly describes as a “female version” of himself, at least in her balance between business and fitness. “We met four and a half years ago at a party but we clicked because she was also very much into health. She was also going to business school and working at a full-time job. It does sound a lot like my background.”

His suggestions to others? “The 15-second advice I give people in the gym is to step back and look at your long-term goals, develop a good program, meet those goals, and stay consistent and motivated. Stick with it. Everyone’s going to have different motivations and different reasons for wanting to start or continue a fitness program. So it’s very important for each person to determine what is motivating them.”

As for his future: “My nature is to want to continuously improve, which I’m definitely striving for. With my schedule and with everything else that I’m doing it may take even longer than it would normally. You know, I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied just maintaining what I have. I always want to do better.”

Jeff Seidman

NOT-SO-INSTANT KARMA

By TOM SOTER
from MUSCLE MEDIA MAGAZINE

Jeff Seidman believes in karma. And for nearly 30 years, Jeff Seidman's karma was just about as bad as it could be. From petty to major crimes, from business failures to tragic and unexpected deaths, Seidman faced a life that could only be described as nightmarish.

Seidman: before and after.

Yet, with an optimism and sense of humor unusual for his circumstances, Seidman persevered, not only changing his karma from bad to good, but dramatically turning his life around in the process. In 1997, he amazed his friends, who saw the former bad boy become a co-champion in the Experimental and Applied Sciences (EAS) Physique Transformation Contest, gaining 27 pounds of solid mass in 12 1/2 weeks.

And he says he owes the positive changes in his life primarily to bodybuilding. "Even when things got bad, I still went to the gym every day," says the 5-foot, 11-inch, 184-pound Seidman. "I liked being around people who were doing good things to themselves. Even when i was a bad person, I knew that's not who I was in my heart. I just didn't know any other way."

Seidman came from a rough and tumble beginning. Born in San Francisco on September 8, 1961, he was raised in sunny Monterey, California. But he found nothing sunny about his early years. His parents separated when he was very young and he and his siblings (three brothers born a year apart and a sister) were raised by a mother who was forced to live on welfare. Consequently, his childhood was not about eating right. It was about whether he ate at all. "We were really poor," he admits.

Money usually ran out by the middle of each month, so he and his siblings would turn to a variety of methods to fill their bellies. Those would include everything from trick or treating in August ("We'd go knocking on people's doors saying, 'Trick or treat,' with a bag to get something to eat. They'd say, 'What the hell is this?'") to stealing candy and other sweets.

Even then, his optimistic nature was surfacing. Like street urchins, Jeff and his brothers would regularly rummage around after hours in the back of the Safeway supermarkets, digging in the garbage cans to find discarded food: bread that had expired and vegetables and fruit that was no longer fresh. Yet Seidman was upbeat about the grim task: "I actually enjoyed doing that. It was like finding treasures."

Small crimes led to larger ones. "It got worse and worse as I got older," he notes. "I got into heavy-duty stuff, everything from stealing cars to breaking into businesses.It got to the point where I thought money was the answer to everything. It seemed like where I grew up, which was a middle-class neighborhood, all my friends had a perfect life. They had all the toys they wanted and all the food they wanted."

It was at about this time that Seidman's weight training began. Although he didn't know it then, the workouts would later become the one fixed point in his ever-changing world, his lifeline to a better life. At that point, however, he built up his muscles for practical reasons: he needed to defend himself.

"I was getting into fights all the time because kids teased me about being poor and wearing the same clothes every day," he explains. "I would also fight with my brother a lot. He used to beat me up every day. I started lifting weights so I could beat him up. After that, he started lifting weights and then started beating me up again."

There were also self-esteem questions involved. "In school, I liked sports, but I was insecure because I was skinny and couldn't compete. So when I was 12, I started lifting weights to be stronger," he notes. "I'd bench press and curl every day." Meanwhile, the crimes escalated: robberies, break-ins, even an accidental death. At 16, Jeff was stunned when his younger brother was killed on a stolen motorcycle. He vowed to mend his ways. Ingrained habits are hard to break, however, and knowing little else, Seidman soon returned to his old ways.

Finally, in his early 20s and a high school dropout now, the youth was arrested for breaking into a store and sentenced to a two-week stretch in jail. Sitting by himself for one of the few times in his life, Seidman reflected on his situation. "I was waiting there in my cell, praying to God and saying, 'Why is my life so horrible? Why is everything so wrong?' The answer came to me that my life was horrible because I was a horrible person, I did horrible things, and I surrounded myself with horrible people. And there was no way that any good could get in."

He resolved to change. Still, he had many mountains still to climb, and many challenges to overcome, all of which helped build his character as effectively as training built his muscles. "I didn't really have any goals," he recalls. "I just wanted to be a good person. I wasn't exactly sure how to go about doing it. I didn't even know what I wanted to do with my life. But I knew things had to be different."

After being released, Seidman thought a lot and finally decided to start his own business: a health-oriented frozen yogurt sandwich shop. He moved in with his mother so that he could save on rent and then, for two years, slept in a room the size of a roll-away bed, worked at odd jobs, and scrimped and saved every penny. "I lived in what used to be my mom's laundry room," he says.

It was a Spartan existence, but it seemed to pay off. After 24 months, Seidman had enough money for a security deposit and found a storefront near a high school. With great pride, he opened his first business. He was proud of his marketing strategy. "I selected the place for my shop because it was near that school," he explains. "I figured students would be my customers."

They were, and everything seemed to be going well. Then, about eight months down the line, bad luck reared its ugly head again. "The city closed down the high school because the building had to be condemned," Seidman recalls. "They moved the kids somewhere else. So I lost all the students. Maybe 90 percent of my business left. After that, I had to quit. I was losing tons of money every month."

The young entrepreneur was depressed and suddenly, once again, at sea. Had all his work and his planning gone for nothing? At a low point and with a return to crime a possibility, he got a grim warning from the fate of his best friend, Brad.

Brad had been Seidman's partner in breaking the law. Yet where Jeff had left his illegalities behind, Brad had continued and had ended up serving a seven-year stretch in prison. While in jail, and simply because prisoners could have conjugal visits, Brad wooed and wed Seidman's lonely mother. After his release, however, the ex-con began cheating on his wife. Bizarrely, the mother blamed Seidman - who had opposed the marriage from the start - for Brad's infidelities.

"My mom saw me as an influence on him and his screwing around," Seidman explains. "So she told the whole family to hate me." Caught in the middle of his warring relatives and confronting a failed business, Seidman turned for consolation to his weight training. He even tried to get Brad involved. "I thought it would be a good change for him. When he did it, the workouts took his mind off of other things. But, afterwards, he'd go back to his bad ways."

Then the first of two tragedies struck. Seidman and his newfound fiance, Shannon, went to visit Brad one night. They were shocked to find him dead from a drug overdose. "That really helped me decide to stay away from all the bad stuff. It just seemed to always end up in something horrible," he says. "So that really reinforced my idea of changing my life."

Nonetheless, things only seemed to get darker. Still recovering from his lost business and his best friend's death, another tragedy struck: his fiance was killed in an automobile accident. "About four or five months after I had lost my business, my fiancee died in a car wreck," he recalls. "That was the lowest point. I got really depressed. I had worked so hard to achieve everything and now it was all gone."

Yet, although he didn't know it then, his climb out of the valley to the peaks of success was about to begin. Looking back, Seidman sees Shannon's tragic passing as a kind of turning point, a change in his karma. "After she died, I felt like this huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders," he admits. "I felt like I had finally paid for all the bad things that I had done. Things began to be different."

A change of scene, hard work, and discipline also helped the process. Buffeted by events, Seidman, now 30, moved to San Francisco where he got his first comparatively high-paying job as a bellman at the St. Francis Hotel in Union Square.The effect was positive. "I got to be around guys my age and it was a great atmosphere; it was a really beautiful hotel. When I first went in there for the interview, I looked at it in the lobby and I said, 'Oh, my God, I'm not worthy of this place.'"

Encouraged by his new start in life, Seidman also got his high school equivalency diploma and began thinking about other career options. "I got my real estate license and was taking some broker's classes to sell real estate," he says.

And then there was his weight training. He had kept it up, and when his fiance died, it had helped him keep his sanity. "I still went to the gym every day. Partially, it took my mind off Shannon. Also, I was around people that were doing good things and were all positive. It helped."

At about this point, Seidman picked up the first issue of Muscle Media and was impressed by what he read. "It seemed to tell the truth about natural health," he notes. He soon obtained a license as a personal trainer Nonetheless, although he advised others on diet and training programs, Seidman began to feel like a hypocrite for not following his own advice.

"I had always worked out but I wasn't a hundred percent into my workouts the way I am now," he says. "When I had put 100 percent into it in the past, I had nowhere near the results I have today. That's because the information I had [from other sources] was incorrect and the supplements didn't work the way they were supposed to. But the more I read Muscle Media, the more I learned. As a trainer, though, I personally was a hypocrite because I gave out all this advice but was not putting it to use myself."

Once again, he decided to change. "The more and more I read and the more results I saw in the gym from other people taking the EAS products, the closer I came to doing it myself. Then I said, 'God, I'm going to start working out, and putting 100 percent into it again.' But I kept on coming up with reasons not to do it because I was working two jobs, plus I was taking real estate classes. So I kept on using the excuse that I was too busy to work out the way I should, even though I wanted to."

That all changed when he read about the Physique Transformation Contest, which offered a sports car and $50,000 in cash to the winner. Seidman loved cars and thought that the prize money offered could help him get ahead in business. He said to himself that he could - and would - win.

"That changed it all for me," he recalls. "I said to myself, 'I don't care how busy I am, I'm going to win that car.' So even though I was working 60 hours a week and going to school, I believed I was going to win because I wanted to win."

Seidman began a rigorous training program, gaining 27 pounds of solid mass in 12 1/2 weeks. "I got a little bit creative with my time," he explains. "I kept my jobs and I kept on going to school. But I decided that I was going to win the contest. I was willing to sacrifice anything. So I just made sure I never missed a workout. I put 100 percent of my intensity into my workout."

He trained with weights six days a week, performing bench presses, barbell curls, dead lifts, squats, and pull-ups, changing his program regularly in order to keep his body from adapting. Since he was not trying to lose weight but gain muscle, he did not do aerobic exercise. "I've always been lean and skinny, so I didn't need it," he explains.

The training involved three days pumping iron in the gym, with one day off. His 10-hour-a-week workout schedule was straightforward: on Monday, he would train his chest and back; on Tuesday, his legs; on Wednesday, his shoulders and arms. He would take Thursday off, and then on Friday, start all over again, usually with his chest and back.

"I'd do that cycle no matter what," he says. "I did it at all different times. Sometimes, I'd do it at seven in the morning. Sometimes at ten o'clock at night. I didn't have a set time because my schedule was different every day. On some days, I'd have to split up my workouts because I didn't have much time. I'd have to do maybe the chest in the morning and the back at night. It varied every day."

As for nutrition, Seidman was eating every two to three hours. "I ate maybe eight times a day." When he would wake up in the morning, he would have a Myoplex Plus shake and eight eggs with only two yokes, oatmeal, and milk and water. Every two or three hours, he would have a selection from the following: lean red meat, fish, chicken, vegetables, potatoes, and rice.

He would drink a supplement shake between regular meals He would also have one an hour prior to his workout and immediately following it. Besides the Myoplex Plus, he would have Phosphagen HP three times per day. As he progressed in his training, the bodybuilder added more supplements: Phosphagain 2, V2G, HMB, and GKG. He would consume one serving of Myoplex Mass in the middle of the night to boost size gains. "I'd sleep for about six hours and I didn't want my body to go for six hours without any fuel," he explains.

Seidman noticed results almost immediately, and that only spurred him on further. "I got motivated every time I saw that and I'd work out harder." He had one setback, however: after about five weeks, he was laid up by the flu for a few days. "That really worried me," he says. He was soon back on track.

Nonetheless, exhaustion was his constant companion. "The most challenging thing for me was finding the time," he admits. "I had to make the time to do it, so I worked out no matter what. As a result, I found I was tired all day. I lacked sleep and sleep is really important to bodybuilding. I probably could have gotten greater gains if I had slept eight hours a day. But I was unable to do that and also do the contest."

Seidman was thrilled to be one of ten finalists. Yet he was stunned when, during the contest finals in Colorado, he was told that he had failed his polygraph test when asked about his use of steroids. It seemed as though the bad karma had returned.

The explanation was simple enough: Seidman had utilized steroids years before when he had first become interested in bodybuilding. A lot of it, he says, involved personal insecurity. "I took them 12 years ago," he explains. "I was a young guy. I was 23 or so and I was feeling insecure and I was feeling if i had more muscle I was going to have more of everything: more friends, more success, that kind of thing."

He had used the drugs from 1985 until the beginning of 1987. "They worked," he acknowledges, "but I wasn't really getting the results that I wanted. I wanted to be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger and I was unable to achieve that. At that point, just prior to '87, steroids became illegal and they really started to prosecute people who were taking them."

So Seidman gave them up for the same reasons he abandoned crime: steroids were bad for him. "I started to worry about going to jail, and then about the health complications of taking this stuff. So I quit, which is actually hard to do because they're psychologically addictive.You actually get bigger and stronger - the thing I wanted for my whole life - so it was really difficult for me to get off them. I started to lose muscle and I started to get smaller. I thought, 'I'm going to lose my girlfriends. People aren't going to respect me.' But, of course, that wasn't true."

Once the facts came out, a minor brouhaha resulted, which was documented in the film Body of Work. Seidman was allowed to finish the contest. He looks backs now on the incident with the humorous optimism that seems to have gotten him through other crises in his life.

"At first, I was really, really depressed because I thought I had let everyone down, that no one believed me," he says. "But after a month or so of being home, when they finally filmed me for my little segment [in Body of Work], I finally got to say in the movie that I felt miserable because I felt I had put doubt in [Muscle Media executive editor] Bill Phillips' mind, and I felt better because Bill would hear that. And now it doesn't bother me; I'm kind of glad, actually, because I had more time in the movie." He laughs. "You know, people remember me because of that."

Seidman says he learned a lot from the Physique Transformation Contest - and not just lessons about physical health. "The actual competition, that was a lot of fun. Being there sort of changed my perspective on why I was doing it. Initially, I just wanted to win the whole thing and screw everybody else. But once I met everybody, I saw that they were all cool people. In the end, I really wanted everybody to win because they were such great people and they'd all worked as hard as I had. Their goals were just different from mine." He was also moved by how supportive everyone was during the steroids controversy.

Since winning $50,000 and a Corvette, Seidman and his girlfriend of three years, Rowena, have moved from California to Florida. "We came to Orlando about seven months ago because, in 1985, we had bought four homes here as rental properties. We had wanted to start some long-term investments. We came here to manage the homes and get more heavily invested in real estate. Once we got to Orlando, we figured it was a good place to live."

The two are planning a move to South Beach in Miami where Seidman hopes to capitalize on his newfound fame to promote his beliefs in fitness and bodybuilding by opening a bodybuilding center. "I love South Beach and I loved doing personal training, so I thought that a personal training center would be the best thing," he explains. "And I believe that we will be successful, mainly because of what bodybuilding and Bill Phillips did for me."

As sunny in success as he was in failure, Seidman is convinced anyone can take the path he took and find better living through exercising and eating right. "There's no secret to getting in shape. It's just basically nutrition, supplementation, and weight training," he says. "That's it. Everybody thinks there's a special secret. Everybody asks me all the time at the gym, 'What do you do?' I don't do anything differently than anybody else. I'm just more strict about it.

"But a lot of people are looking for a quick fix or some easier way to go about it. They're fooling themselves. If you set a goal for yourself - the way I did when I dedicated myself to three months of training for the contest - you can change. It took me only 12 weeks, which compared to the full time that you're here on earth is nothing. You're going to have dramatic changes in your body. That alone will change your life and motivate you probably for the rest of your life."

Besides setting a time table, Seidman thinks the key to training and transforming is to stop fooling yourself. The bodybuilder himself has had firsthand experience with reasons not to succeed - bad circumstances, bad luck, and bad karma - but he didn't let that stop him.

"People think it's so complex and they make up excuses. It's much simpler than people think. I say, don't count on finding time, make time. I found that even with my busy schedule, I could make the time I needed to transform my physique. To be successful, you have to stop making excuses. The physical workout is part of a mental process because really to push yourself hard enough to really get major results you have to mentally push yourself. You just have to find something that will motivate you enough so that you can find time to do it."

Indeed, Seidman believes that self-motivation is crucial. He cites his sister as an example. "Some people can't see their progress and that discourages them. My sister had started the [Physique Transformation] contest, but she didn't finish it. She got discouraged because she looked at herself every day. It's hard to see progress every day. But I had her take some photos of herself. After about five weeks into the contest she looked at the photos of her then and now, and she realized that she had changed quite a bit. She hadn't realized it because her body weight hadn't changed but her physique had. Dramatically."

If you want to improve your life, he adds, find what works for you. Everyone may be different, but the solution is the same: dedication, hard work, and patience. "Anybody can follow my routine and get great results. Or make up your own. There's no perfect routine," he notes. "That's a myth. Because all ten of us who did this contest had completely different routines as far as working out went. I developed mine on my own, and I went by how my body felt. I developed it by reading and researching. I trained more than anybody who was in the contest, I think. But all ten of the routines worked. The similarity we had was in what we ate: we all had almost identical nutritional and supplemental programs. We all had very healthy food and were very consistent with that."

It has been a bumpy road, but for now, Jeff Seidman, man of bad luck and bad karma, sees only a bright future, one in which he has finally taken charge of his life. Despite the odd and despite the difficulties, he has succeeded in bettering himself and his environment. And he hopes that others can learn from his example.

"I was always optimistic, even at the worst of times," he says. "It was hard to change from being a criminal. When I went to get a job, I was getting minimum wage because I didn't have the education. I was making so much more money stealing and the stealing was much easier. But I always knew inside that the bad person wasn't me.Everyone should look at their life. I mean, I really believe you become what you surround yourself with. And you can change. Once you become an adult, you can take total control. When I was younger, I made excuses. I blamed my parents, my friends, whoever. But once I got older, I realized I was in charge of my life. I could make it anything I wanted."

Martin Boonzaayer

THE WARRIOR
Judo and Bodybuilding Champion
Martin Boonzaayer Personifies True Power
for MUSCLE MEDIA, November 1998

In Japanese, judo means “The Gentle Art.” But there seems to be nothing very gentle about the way Martin Boonzaayer, bodybuilder extraordinaire and would-be-Olympic judo champion, practices the sport. He has crushed bones, tossed opponents in the air, and taken violent falls. Yet he has never slackened in his urge to be both competitive – and a winner.

“Competition’s always driven me,” he observes. “There’s a tremendous satisfaction that comes when you do something right. I remember the first judo tournaments where I threw somebody and it felt effortless. I did it just right; and to see this person – this opponent whom you respect, who is a good player – all of a sudden, with what looks like no effort, fly over the mat onto their back – there’s a tremendous satisfaction in that.”

Off the judo mat, he is just as determined, approaching his specialized training with an almost all-encompassing energy. He works 8 to 5 at his electrical engineering job at Motorola in Chicago, and then will spend hours at the gym, lifting weights, throwing opponents, and perfecting the fine art of judo until 10 P.M. nearly every weeknight. On weekends, he is often found traveling to judo or bodybuilding competitions.

Boonzaayer, 25, is a rare bird: a bodybuilder champion who practices judo. He has placed well in body competitions: first in the Natural Michigan in 1993 and second in the Mr. America contest in 1997. And he has also succeeded in judo face-offs: two-time national champion in 1996 and 1997, winner of two silver medals in the U.S. International Invitational match in 1996, and winner of the Rendezvous Montreal in 1997.

He approaches it all with an intensity that is laudable, yet once out of the gym, he is softspoken and self-effacing, a man who plays the violin for relaxation and has a masters degree in computer programming. You can call him unusual. You can call him the “peaceful warrior.” But whatever you do, don’t call him a quitter.

“I hate the idea of giving up,” he says. “I told myself that I want to do judo long enough so that when I’m done with it all, it’s termed retirement, not quitting. Usually to get that distinction, you have to get somewhere, to win something. And that takes work.”

The challenge is what appeals to Martin Boonzaayer. “I am good at academics, at my job, at bodybuilding,” he observes. “But for judo I have no natural ability whatsoever. I have to work for every improvement. In spite of my successes, for every step forward i make, it seems like I have ten frustrations, ten losses. I’ve had lots and lots of setbacks and it’s been really hard but it makes me appreciate succeeding all the much more. I just really want to be good at something that I really have to work for.”

Boonzaayer’s near-obsession with competitive sports began when he was a boy. His father, a baker who emigrated from the Netherlands, encouraged young Martin to excel in anything he attempted, be it studies, athletics, or even learning a musical instrument.

“I grew up in a family that enforced good study habits,” he recalls. “It was all about discipline.” That included the discipline of learning the violin. “My parents encouraged all of us to play musical instruments. There were trumpets, clarinets, flutes in family.” Boonzaayer earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering at Western Michigan University, which he attended on an academic scholarship. In his senior year, he was selected as outstanding computer engineering student of 1993-94.

As one of nine children growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, competition was a given; naturally enough, Martin gravitated to a competitive sport. At 11, he began studying judo. “My dad enrolled me because he did it when he was a boy in the Netherlands. Judo’s a real big sport over there, so he thought it would be good for me. I really liked it but I didn’t compete that much. The tournaments were on Sunday and my family was religious, so I couldn’t take part.”

He continued for five years, but frustrated by his inability to find training partners, he stopped judo when he was 17. Nonetheless, he had already taken on a new activity: bodybuilding. “While training for judo, I had started lifting weights in a casual recreational way.”

Martin competed in the Iron Man Contest in Flint Michigan in 1992. He won in the heavyweight division. “It was exciting. It was fun. After that first show, I was hooked. I got the post-show size increase. I was obsessed with the idea of getting stronger and bigger.”

He trained regularly and has seen gains. In his first show as a teenager, the 6’1” weight-lifter checked in at 200 pounds. He is currently 275 pounds of solid muscle.

In college, he was reintroduced to judo. “I graduated from Western Michigan in ’94. At the time, I was out of judo and was bodybuilding pretty heavily.” He was studying for his masters degree in electrical engineering at Arizona State University when he “wandered into the dojo where you do judo. I hit it off with the coach. He encouraged me to start practicing again.”

Martin practiced and then won the Arizona State Judo Championship. “My coach told me I had potential and he worked with me and brought me up to the national level.”

He found judo training was both different from and similar to his bodybuilding regimen. “I still have a very heavy bodybuilding influence in my training,” he notes. “Ideally, I should completely revamp my training for judo. But the bodybuilding habits die hard. Judo training is different in the weight room. It has more emphasis on power movements, with explosion, squat, dead lift, clean, and more combination movements. It is not as much isolated movements.”

He explains that judo employs a high volume of back movements (“a lot of pulling, not so much pushing”) and also more circuit training to increase muscular endurance. “Endurance is important,” he notes. “When you’re out there for five minutes on the judo mat, cardiovascular conditioning is very important. With judo, its very anaerobic; it’s like a five-minute sprint because you use your whole body. When you’re fighting out there it can be really, really exhausting depending on how much strength you use. There’s a lot of tension in your body and you can go through a ton of energy quickly. So if you don’t have high muscular endurance you tend to cramp up out there.”

He feels the judo has helped his bodybuilding because it “has forced me to work my flexibility. A lot of bodybuilders are muscle-bound and don’t stretch as much as they should.”

Judo itself is a game of strategy, a sport of the mind as much as the body. “I’d say judo needs some physical strength but it’s very very much mental,” Martin observes. “My boss’s son does judo and he is not the most athletically gifted kid. You watch him throw a ball and you’d laugh. But he’s been doing judo – he’s 12 – since he was 4 or 5 , and this kid is good. He’s a true technician. He wins everything in sight. Judo is about hard work and perseverance. That’s what I like about it. In judo, with hard work and proper guidance, anybody can be a good player.”

The sport was originally developed about 130 years ago in Japan by Jigaro Kano as an alternative to the more brutal hand-to-hand combat known a jujitsu where every move was designed to maim and kill. Kano adapted jujitsu into judo, which means “the gentle way.”

Judo eventually became an Olympic sport, with rules to follow in order to win. Martin found that out last year when he made a crucial mistake in the world Olympic trials. There is a red, meter-wide border to the combat mat. If one combatant stands in the red area for five seconds, he gets a penalty point against him. In the battle, Martin had his opponent in the red for 4 1/2 seconds but was not aware of it.

“If I had paid attention and had kept him there for another half-second, he would have gotten a penalty, which would have put me in the lead and I would have gone to the world trials,” he says with a sigh.

The basic objective in judo is for one player to get a strong enough grip to knock his opponent down on his back. The final score depends on how flat he falls: a side or rump landing results in fewer points. If he falls flat on his back with his feet up, the match is over. “But when you have two skilled people, that’s very tough to do,” admits Boonzaayer.
Judo differs from karate, kung-fu (which uses weapons), or boxing, in that the two opponents are often locked in a tense grip for the whole match. To those watching, it is a strange ballet of battle as each searches for a misstep by the other, an unbalanced movement which will allow one of them to be toppled. “The better grip you have the better chance you have to control your opponent to get in a position from which you can attack,” explains Martin.

The grip is crucial. Therefore, having strong wrists is key. “One big difference in training is that bodybuilders use those straps they wrap around their wrists and then wrap around the weight bar,” he notes. “In judo, you don’t use those because I want my hands to be really strong. In judo it’s not hitting, it’s gripping.”

That point came home to Boonzaayer when he fought in his judo competitions. “My forearms would cramp up because I would be gripping so hard. And I wasn’t acquainted with it because I would only have to fight that hard in tournament. When I stopped using the straps, I stopped having the problem.”

He found that pure strength was not necessarily an advantage. “In judo, timing is critical,” Boonzaayer notes. “Rarely can you just go out there and throw your opponent with one move. It’s almost impossible to throw on pure strength. Judo is very non-static. It depends very much on your motion and the motion of your opponent.”

Martin has had his share of injuries, too: his eye was cut open, he had somebody throw him off the mat with their fist in his back, and he once separated his shoulder. “A lot of times when somebody gets hurt, it’s their own fault,” he notes. “Tonight in training, I hurt myself. I was getting thrown clean, but I tried to twist out and hurt my shoulder. If I had taken a nice, clean fall, I would have been fine. But when you try to twist, all that weight coming down goes right through your shoulder.

“You have to do that, though. Because if you take a clean fall in competition, you lose. Whereas if you train yourself to always try and get out of every situation, then you end up doing in tournaments what you do in practice. If I can twist out and fall on my stomach, there are no points against me.”

What appeals to Boonzaayer is the idea that the art involves mind as well as muscle matter. “It’s definitely a sport that’s very mental in that you don’t need the physical package to succeed. Anybody can can do well if they’re willing to apply themselves. When you’re gripping, you can feel when they step one way and the weight’s a little bit more one way or the other. You can’t really tell anything from looking at somebody. Some guys that look kind of dumpy and slow can be surprisingly tough. When you get them on the mat, everybody moves a little bit differently. The ones who do best in judo are the ones who have incredible feel for their opponent’s movements.

“Strength is never more important than technique,” he adds. “Somebody with technique will crush somebody with strength but no technique any day. But once you get to the international level where everybody is good, power and strength can be a very important factor. A lot of your power is in knowing how to use it. Raw power and strength gives you nothing if you don’t know how to use it.”

Like bodybuilding, judo involves eating right, sleeping right, and plenty of discipline. Martin has six meals a day, each two to three hours apart: (1) a dozen egg whites with two yokes every morning, along with a cup of oatmeal; (2) a protein shake; (3) chicken, rice, and broccoli (4) a protein shake; (5) 12-16 ounces of steak, a basked potato, and a salad, and (6) a protein shake. He also eats apples and oranges throughout the day. For supplements, he takes whey protein year round and also creatine for 5- or 6-week cycles. He also has multi-vitamins and Vitamin C with his meals.
Training is more difficult in judo because, unlike bodybuilding, you can rarely do it alone. “You have to practice at least once or twice a week,” Martin notes. “You have to go to a place where they teach judo and have a teacher and classes. You can’t do it on your own. That’s what was really frustrating when I was doing it as a kid, because I didn’t really have anybody.”

Nonetheless, judo and bodybuilding are similar, Boonzaayer feels, because both involve discipline. “Part of my success as a natural bodybuilder is because I applied that same discipline to sleeping. I always get enough sleep. I’ve been eating six meals a day for six years now without fail and those two things alone made a huge difference. It’s about consistency, year in year out. A lot of bodybuilders are consistent pre-contest. Then they’re off-season and they let things slide. They enjoy fitness but they also enjoy their night life and don’t get nearly enough sleep. That’s when you make your gains, when you rest.”

Whether sleeping or training, Boonzaayer is nothing if not determined, a peaceful warrior waging his one-man campaign against failure. “The more I learn and the better I get, the more I realize how complicated judo is. So I have more respect for the people who do this and who do it well. In my mind, it’s one of the absolute most difficult sports because you use absolutely every part of your body. You have to have a combination of strength, power, quickness, agility, balance, feel, timing. I really don’t want to rest until I feel like I’ve learned and acquired that kind of ability.”

The quiet warrior is certain of one thing, however. He is going to win. “I’ve been the national judo champion in the heavyweight division for the last two years,” he observes. “My coach and I both know I’m going to the Olympics. I’ve worked a long time for this. It’s not a vague dream. This is something very real and tangible. And that’s also what keeps me going. It’s definitely why I’m not going to give up now. I’m closer than I’ve ever been. And I don’t plan to just be in the Olympics. I want a medal. I’ve always been competitive because if I do something, I really want to do it well. That’s the way you should be about everything.”

Nice Work If You Can Get It

 I had a brief, bizarre career as a health reporter for Muscle Media magazine. Here's how it worked: I had done some health reporting for Diversion magazine, and the editor of Muscle Media had seen it. He apparently liked what he saw since he called me to say he'd like me to write an article for them and that one of his associate editors would get back to me. She did and after explaining that they wanted a profile of body builder Porter Freeman, here's how the conversation went:
Me: So what do you pay for this? She: a dollar a word. Me (thinking that's a good rate but probably for a brief article): And how many words? She: Oh, 2,000 or 3,000, whatever you think is best. Me (sputtering slightly in disbelief, and thinking, of course I'll write long, at a dollar a word): And how many sources do you want me to talk to? She: Other people? (Pause) Gee, I don't think that's necessary.
A one-source story at a dollar-a-word with the word limit up to me. Was I dreaming?
It got better. I finished the article way ahead of schedule and two days after I turned it in, the associate editor called me again.
She: We were very pleased with the last article. We'd like you to do another. But we need it in a hurry. Could you manage it in a week? Me: Sure. How long? She: 1500 to 2500 words. You decide. Me: Same rate? She (hesitating – oh, oh, I think, here it comes) Well, we are asking you to do this in a hurry, so we'd like to give you $1.50 a word on this one.
They must have had money to burn. What's even more bizarre is that they gave me two more stories in the next three weeks (earning me, in total for the gigs, something like $10,000; they paid promptly, too). And then, like a a mirage after you've arrived, it all, suddenly, stopped. No more calls. No more offers. No explanations.
The coda to this opera without music, was that they heavily (and from what I could see, arbitrarily) rewrote my final story – and bylined it with a pen name, to boot (it appears here in its original form). I never understood it all, and always thought, "Maybe they're too fit and their muscles are squeezing their brains). Needless to say, I wish it had gone on longer. Sigh.

August 29, 2010

Porter Freeman

BACK FROM THE BRINK
By TOM SOTER
from MUSCLE MEDIA, JULY 1998Porter Freeman, before and after.

Addiction is a patient lover. It snuck up on Porter Freeman insidiously and soothingly. And with its help, he lost his health – and could easily have lost his life.

Never concerned much about gaining weight or eating right, the six-foot tall Southerner had lived life to its fullest. As a child, he had eaten whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. And as he grew older, he ate more and found excuses to exercise less.

Until one day he stood on a scale. And discovered that he was 40 pounds overweight. And miserable.

That was the first turning point for Porter Freeman, one of the signposts that led him on an amazing journey back to good health. It was a trip in which a 47-year-old nightclub manager, surrounded by temptation and physically handicapped, went from being depressed and overweight to becoming a 1997 Physique Transformation Co-Champion and the winner of a Corvette and a $50,000 contract with Experimental and Applied Sciences (EAS). He lost 50 pounds and dramatically changed his physique in just 84 days. And he did it all at an age when most people don’t even think about starting an intense exercise regimen.

“We all have the character to change our lives,” he says. “I got into a rut because I was lying on the couch instead of going out and doing a light workout or hitting the speed bag or lifting weights. I was making all the wrong choices. But I was still who I was inside. I still had the character to change. I had just hidden it with layers and layers of fat.”

Freeman’s transformation was a long time coming. Born in North Carolina on October 21, 1949, and raised in both Georgia and South Carolina, he led an unexceptional existence with a single constant: food. One of two children (he has an older sister), Freeman’s parents were divorced when he was young. Consequently, he found himself moving a lot in his high school years and also spending a great deal of time at his grandmother’s, where, to paraphrase the song, it was always summertime, and the eating was easy.

“My grandparents had a farm up in North Carolina, and I know I got an awful lot of fresh food and vegetables,” he recalls. “I ate good and plenty. Every person who grew up in the South will recognize this: you show your grandmother how much you love her by how much of her dinner you eat. It’s directly equated to how many of her biscuits you can swallow at one sitting.

“My grandparents cooked fried food, barbecue, [using] a lot of butter,” he adds. “There was butter on everything. I don’t think you could eat anything that hadn’t been salted and buttered. When I look back I can’t believe I ate this. But to have a bacon-and-cheese sandwich with salted tomatoes and a lot of mayonnaise was just like an everyday occurrence. And, oh my goodness, with what I’ve learned in the last year or two about health and nutrition, it’s a wonder my heart doesn’t blow up in the middle of this conversation.”

Nonetheless, Freeman was neither fat nor thin – and was more interested in chasing girls than lifting weights. “I wasn’t really conscious of physical fitness. I think I played one year of high school football. But due to my moving, I never excelled in any sports. I was probably the average guy who just thought about girls. ”

Coincidentally or not, his career seemed to always involve food. When he was in seventh grade, he began working as a busboy in a Georgia restaurant. He was later a dishwasher in a pizza place, and when he relocated to Orlando, Florida, he began working in nightclubs as a part-time doorman, bouncer, relief manager, and finally manager. “I’ve had 22 years in various restaurants and nightclubs around Orlando,” he says. “I even owned a restaurant for a while.”

By the time he was 40, things had settled down into a routine. He still ate whatever he wanted, but his irregular routine and bar led to even worse behavior. He admits he drank too much and ate too much junk food.

Nonetheless, as many in middle-age do, Freeman had started to become aware of his health. He visited gyms and studied the martial arts, earning a black belt. He also “messed around” with weights but did not follow any particular regimen.

“I had been, I guess, in and out of gymnasiums on and off for 20 years. Just going in and moving the weights around,” Freeman notes. “And I never really got involved with it. I joined a health club, gosh, 20 years ago. I had just been in and out of gymnasiums and just, I think like any guy, you work out a little bit and then you don’t.”

But he continued poor health habits. Married for a year in the mid-1980s, he kept eating junk food, drinking beer, and even started smoking. (He quit after two years when “I got up one morning and felt like hell. I threw the cigarettes in the commode and flushed them and I’ve never picked up another one. I’d rather eat a bucket of cheese than smoke a cigarette.”)

Working at the bar, Freeman found he drank a great deal. “I don’t think I was ever an alcoholic,” he observes. “I’ve never had a problem with it. It’s just that being a single guy and living near my job and working day and night shifts, you have an awful lot of friends that come see you and say, ‘Hey, Porter, let’s have a beer.’ And, you know, by the end of the day I had had five or six beers and maybe two or three drinks of liquor or maybe even a half a bottle of champagne.”

Then came the operations. Constant stress on his bones from different physical activities had led to deterioration. A tendon had also torn loose and he had broken his right hand twice. Freeman’s first operation shaved off and reattached some of the bone. Then, he had his shoulder worked on, removing bone fragments and chips.

For some time afterwards, he says he used his injury as an excuse not to exercise. “I got in fairly good shape doing the martial arts. I was doing that four and five days a week for an hour at a time,” he notes. “I probably weighed 220 pounds.I could still run two miles and do the required push-ups and sit-ups. But when I got those injuries, it was an excuse and that’s being totally honest, it was an excuse to avoid the gym.

“When you’re sitting with your arm in a cast, you can have another beer or another donut or another whatever, you can say, ‘Well, just as soon as I get my arm of this cast I’m going to get back to the gym.’ And I've never denied that I like to have a cold beer. I completely got in a rut. I often say, the difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.”

Freeman went into denial. Clothes getting tighter? Get a bigger size. Feeling bad about the weight? Have another beer. It was a typical pattern that many have experienced. Except in Freeman’s case, he made a dramatic change.

The first step in that metamorphosis was when he weighed himself. “One day I got on the scale and it said 256 pounds. I just froze. I had put on in the neighborhood of 40 pounds. And a day or two later I weighed 260. And that’s a rude awakening.”

Freeman became depressed. Then Eric Shrieves, a friend who managed a local gym, The Steel Mill, gave him a copy of Muscle Media. In it was a story about the Physique Transformation Contest. It was time for Porter Freeman’s epiphany.

“When I read the article, I got to the end of it, and it said, ‘If you’re in bad shape, you ought to do something about it,’” he recalls. “This was Bill Phillips [executive editor of Muscle Media] talking, and it said, ‘I’ve given you every opportunity and every reason to get back in shape. If you don’t do it, you might as well go start an ant farm.’

“And I swear, I thought he was talking to me. It was like he was standing in the room saying, ‘Well, Porter, you fat ass, you’ve gotten so bad out of shape, I'm going to offer you a car and $50,000. Just go get back in shape.’ And I thought, ‘Who in the hell are you to tell me to go start an ant farm?’ You know, it was perfect timing. I had realized I was at 260 pounds. I knew that I couldn’t go on living like that. You’re not living at 260. You’re dying at 260.

“I must have read that article three or four times that night. And every time I read it, I got madder and madder. I got mad at him for telling me to start an ant farm, and I got madder at myself for being such a slob. I had sat down on the side of my bed with the night light, and I had a cold beer and a bag of potato chips or some pretzels or something. I was just going to much some pretzels and drink a beer and go to sleep. And I read that article. I don’t believe I finished the beer. I know I didn’t finish the potato chips. “

If Freeman got mad, he also decided to get even – not with Phillips, but with himself. He decided to prove that he could change. He went to see Shrieves at The Steel Mill. “I said to Eric, ‘Let’s do it. I’m going to show that guy I'm not an ant farmer.’ That’s exactly how I felt. So we looked at my shoulder, and I had lost some of the range of motion in that arm because of the operation. And also some of the strength in my grip, because I had just completely pulverized one of my fingers one time, and there’s less grip in that hand.”

Before even beginning the 12-week Physique Transformation Contest, however, Freeman needed to lose 20 pounds since Shrieves felt it would be too difficult to lose so much weight and build muscles at the same time. Freeman agreed. By jogging and eating right, he lost 20 pounds in just 14 days.

After accomplishing that, he began a systematic body-building program designed by Shrieves. “He worked around my shoulder,” Freeman explains. “I can’t do any flat-benching. I can’t do decline curls. There’s legitimately some damage in one arm. I also went to see a sports chiropractor here. He kept me straightened out the entire 12 weeks.”

His workouts may have been grueling but Freeman’s determination never wavered. “I was not afraid that I couldn’t do it,” he recalls. “I craved going the 12 weeks way more than I craved a piece of key lime pie or some barbecue or a beer. I made my mind up that night when I read that article that I was going to do 12 weeks or die.”

Freeman had to juggle work – 70 hours a week – with his exercise schedule. Initially, he was exercising once a day from 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes. “I changed my routine a lot, but at some point I was in the gym either doing aerobics or lifting weights, I would say almost every day,” he recalls. “In the 12-week period, I might have taken four days off where I just gave my joints a break.”

He eventually “earned” his own key to the gym. “I was having such a difficult time trying to get in there sometimes twice a day that I said, ‘You know, it would be great if I could have a key and come in here and train late at night when I get off work.’ And they said, ‘Absolutely.’ They gave me the key, and so when I closed up at 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning, I’d go work out. I couldn’t wait to get in there. No matter how exhausted I was, I knew that 12 weeks would end. So no matter how tired I was or no matter what my schedule was, I went to the gym.”

Such determination was learned from his father, Galen Freeman. “He had two children and was a single father, and he worked every day. We never did without anything and he has always been there,” Porter says. “And I know he worked two jobs the whole time I was in high school. If you ask who my role model was it’s my father.”

After five weeks of intense exercise, a woman at work walked up to Freeman and out of the blue said, “Porter, your pants are falling off you.”

He was shocked. “What?” he said, thinking he hadn’t fastened them. But it wasn’t an accident. He had dropped 35 pounds and hadn’t even noticed.

“When you look at yourself every day, it’s the same thing with gaining weight,” he explains. “You look at yourself and you don’t realize there’s another two or three pounds. Or, you know, you just unbutton a button or whatever. And then somebody that hasn’t seen you in a year comes up and says, ‘My God, that guy’s put on a lot of weight.’ It was the same thing here in reverse. I was in the gym every day. I really didn’t notice the change.”

He found it a remarkable mental as well as physical inspiration. In Freeman’s view, losing weight and having people notice was like “asking a pretty girl on a date and having her say ‘yes.’ When I worked out, I wasn’t thinking about how do I look. I was thinking about 12 weeks – ‘I'm going to do this and I’m going to show him.’ I was doing 800 sit-ups a day in the gym. Four hundred in the morning and four hundred at night. And I was doing them in sets of 25. I would do four sets of 25, wait a few minutes, do four sets of 25, wait a few minutes. But I tell you what. When that weight starts falling off, it is one of the best feelings in this world. The muscle’s coming and the fat’s going. And you tell me what’s better than that? Unless it’s your bank account going up and the bills going down. It’s the same theory.”

Freeman supplemented the exercise regimen by eating right and adding vitamin supplements to his diet. He traded in beer, pizza, and junk food for chicken breasts, potatoes, oatmeal, and fish. He would eat 200 grams of protein regularly, 60 to 110 grams of carbohydrates, 20 to 35 grams of fat, and drink 80 to 90 ounces of water daily. He would also take BetaGen three to four times a day and between meals.

“I ate 1,400 eggs in that 12-week period,” he says with a laugh. “ I mean, some days, I was eating eight or nine egg whites for breakfast, and then I’d go back and eat another eight or nine egg whites for lunch. And maybe as I snack I would eat two deviled eggs. I can’t remember how many chicken breasts it was; something like 200 chicken breasts. But I was eating high-quality protein. I was taking the EAS supplements every day without fail.”

He also switched from three large to five small meals daily. “I would eat before I went to bed and take Cytovol and Vetagen. And my metabolism would be running, while I was asleep,” he notes, adding: “We also cut out all the junk and the alcohol and soda pop. We cut out everything but water and coffee. I’m just glad it never got down to a choice between coffee or the contest, because then I might have quit.”

His friends were still there and some tried, albeit unconsciously, to reinforce his bad habits. Freeman’s buddies would come to the bar and say, “Let’s have a couple of beers.” And he would say, “I’m not going to do that for a while.”

“I told somebody once that addiction is a patient lover,” he says. “It will be waiting on you at the grave. If you’re addicted to food or alcohol or cigarettes or even the wrong person in your life, if you’ve got a bad habit or an addiction, if you came back out of the grave that addiction would be patiently waiting right there. And, yes, sir, all those old habits were right there.”

Some acquaintances even expressed concern. “One of my good friends came to me and said, ‘Porter, you want to talk to me about what’s going on with you? Are you all right?’ I didn’t know if he thought I had some disease or if I was dying. He was legitimately concerned because I didn’t go out and tell a lot of people, ‘I’m going to get in this contest and I’m going to win.’ I don’t believe that you go out and rant and rave and tell everybody you know you’re going to do something because you don’t know what’s coming. You might not make it.”

Nonetheless, throughout it he stuck to what he dubs “Freeman’s Four Rules to Get Healthy,” which he wrote down as a reminder to himself at the beginning of his 12 weeks:

Want It. Ask yourself, do you want this? And if the answer comes back, no, then it’s over.

Make It a Priority. When the guys are all going to go to the football game, you may want to go. But you have a date at the gym. That’s the priority.

Quit Doing Bad Things to Yourself. If you’re eating badly or at the wrong times, or not sleeping right, or not exercising, it’s time for a change.

Start Doing Good Things to Yourself. Eat right, exercise right. And if you buy a cake, don’t eat three slices.

“If I broke any one of the four rules, then I just felt like I wasn’t in the contest any longer,” he recalls. “During that 12 weeks, I never cheated one time. And once it was over, I had completely changed my eating habits. I don’t go eat three pancakes in the morning, and I don’t drink six beers in an eight-hour period, and I don’t sit down [and accept] every time somebody wants to buy a drink.”

After the 12 weeks, Freeman got his call from EAS: he had won in his category (“Men, Age 40 to 54”). When he heard the news, he “started screaming and people at work came running into the office. I was jumping up and down.”

He says now that he didn’t see the contest as a competition with other people. “I wasn’t in a competition,” he says. “By the time I got to Denver [the site of the finalists’ contest], my competition was over. There were 54,000 people in it and the only person that I competed with in that whole thing was Porter Freeman. That was it. Arriving in Denver and being part of that [finalist] weekend was the reward. The journey was the reward, not the gold. It was that ten people in America were going to get to do that. Now, that’s a pretty damned exclusive club. And I was the best of the people that did it. And my group was the best group that did it.”

In fact, Freeman says he sees exercise in general – and his success in particular – as more of a group effort than anything else. “I’m going to tell you who won. Me, and Eric, and the Steel Mill gym, and my boss, a guy named Gene Dupont, and EAS. This would have never happened without everybody kicking in. They gave me the place to do it, they showed me how to do it. My boss was very lenient with my schedule, and EAS gave me the challenge. So I never did anything. We did it all.”

These days, he follows a “maintenance” regimen that is laudable in its simplicity. He does aerobics, probably five times a week (jogging, shadow-boxing, running the treadmill, riding the stationary bike). He runs “hard for two minutes and then I jog for five minutes. And then I’ll run hard again for three minutes and then I’ll jog for two minutes. And I'm doing, the days I do two a day, I do them 20 minutes, 25 minutes both times. And I do them once a day, I try to go maybe 30 minutes, 35 minutes.” Some days he goes through the routine twice.

He now visits the gym three days in a row, then takes a day off, and returns for another three days, working each body part twice a week with weights. “Right now, I’m maintaining,” he explains. “In the past year, I’ve put on about six pounds and everybody says it’s muscle. I’m still wearing size 34 pants. I have increased some of my muscularity.” He has also added Myoplex to his protein/muscle supplements.

Freeman’s advice to others is simple: “If it’s bad for you don’t eat it. That’s number one. Everything you put in your mouth, eat it today, wear it tomorrow. Eat fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, low-fat protein sources, water. I drink water like it’s the fountain of youth. I drink eight, ten, twelve ten-ounce glasses a day. Then, surround yourself with people that are positive and want to help you. Just do it. I don’t know how much more plain you could make it.”

In his spare time, Freeman finds time to read – everything from Stephen King to Billy Graham – and he may also have a new career as a movie star. The actor Don Wilson has asked him to appear in a film, “but he said it’s going to be a short career because he might have to kill me off.”

Currently supervisor at Dancers Royale, a topless bar in Orlando, he also acts as a notary, performing marriages much as his grandfather once did. “My granddaddy was a Baptist minister,” he notes. “Years ago I entertained the idea of becoming one myself. Now, that all seems kind of strange, me being in the adult business. But I think that you can do a lot of good in the adult business if you set good examples and if you are there to counsel people and help them. I grew up around the church. And I guess maybe the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

In fact, he sounds almost like a minister himself when he starts preaching about his new religion: health. “The end is rushing toward us,” he observes. “When I go to Heaven, I want the Lord to look at me and say, ‘Gosh, Porter, you’re in good shape. You know, you’re here, but you lost weight, didn’t you? You look good.’

“The biggest myth is that you’re too overweight to get in the gym,” he adds, more seriously. “You’re never too thin and you’re never too fat to change. People like to believe that everybody in the gym looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. That’s not true. He had to start one day like everybody else. You’ve got a flight of steps? Do them instead of the elevator. You say, ‘Well, I'm want to take the elevator. It will save me time.’ All you’re doing is rushing to your grave by not taking the steps.

“You can do it. It’s a myth that you can’t. Bodybuilding doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a finalist in the Mr. Olympia contest. It just means not saying no. There are people in my gym that are blind. One of the girls who was a top runner-up in the contest was in a wheelchair. One of the winners had AIDS. And every reason – broken hands, broken fingers, surgery, all of that stuff for me – can be an excuse to stop. Don’t accept that. Just get off the couch and start. It’s that simple.”