Like most kids my age my hero’s where He-Man, Mr T, and any character played by Arnold.  I wanted to be like them. But alas, when you get to secondary school you get told the “Truth” that you’ll never be like these guys, and very well meaning older friends told me that they tried look good when they were my age too and that it was a matter of fact that you can’t look like the guys in the magazines. This was all very upsetting news for me at the time, since I had done my press up’s and pull up’s since the age of 14 and here I was a skinny eight  stone 18 year old boy.  My dreams where shattered.

Then one day when I was about 19, I met a man ten years older than me training in his garage, lifting what then looked like Herculean weights, he stood 6’2” and weighed 18 stone of muscle. Wow these men where real, they did exist and here I was standing face to face with one. Very soon we became good friends and he taught me some of the greatest secrets and principles that I still teach today. He taught me that it really does not matter where you start, all that matters is that you do. He also taught me that real strength comes from the mind, and that when he started he too was a skinny kid that could not put weight on.

Three years later I was 13 stone of muscle, which is big for a 5’6” short guy. Two years after that I competed in my first bodybuilding show and won, and did the same the following year and won that too. Wining a body building show is not as easy as it sounds, getting big muscles is one thing but dieting down to 4% body fat is a completely different story. I had to learn everything I could about how the body used food and burned body fat. I sort out the best advice going and made friends with university graduates, read books, magazines and spoke with the leanest bodybuilders around then compared information. Strangely just as applying the muscle building principles I had learned earlier turned out to be a mental game, so did the applying the diet principles, there was definitely a mindset required to be good at all of this stuff.

After winning my second show I was invited to compete with the best in the country a few months later. I did go but the whole thing felt wrong, terribly wrong, I knew I was men’t to go but it certainly was not to win. I had executed my carefully constructed and cerographed routine. Then the monsters came on the stage, they where massive, they where twice my size and had twice as many veins all over them, in places I’m sure your not meant to have them, they where aggressive and moody. Don’t get me wrong they where very impressive form a freak point of view. But this is not what I wanted to look like. I wanted to look naturally fit and aseptically pleasing, a sex god, not some anabolic experiment gone wrong.

It was clear that bodybuilding had become a freak sport and it was not the place for me. I must have done something right though because I constantly had people asking me to train them, and ask for advice. Having the success in achieving what I wanted to look like, felt like it came easy to me, although people would often comment on how hard I trained and how disciplined I was. But for me it was just who I was being so it really did feel effortless. . . . . Who I was being? Felt effortless? Yes it’s true!
What is it that makes someone achieve what they want? What is it that drives them? How comes some people try for years and get no where and others just go from strength to strength? And can anyone learn to be successful even if at first there not? And if there are underlying reasons or answers to these questions can they be taught to others? These are the burning questions that have been on my mind for the past few years. You see I was, what is termed “unconsciously competent” which means I could tell you what to do to get the same results, but I did not understand the thought process or mindset behind the doing. It is not so much what people do; it’s how they do it that counts. There are certain ways of thinking that are required to get certain results and these can be learned by anybody. So for the past few years I have been mapping out these secrets so they can be learned by you.