16/07/2012

Today is Monday after noon and I was so burnt out. I know what is going on as my body is repairing after an extensive workout. I am now on my second day of recovery which I feel is well needed, especially if I am going to burn through an exercise routine like the one I did on the past Saturday.

So why am I training so hard? It has come to a point in my life where I have found a deep passion for something I will not give up on, in fact that is not in my vocabulary when it comes to this topic. I truly love the field of fitness and it all started with a personal transformation, and a fitness competition, I won't get to much into the history but I haven't entered a competition since October of last year. This year I will be doing it again, taking it a step further then I have before.

I recently looked at my current photo of my bodily state, this is my new before photo, I am not nearly as lean as when I competed last year, but I can definitely see the remains of my hard work as the lines of muscles show under the layers of fat.

I have spent nearly two years studying and applying fitness theories and methods like a scientist trying to discover a cure. I have come out of the process and felt quite accomplished as I have managed to achieve a physique I could be proud of and willing to put on stage, all through methods of training, supplementation, and nutrition.

I have continued to train hard as time passed since last October, but now looking at the photos of what I want my next level of fitness to be, these where the guys in the magazines. I wasn't willing to resort to underground drugs to place and being in the industry I have seen alot of people who claim to use it and don't build a good physique anyways. I continued to dig for better methods and new research that came into my hands from documentaries, magazines, books, and so on. My collection seemed to begin to look more like a library than anything else.

It was just recently that I realised I wanted to push deeper into getting further gains so I had to find a mentor. I have always known that mentors was the way to success no matter what it is we are doing. Someone out there has the formula that they discovered long before I will, someone is ten or twenty steps ahead of me and that's who I needed to find. I then looked no further than my network of people I have connected in the past through competing, seminars, and through the names of those people that popped up. I ended up looking to get in contact with a top trainer in Calgary, Paul Anthony with DreamBody, 7 time top trainer of the year for Alberta.

The first day I sat down with him he was a very lively and high energy individual, his charisma would get anyone to befriend him. I got my nutrition plan and supplementation list, and it looked very similar to what I was already doing, but with some very important differences that I wasn't doing which I knew was clearly the difference in why this method would work so much better than the mainstream that I was doing.

I was excited, my new mentor had faith in me and the goal was set, I needed to be at 4% body fat. I was ready to get on board and go full throttle. The upcoming Saturday would be our first day of training, and I was very accustomed to training hard and with a pre workout, creatine, and l-arginine stack there was nothing that could stop me in the gym, so I was ready for whatever Paul was going to dish out, or so I thought.

We started with abs, and the workouts we began with was forcing my body to learn entire new movements, in literally minutes I was already grunting and sweating, as Paul encouraged me to keep up the reps. At this point I was thinking this has got to be the worst of it. We begin to move along to the next workouts and my preworkout was useless, I was drained, tired and I had to keep going. I was down to doing single reps, and my arms wouldn't do one more even though I wanted to. The session continued on right to the end of the circuit just as I described, grunting, grinning, sweating, muscle group after muscle group.

I have never trained in that manner in my life, this made military training look easy, and I never got sore at the gym but I left feeling accomplished and knew I would feel it the next day.

I now know what it means to train like a body builder, and I'm sure this is only scratching the surface, I am excited to find out what the future has in terms of fitness level for me.

I now have to set my own theories aside and let my mentor do his magic. Paul told me in the first meeting that I would wonder why I didn't come to him before, and he was right. I can't wait to see the final outcome.

There is no substitute for a great mentor/teacher to get you to the outcome.

If Armour Projects is where you get the raw material for the forge, Paul Anthony is the blacksmith.

Andy Nghi