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.”