I am excited East Coast Muscle asked me to be a part of the team. This will enable me to reach out to my fans, and anyone else who logs on, and provide them with up to date information about me, training techniques, nutrition, and many other topics dealing with natural bodybuilding. I hope you will find this, and my future articles, full of valuable information for you to use in your own training and show preparation.
This article is to provide our readers with a bio, allowing you to get to know me. I'll take you through a history of myself, giving you insight on how I became who I am.
I was born in Rochester, NY in 1966. I'm the middle child in a family of five children. My family moved to Wisconsin in 1979, where I finished middle school and went to high school.
I really didn't start working out regularly until the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. The only reason I did work out was because my coaches wanted me to get bigger and stronger for my senior year of football. Every summer we were tested in the bench press, squats, one mile run, 40 yard dash, shuttle run, and a few other agility tests, so the coaches would have some way of grading our athletic ability. Since I was a scrawny kid, who only benched 115 lbs. going into my junior year of football, the coaches knew that if I was going to be the quarterback in my senior year, they needed me to hit the weights. I was glad they pushed me into weight training, because when my senior year came around, I increased my bench press to 215 lbs. and graded out very well on my other fitness tests. However, I still only graduated from high school weighing about 155 lbs. (...I told you I was scrawny.)
I then went to the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees in exercise physiology. This is when I really started weight training on a regular basis. From my sophomore year in college through graduate school, working out became part of my lifestyle. I guess I was just lucky enough to make friends with people who liked to work out. As I started putting on more and more muscle, I became more confident in myself and really took pride in the way I looked. I graduated from college weighing 185 lbs. with single digit body fat. I have to say my college years were some of the best times of my life. I guess that's why I decided to go back and get my master's degree.
One of the requirements to complete my master's degree was to do a four month internship at any one of the University approved intern sites located throughout the country. Since I pretty much grew up in the cold (New York and Wisconsin), and already had a job lined up in Wisconsin after I completed my internship, I decided to go to sunny Florida to finish my program. I did not know anyone (except my friend Chris Lambert, who was also interning at the same place) in Florida. It was late September, Wisconsin soon would be covered with snow, so I thought it might be fun to spend part of the winter in Florida. I was right. Through the gym I joined, I met a lot of fun people, which made my time in Florida well worth it. I graduated with my masters degree in December of 1990, weighing 192 lbs., still with single digit body fat.
Enter the real world. My first job out of college was working for Kimberly-Clark Corporation in Wisconsin, starting in January, 1991. But something inside kept telling me I needed to get back to Florida and start my own business. I realized I did not want to work 40 hours per week, making someone else a lot of money, when I could put the same amount of time and effort into working for myself, earning double the money. Also, I was not happy in Wisconsin anymore, and just had to find a way to get back to Florida.
photos: Eric Jacobson | graphics: Lou Messina