Welcome back to the Muscle Intelligence Podcast. I'm your host, Benpulski. Today we're going to talk about my history as a professional bodybuilder. Many of you may or may not know.

I was one of the biggest man on the planet at one point weighing up to 293 pounds on stage.

That's sub 5% body fat, striety glutes, all of it. I'm going to teach you how I went from 242 to 293 in two years.

In fact, it was under two years. It was about 18 months. And I was between two contests.

So I put on just over 45 pounds of stage weight. So that's not fat. That's not, you know, bulk.

It's stage weight in two years, which is far exceeding what everyone else

talks about. I'm going to talk about that exactly how I did it in today's episode. We're

going to go through training, we're going to go through nutrition, we're going through

lifestyle, going through mindset, every little aspect coming at you right now.

All right, so here we go. 2005 is when I started my aspiration as a bodybuilder.

I stepped on stage in my first show at 237 pounds.

And to be honest, I wasn't particularly lean.

I could have easily been to 220, 225, looking back on it now.

I was good enough to win the show because I had a great structure. Fast forward about two and a half years, I won my professional card as a professional bodybuilder. Now, two and a half years to go from, you know, literally never having stepped on stage to being a professional bodybuilder, I was raw. I didn't know a lot. That being said, I was a massive fan of bodybuilding since I was 15 years old.

So I would practice, I would pose. You know, I thought I knew what I was doing. Looking back on it, I was a little kid. It's not, I was a little kid. Didn't know very much.

but I went through the ranks really, really quickly.

So when I stepped on stage in 2009 at my first professional bodybuilding show,

I was raw.

I barely knew how to pose.

You know, I practiced a lot

because I do have a little bit of OCD. And I stepped on stage and I got third place at my first ever bodybuilding show. For most people, that's unheard of, especially behind someone like Dennis James, who's been a 20-year icon in the industry, who I thought had more muscle than God,

and just blew my mind that I got to place third behind Dennis James,

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