-Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta
The steam in the bathroom was so thick it was hard to see what was happening. I blinked. Yes, this was real. A baptism was about to take place. The bedroom was pushing 95 degrees. Christian music pumped through the sound system, and there was a constant parade of smiling faces popping in to say hi.
The athlete was submerged to his chest in a steaming bath with lavender-eucalyptus bubbles floating like swans all around him.
Words were spoken that I couldn’t quite hear. I didn’t have to. The fighter was rejoicing. He’d already lost 30 lbs. during training camp and today had to lose just eight more. In this situation, some people would look like they were suffering. But as the priest made the sign of the cross over the fighter’s head, he beamed the smile of a young boy. This wasn’t just a weight cut. This was a spiritual moment during which I couldn’t help but think: How did I get here?
Weight has been my main focus for more than twenty years; as a competitor, as a coach and as a consultant.
I purposely drove my body weight to 280 lbs. as powerlifter to achieve my goal of squatting over 800 lbs. Three years later, I set the record for fastest knockout in the International Fight League while competing as a 170 lb. mixed martial artist. I lost 110 lbs. while maintaining a vibrant level of health and vitality.
Now, as a peak performance coach, I continue to develop these methods while working with the most elite athletes in mixed martial arts. I’d like to share them here with you.
*****
THIRD GRADE
It was the end of a typical school day for me. I could hear the pounding of waves on the beach a few blocks away as I made my way home from school. I tossed my backpack on the dining room chair and headed straight for the refrigerator. That’s when I noticed the prevailing silence. In a house with four kids, silence is rare.
The backdoor was open, but the screen door was shut. I could see my mother in the yard hustling toward the stairs, toward me. All I could think was, Uh, oh. What did I do?
“Hold your father,” she yelled.
That’s when I saw my dad sitting on the back stairs, tilting awkwardly to the side, incoherent. The minutes that followed were a blur of emergency sirens, color and people. Our next door neighbor was a police officer and the first emergency responder on the scene. Then came the ambulance and the craziness. Neighbors from up and down 8th Avenue flooded our driveway offering support, but mostly asking what had happened. I didn’t know. But later, I found out my father suffered a stroke.
I was nine.
A stroke is caused by the rupturing or the blockage of an artery. This prevents part of the brain from receiving oxygen, and in minutes, brain cells begin to die, resulting in brain damage, disability and death. Studies show up to 80 percent of strokes can be prevented simply by reducing risk.
My father was a first generation Italian immigrant who began smoking cigarettes before he was a teenager and continued to do so for nearly twenty years before he quit. He remained smoke-free for another twenty years before his stroke.
Cigarette smoking is a leading cause of stroke along with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes – conditions that are predominantly influenced by lifestyle; notably poor diet and lack of exercise. Not surprisingly, these same conditions are the leading causes of heart disease and obesity.
My father looked like he was in great shape. But his insides were a different story. He cooked with butter, ate fried foods regularly, and usually unwound with a few beers at night. He routinely skipped breakfast, but always grabbed a Thermos full of coffee before he left the house.
His sixty-hour work schedule kept him away from meaningful exercise and increased his level of stress. He was a solid provider and an excellent father. He always took great care of us, but in turn, he did not take care of himself.
*****
A few months after the stroke, my mother and I stopped by the local 7-Eleven for a gallon of whole milk and a loaf of Wonder bread. Like most kids would do, I began scanning the shelves for a candy bar, but my eyes caught on something else. I remember the moment perfectly. Instead of the candy bar, I reached for a magazine with Conan the Barbarian on the cover. Only he wasn’t dressed like Conan. He was standing on the beach surrounded by a pile of weights and throngs of women. I forgot all about the candy bar and asked my mom to buy me the magazine, which she did, surprisingly without arguing. That was my first conscious decision in which I put my health first.
That night, I didn’t sleep. There were pictures of Franco Colombu deadlifting nearly 700 lbs. There were pictures of Frank Zane looking as near perfect as a human could. And later, guys like Dorian Yates with his sheer muscularity and physical presence. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of athletes just like them whom I studied.
What did they eat?
How did they train?
And how could I do that, too?
In short time, I was lecturing my mother on the saturated fat content of whole milk and why she should be feeding us plain chicken breast instead of bulk ground beef. Every day, I learned something new. Even then, I felt it was my obligation to share this knowledge. Don’t get me wrong. A lot of the things I read in these magazines didn’t make sense even to my young brain, but I still recognized salesmanship and gluttony over scientific fact and applicable health benefits.
My enthusiasm wasn’t confined to nutrition or lecturing family members. The house I grew up in was built in the early 1900’s and the windows were outfitted with weights that acted as counterbalances when the windows were opened or closed. One day, while playing in the basement, I discovered a set of these weights. I immediately assumed they were dumbbells, and I’d spend hours with my magazines opened to articles detailing the workouts done by my favorite athletes. I performed every exercise hundreds of times for thousands of reps. No doubt I was extremely over-trained! (I wouldn’t learn the principles of periodization and central nervous system recovery for a few more years.)
*****
FRESHMAN YEAR
It was the spring before high school. I was five-foot-four and maybe just over 100 lbs. I was working at a local athletic store scrubbing silk screens at a chemical tub of all things. A few doors down was a hardcore bodybuilding gym called The Muscle Shop. I wanted a membership there, but the age of consent was fifteen with a parent’s signature. I was thirteen.
Driven by the need to know what happened inside those walls, I did what any desperate boy would do in my situation. I lied.
It took me a couple days to build up the courage to walk through the big wooden door. And when I finally did I felt like I’d fallen through the proverbial rabbit hole. This was a whole new world of which I couldn’t wait to become a citizen. Metallica blasted from mounted, dust-coated speakers in a cement room bursting with thousands of pounds of weights, barbells and steel cages. And then there were these massive, mostly ugly monsters walking around in clown clothes.
There wasn’t an office. Only a stool, a shelf, and a cash register. After a few minutes of me standing there looking like I’d seen the Second Coming, this short, stocky guy with eyebrows as big as his mustache walked toward me. I froze. He looked exactly like Dennis Tinerino, whom most of you might not recognize as Mr. America 1967, but I sure did. I’d read dozens of articles about him, but as the guy got closer, the mirage faded.
This was Joe, the owner. He had a great build. All his muscles were perfectly rounded and they fit together flawlessly. He was wearing an orange tank top he’d obviously tailored to show off more skin than the original designer intended. He introduced himself and – seeing how scrawny I was ¬– promptly told me I had to be fifteen to sign up.
It was $99 for three months, but there was a catch. I had to convince my mother to sign the consent papers. I ran out of there, grabbed my bike and pedaled fast. Would she be cool with this? I was about to find out.
Dropping the bike on our front lawn, I bolted into the house. Mom was scraping dinner together and barely glanced at me as I started rambling.
“Okay,” she said, cutting me off mid-sentence.
She didn’t ask anything about age, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell her. Mom went back to cooking while I stared at her expectantly. She glanced up.
“Can we go now?” I asked.
She wasn’t thrilled, but didn’t say no as she put away dinner and grabbed her purse. I followed her out the door.
I had the money to pay for it. Money wasn’t the issue. I had coffee cans filled with $5 bills from the athletic shop and a newspaper route so the enrollment fee was of no consequence.
We walked into the gym and it was the same crazy zoo scene from before. I noticed more people looking this way now that I was standing there with my mother. She was the only woman in the gym.
Joe came over and told her what he’d told me earlier, only this time much more politely. During his sales pitch he’d told her he’d put me on a fitness program and that he’d teach me everything I needed to know to get started. Sounded great to me!
She signed the consent form. The deal was done. I asked my mom if I could stay and get started. She had no problem with it, but how was I going to get home? I told her I’d walk. It was about three miles to my house. Yeah, I was that excited. We parted ways, and I walked back into the gym.
I was standing by the register trying to make eye contact with Joe, who was talking to some guys sitting on weight benches. They looked like they were training, but after ten minutes of watching them, they hadn’t done anything. (Today, that’s a habit of gym-goers that absolutely drives me crazy. Don’t monopolize the gym equipment. Get in, get out, get it done.)
Joe finally noticed me. He came over looking slightly peeved. I’d guessed the story he’d been telling was a whopper. He asked if I forgot something.
“No,” I said. “I want to start training.”
Now his look was more of disappointment than annoyance. His face went blank for a second.
“Follow me,” he said.
He brought me over to a steel contraption of pulleys and weights with six different stations. Joe told me to go to each station, do ten reps and move on to the next. Go around the circuit three times, he’d said. He pointed me to the Triceps Pressdown and showed me how to do that for two or three reps.
“There ya go,” he said as he walked away.
It was the last time I ever talked to that guy.
The steel V-bar in my hands was attached to a 200 lb. stack of weights. Although, I was only using 40 of those pounds, I felt invincible! I could feel my body merge with the steel during each repetition. It became more like a team effort; my body, my mind and the weight stack. I was hooked.
From that first set, I knew exactly how to train myself, how to pair muscle groups, increase strength in specific areas of my choosing, lose weight, or increase endurance. I was a natural. I put on 40 lbs. of muscle that year. I began high school as a 114 lb. skinny kid and came back sophomore year at a solid 154. I was still only five-foot-four.
*****
All the local cops trained at my gym, and I was lifting more than they were. At fifteen, I thought that was something to be pretty proud of considering I focused on the hardest lifts that most others naturally avoided. While they were performing leg extensions and biceps curls, I was straining at the squat rack or performing weighted chin-ups.
I made the varsity wrestling team as a freshman, having never wrestled a single match in my life. I walked onto the mat the first day of tryouts and pinned my opponent in twenty seconds with a move that doesn’t even exist. I pretty much just manhandled him. Somehow I wrapped his knees around his head and held him there until the coach slapped the mat and shouted, “Pin!”
When I got up the assistant coach came over. He was a well-known college wrestler from our area with a grizzled face, ugly ears and a wad of chewing tobacco nesting in his upper lip.
“Have you ever wrestled before?”
Embarrassed, I shook my head and said, “No.”
He smiled. “I didn’t think so, but you made the team.”
When formal practice started, the coaches immediately moved me out of the freshman group and into the sophomore group, and then to the juniors and, finally, the seniors. By the second week, I was working out with the varsity squad and doing pretty damn well.
The night before our first match, the coaches sat us around the mat to give us a pep talk. They finished by saying they’d chosen four captains: Two seniors, a junior, and me.
When I returned sophomore year, my teammates noticed the big difference in my appearance. They were amazed at how much stronger I was than everybody else and how I would never get tired.
They wanted to make the same physical gains. So I helped them. To repay me, some guys would drive me to practice or pay for my lunch, and I’d show them how to lift weights, eat properly, and take them on runs.
I’d design my teammates’ weight cuts and rehydration for same-day wrestling matches or multi-day tournaments. Back then I was relying on performance-science tempered with my own experience of gaining or losing up to 20 lbs. three times a week.
This pursuit became my obsession. I poured through countless books, magazines, research journals and abstracts as well as attended seminars, conferences and more classes than I can remember.
Clearly, this remains my obsession, and I have continued to evolve my work around the principles of longevity science, realizing that life extends far past an athlete’s career.
CHAPTER 2
HELP IS NOT A FOUR-LETTER WORD
“Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.”
The steam in the bathroom was so thick it was hard to see what was happening. I blinked. Yes, this was real. A baptism was about to take place. The bedroom was pushing 95 degrees. Christian music pumped through the sound system, and there was a constant parade of smiling faces popping in to say hi.
The athlete was submerged to his chest in a steaming bath with lavender-eucalyptus bubbles floating like swans all around him.
Words were spoken that I couldn’t quite hear. I didn’t have to. The fighter was rejoicing. He’d already lost 30 lbs. during training camp and today had to lose just eight more. In this situation, some people would look like they were suffering. But as the priest made the sign of the cross over the fighter’s head, he beamed the smile of a young boy. This wasn’t just a weight cut. This was a spiritual moment during which I couldn’t help but think: How did I get here?
Weight has been my main focus for more than twenty years; as a competitor, as a coach and as a consultant.
I purposely drove my body weight to 280 lbs. as powerlifter to achieve my goal of squatting over 800 lbs. Three years later, I set the record for fastest knockout in the International Fight League while competing as a 170 lb. mixed martial artist. I lost 110 lbs. while maintaining a vibrant level of health and vitality.
Now, as a peak performance coach, I continue to develop these methods while working with the most elite athletes in mixed martial arts. I’d like to share them here with you.
*****
THIRD GRADE
It was the end of a typical school day for me. I could hear the pounding of waves on the beach a few blocks away as I made my way home from school. I tossed my backpack on the dining room chair and headed straight for the refrigerator. That’s when I noticed the prevailing silence. In a house with four kids, silence is rare.
The backdoor was open, but the screen door was shut. I could see my mother in the yard hustling toward the stairs, toward me. All I could think was, Uh, oh. What did I do?
“Hold your father,” she yelled.
That’s when I saw my dad sitting on the back stairs, tilting awkwardly to the side, incoherent. The minutes that followed were a blur of emergency sirens, color and people. Our next door neighbor was a police officer and the first emergency responder on the scene. Then came the ambulance and the craziness. Neighbors from up and down 8th Avenue flooded our driveway offering support, but mostly asking what had happened. I didn’t know. But later, I found out my father suffered a stroke.
I was nine.
A stroke is caused by the rupturing or the blockage of an artery. This prevents part of the brain from receiving oxygen, and in minutes, brain cells begin to die, resulting in brain damage, disability and death. Studies show up to 80 percent of strokes can be prevented simply by reducing risk.
My father was a first generation Italian immigrant who began smoking cigarettes before he was a teenager and continued to do so for nearly twenty years before he quit. He remained smoke-free for another twenty years before his stroke.
Cigarette smoking is a leading cause of stroke along with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes – conditions that are predominantly influenced by lifestyle; notably poor diet and lack of exercise. Not surprisingly, these same conditions are the leading causes of heart disease and obesity.
My father looked like he was in great shape. But his insides were a different story. He cooked with butter, ate fried foods regularly, and usually unwound with a few beers at night. He routinely skipped breakfast, but always grabbed a Thermos full of coffee before he left the house.
His sixty-hour work schedule kept him away from meaningful exercise and increased his level of stress. He was a solid provider and an excellent father. He always took great care of us, but in turn, he did not take care of himself.
*****
A few months after the stroke, my mother and I stopped by the local 7-Eleven for a gallon of whole milk and a loaf of Wonder bread. Like most kids would do, I began scanning the shelves for a candy bar, but my eyes caught on something else. I remember the moment perfectly. Instead of the candy bar, I reached for a magazine with Conan the Barbarian on the cover. Only he wasn’t dressed like Conan. He was standing on the beach surrounded by a pile of weights and throngs of women. I forgot all about the candy bar and asked my mom to buy me the magazine, which she did, surprisingly without arguing. That was my first conscious decision in which I put my health first.
That night, I didn’t sleep. There were pictures of Franco Colombu deadlifting nearly 700 lbs. There were pictures of Frank Zane looking as near perfect as a human could. And later, guys like Dorian Yates with his sheer muscularity and physical presence. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of athletes just like them whom I studied.
What did they eat?
How did they train?
And how could I do that, too?
In short time, I was lecturing my mother on the saturated fat content of whole milk and why she should be feeding us plain chicken breast instead of bulk ground beef. Every day, I learned something new. Even then, I felt it was my obligation to share this knowledge. Don’t get me wrong. A lot of the things I read in these magazines didn’t make sense even to my young brain, but I still recognized salesmanship and gluttony over scientific fact and applicable health benefits.
My enthusiasm wasn’t confined to nutrition or lecturing family members. The house I grew up in was built in the early 1900’s and the windows were outfitted with weights that acted as counterbalances when the windows were opened or closed. One day, while playing in the basement, I discovered a set of these weights. I immediately assumed they were dumbbells, and I’d spend hours with my magazines opened to articles detailing the workouts done by my favorite athletes. I performed every exercise hundreds of times for thousands of reps. No doubt I was extremely over-trained! (I wouldn’t learn the principles of periodization and central nervous system recovery for a few more years.)
*****
FRESHMAN YEAR
It was the spring before high school. I was five-foot-four and maybe just over 100 lbs. I was working at a local athletic store scrubbing silk screens at a chemical tub of all things. A few doors down was a hardcore bodybuilding gym called The Muscle Shop. I wanted a membership there, but the age of consent was fifteen with a parent’s signature. I was thirteen.
Driven by the need to know what happened inside those walls, I did what any desperate boy would do in my situation. I lied.
It took me a couple days to build up the courage to walk through the big wooden door. And when I finally did I felt like I’d fallen through the proverbial rabbit hole. This was a whole new world of which I couldn’t wait to become a citizen. Metallica blasted from mounted, dust-coated speakers in a cement room bursting with thousands of pounds of weights, barbells and steel cages. And then there were these massive, mostly ugly monsters walking around in clown clothes.
There wasn’t an office. Only a stool, a shelf, and a cash register. After a few minutes of me standing there looking like I’d seen the Second Coming, this short, stocky guy with eyebrows as big as his mustache walked toward me. I froze. He looked exactly like Dennis Tinerino, whom most of you might not recognize as Mr. America 1967, but I sure did. I’d read dozens of articles about him, but as the guy got closer, the mirage faded.
This was Joe, the owner. He had a great build. All his muscles were perfectly rounded and they fit together flawlessly. He was wearing an orange tank top he’d obviously tailored to show off more skin than the original designer intended. He introduced himself and – seeing how scrawny I was ¬– promptly told me I had to be fifteen to sign up.
It was $99 for three months, but there was a catch. I had to convince my mother to sign the consent papers. I ran out of there, grabbed my bike and pedaled fast. Would she be cool with this? I was about to find out.
Dropping the bike on our front lawn, I bolted into the house. Mom was scraping dinner together and barely glanced at me as I started rambling.
“Okay,” she said, cutting me off mid-sentence.
She didn’t ask anything about age, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell her. Mom went back to cooking while I stared at her expectantly. She glanced up.
“Can we go now?” I asked.
She wasn’t thrilled, but didn’t say no as she put away dinner and grabbed her purse. I followed her out the door.
I had the money to pay for it. Money wasn’t the issue. I had coffee cans filled with $5 bills from the athletic shop and a newspaper route so the enrollment fee was of no consequence.
We walked into the gym and it was the same crazy zoo scene from before. I noticed more people looking this way now that I was standing there with my mother. She was the only woman in the gym.
Joe came over and told her what he’d told me earlier, only this time much more politely. During his sales pitch he’d told her he’d put me on a fitness program and that he’d teach me everything I needed to know to get started. Sounded great to me!
She signed the consent form. The deal was done. I asked my mom if I could stay and get started. She had no problem with it, but how was I going to get home? I told her I’d walk. It was about three miles to my house. Yeah, I was that excited. We parted ways, and I walked back into the gym.
I was standing by the register trying to make eye contact with Joe, who was talking to some guys sitting on weight benches. They looked like they were training, but after ten minutes of watching them, they hadn’t done anything. (Today, that’s a habit of gym-goers that absolutely drives me crazy. Don’t monopolize the gym equipment. Get in, get out, get it done.)
Joe finally noticed me. He came over looking slightly peeved. I’d guessed the story he’d been telling was a whopper. He asked if I forgot something.
“No,” I said. “I want to start training.”
Now his look was more of disappointment than annoyance. His face went blank for a second.
“Follow me,” he said.
He brought me over to a steel contraption of pulleys and weights with six different stations. Joe told me to go to each station, do ten reps and move on to the next. Go around the circuit three times, he’d said. He pointed me to the Triceps Pressdown and showed me how to do that for two or three reps.
“There ya go,” he said as he walked away.
It was the last time I ever talked to that guy.
The steel V-bar in my hands was attached to a 200 lb. stack of weights. Although, I was only using 40 of those pounds, I felt invincible! I could feel my body merge with the steel during each repetition. It became more like a team effort; my body, my mind and the weight stack. I was hooked.
From that first set, I knew exactly how to train myself, how to pair muscle groups, increase strength in specific areas of my choosing, lose weight, or increase endurance. I was a natural. I put on 40 lbs. of muscle that year. I began high school as a 114 lb. skinny kid and came back sophomore year at a solid 154. I was still only five-foot-four.
*****
All the local cops trained at my gym, and I was lifting more than they were. At fifteen, I thought that was something to be pretty proud of considering I focused on the hardest lifts that most others naturally avoided. While they were performing leg extensions and biceps curls, I was straining at the squat rack or performing weighted chin-ups.
I made the varsity wrestling team as a freshman, having never wrestled a single match in my life. I walked onto the mat the first day of tryouts and pinned my opponent in twenty seconds with a move that doesn’t even exist. I pretty much just manhandled him. Somehow I wrapped his knees around his head and held him there until the coach slapped the mat and shouted, “Pin!”
When I got up the assistant coach came over. He was a well-known college wrestler from our area with a grizzled face, ugly ears and a wad of chewing tobacco nesting in his upper lip.
“Have you ever wrestled before?”
Embarrassed, I shook my head and said, “No.”
He smiled. “I didn’t think so, but you made the team.”
When formal practice started, the coaches immediately moved me out of the freshman group and into the sophomore group, and then to the juniors and, finally, the seniors. By the second week, I was working out with the varsity squad and doing pretty damn well.
The night before our first match, the coaches sat us around the mat to give us a pep talk. They finished by saying they’d chosen four captains: Two seniors, a junior, and me.
When I returned sophomore year, my teammates noticed the big difference in my appearance. They were amazed at how much stronger I was than everybody else and how I would never get tired.
They wanted to make the same physical gains. So I helped them. To repay me, some guys would drive me to practice or pay for my lunch, and I’d show them how to lift weights, eat properly, and take them on runs.
I’d design my teammates’ weight cuts and rehydration for same-day wrestling matches or multi-day tournaments. Back then I was relying on performance-science tempered with my own experience of gaining or losing up to 20 lbs. three times a week.
This pursuit became my obsession. I poured through countless books, magazines, research journals and abstracts as well as attended seminars, conferences and more classes than I can remember.
Clearly, this remains my obsession, and I have continued to evolve my work around the principles of longevity science, realizing that life extends far past an athlete’s career.
CHAPTER 2
HELP IS NOT A FOUR-LETTER WORD
“Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.”
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