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Get big and strong in one year
How I gained 18 pounds of muscle in 12 months
When I look back on my 20’s I always smile. It was a decade in which I travelled extensively (before gap years seemed like a mandatory middle class CV insert), set up a few businesses that did well (and plenty that didn’t), met two of my closest friends, learned how to trade financial markets and became a seriously good guitarist. It was also in my twenties that I made a rapid and enormous change to my body.
I started working out at home in my early teens before moving on to the gym and I’d always been in good shape, but in my mid twenties I really just looked like a slightly fatter version of the (very athletic) 18 year old me.
One day I joined a Fitness First in London’s America Square, just behind Tower Hill Station. Within a couple of weeks my girlfriend noticed ‘all the lumps’ on me. My manager, with whom I shared a small office asked me what on earth was happening to my body. By the end of a year’s training I looked completely different. Fellow gym goers had started calling me “The Machine,” and “The Terminator.”
In retrospect, they seem like halcyon days. I trained in that gym early in the morning, late in the evening, with friends from school, with my brother, with friends I’d made later in life and even friends I’d met at the gym…
