Introduction and Early Athletic Background

by the way guys surprise we have luke lehman he is the co-founder of muscle nerds he's traveled the world teaching for Charles Polkin and has taught thousands and personal trainers and coaches how to get better at their craft over the past 13 years, including our favorite Allie Gilbert, who a lot of you guys are fans of crazy Allie, crazy Allie. Yeah. She, um, the way that we actually connected is Allie actually shot me a message. Um, and she's like, you know what, can you, uh, you should definitely have my coach on your podcast because, uh, he's really awesome. he uh likes creams and he's had experience with anabolics and peds and i was like wow that sounds right up my alley yeah boy peds um but um we were just discussing some personal experiences with some fun substances but uh going off of that though i kind of wanted to ask you um i listened to some of the podcasts that you were on and some other information it's all it was really cool all the things that you said i actually kind of blew my mind so i got like a lot of questions that i'm really curious to ask you in general anyways but um what did your interest in bodybuilding originate and then when did you first start delving into like peds okay yeah that's a great question so if you go back to the mid 80s so i'm it was i think it was 1984 or so, probably like 84 to 86. I was eight years old and I saw Conan the Barbarian and I wanted to be like Arnold. Like I saw that's the physique I wanted. I want to look like that. And in Texas, like California's got a pretty big like football, like American football gridiron culture. Yeah. And so of course it's Texas. So every single guy is almost expected to be on a football team, especially in a small town where I'm from. So the town, Mahea is the name of the town. Less than 7,000 people live there. So we don't, there's nothing to do. It's way the fuck out in the country. So you either, it's like fucking fighting and football. I mean, that's all you do in your teenage years. And so we start young lifting weights. So we started, man, before junior high you sneak into the high school or sneak into junior high and start smashing weights and then during high school i started power lifting so i wanted to i actually wanted to wrestle so i was seeing watching wrestling movies and i thought man that'd be really cool so i went to the coach said hey can we start a wrestling team and he looks at me and goes luke you're in a tiny like your high school is like 130 something people in your class there's no there's nobody to wrestle in texas unless you're like a super 5a school like a huge school i said okay what else can we do how about powerlifting it's like that sounds cool what is that bench squat deadlift whoever's the strongest awesome so we started a powerlifting team and our school actually dominated everybody no way yeah we just dominated like we had some corn-fed country boys that were just fucking retard strong right like it was it's great because again we don't have anything to do but lift weights and get in trouble and eat. So did that through high school and then left high school, went to college and went, well, I don't want to really want to power lift anymore. I didn't have any friends that were power lifting, but a lot of them were bodybuilders. I'll get into that. So I started getting into that, did that for a while. I never competed in bodybuilding though, because I didn't want to, I don't know. You said before we got on, you said you've always had a hard time with public speaking. Right. And so, so, so did I, I was deathly afraid of that before I started doing the education. And so like, I couldn't think of anything worse than getting in a banana hammock in front of a bunch of people and have them judge my physique. Banana hammocks. Crazy. Yeah. And I'm like, you look at that as well. There's it's almost covering nothing. And I told a friend, I said, look, I don't want to bodybuild, man. My, my pecker's too small to get on stage in a bikini like that. And he says, bro, let me tell you something everybody's got a small dick when a three percent body fat like you got a you got a point but i did that for a while just uh just like amateur bodybuilding um then i got back in the power thing and that's when i got my biggest so i got up to about 270 pounds how old were you at this mid-20s mid-20s so i got up to 270 and still fairly lean so probably like 15 to 17 percent i still had abs i was fucking massive 21 inch arms 21 inch neck 21 inch calves jesus christ yeah and i didn't know what the fuck we were doing back then we were just like throw some drugs in there eat 6 000 calories train it was great yeah um not very healthy though everything became an absolute chore like going up and down stairs forget it like you walk up three flights of stairs you'd have to have a post-workout shake of a nap so yeah did the powerlifting thing for a while again then oh went back into bodybuilding but did men's bikini instead so did uh what is now like men's physique yeah you had board shorts you get up there hated that because you couldn't show your legs wait um how long ago was this oh man that this we're talking like mid-2000s like i was the first i was one of the first competitors for men's fitness men's uh physique i didn't even know i thought men's physique which association was this because i thought men's physique started this is 2012 this was uh in uh mpc mpc maybe it was i was i gotta remember man i'm almost 47 so sometimes i might get the dates i was 20 i was like yeah i was in the like 27 28 29 so it'd been like 20 years ago so that sounds about right maybe i'll have to look back at the day yeah yeah because i remember that it was at uh in dallas what's the big show in dallas it's like uh i can't remember what the big bodybuilding show is. It's massive. But, uh, BSN did like a model search the year before we did the men's physique. And I call the promoters and I go, look, what, what are you guys looking for? Cause I'm a big dude. Like, I don't want to come. And then everybody's tiny because we're not really looking for anything. Just come as you are. I showed up, I was 235 pounds shredded and everybody else looked like Abercrombie models. So I was like, this is bullshit. I'm not doing this again uh and then the next year they did uh men's physique and i started there and did that competed in that for a couple years but again didn't you know i get bored of shit really easy so it's like going into powerlifting then bodybuilding then weightlifting and jujitsu whatever but yeah do they happen to have a weight cap at the time it was all height classes okay it was just high classes right wait no why did i even ask that it's not classic physique it's the men's board shorts bikini no exactly i don't know why i asked that like i i really i know that the weight cap was introduced literally like last year yeah so um okay interesting i thought about doing classic physique because i'm kind of itching to get back up there yeah and i thought about this for years actually when covid hit uh i was actually in pretty decent shape and only a few kilos under where i needed to be to be competitive and uh i was getting ready i said fuck it i'll I won't tell anybody. I'll just show up and get on stage and just do it and go home. And then COVID happened and they shut everything down. So then I went, oh, fuck. Gotcha. The hard part is being in Australia is getting what you need So even getting TRTs is a massive undertaking It freaking difficult there right Yeah Yeah I been told Dude I think you should absolutely go back into classic physique especially if you're feeling the itch now. I am feeling the itch. Yeah. Just to see what you can do, right? Right, yeah. I mean, if you don't do it now, then when are you going to, right? I feel like. Be the best 80-year-old bodybuilder in the world. Hey, I mean, one of my buddies, Paul Barnett, he got his IFBB Pro card just like, what, last year maybe? and um how old was he i'm trying to remember 50s 60s 50s maybe yeah yeah i don't know um i might be butchering this but yeah bro he looked freaking crazy and he got his ifbb pro card in open body building dude was massive it giant i think his stage weight was like his stage weight was above 250 pounds god so man after gigantic after being 270 even above 250 it's just so uncomfortable yeah but luckily for classic it's only like a hundred it's like 96 98 kilos which i weigh more than right now or i have since i got here when i got here i found some trt plus nice trt a couple of a couple of extras that were just laying around yeah yeah it put on 22 pounds as i've been here so