pete.vanhowe’s BodyBlog

My greatest success in bodybuilding has very little to do with me.  I’ve worked as a trainer before, and as any trainer can tell you, your clients are always something of a mixed bag.  Many get frustrated because they don’t see overnight results, or many just don’t want to apply some discipline in the kitchen.   Most  start out strong, but then taper off.  They begin to ‘drag’ themselves to the gym, where you ‘torture’ them.  They begin to become ‘too busy’ to workout out and eventually stop showing up all together.   As a trainer, it can leave you more than a little frustrated.

Many people ask me for fitness advice, and Dominick was one of them.   He was overweight and out of shape.   He was soft spoken, and when he walked around his shoulders were slouched and he stared at the ground.  He didn’t walk so much as ‘shuffled.’   Later, after I got to know him very well, I discovered that his entire family was obese.  His father, even though he was overweight himself, often called his own son ‘fat’ and told him he’d always be a ‘fat loser.’   Dominick was also a junior enlisted paratrooper in my unit, so he had basically been around nothing but yelling and demeaning comments his entire career.  He had basically been told he was a loser so many times that he believed it.

When Dominick first asked me for advice he was merely curious as to why I ate so much protein.   I answered him.   A few days later I asked me about the supplements he saw me mixing together in a protein shake.   After that he began to pester me daily with all sorts of questions about bodybuilding and fitness.    I thought I was merely satisfying his curiosity.   What I didn’t know was that Dominick had started working out on his own, using my advice as a guide.   Self-conscious about his weight, he went to the gym at 2 in the morning when no one was there.  Some days he would be discouraged, but I always told him that consistency and discipline were the two most important things about fitness.

Slowly, Dominick changed.  I didn’t notice it at the time, but looking back on it the change is startling.  I guess I had been discouraged after giving advice to so many people who didn’t do anything with it and wondered why they still looked the way they did.  But Dominick was changing right before my eyes.  His weight dropped and he became noticeably more muscular.  His daily questioning demanded more precise, scientific answers.  Not only did he change physically, he started acting differently.  He stood up straighter, made eye contact with people, and stopped dragging his feet when he walked.

One day not too long ago Dominick came up to me.  He wanted to thank me for what I had done for him.  I looked up at him puzzled, and then realized the man standing before me was someone completely different from the one that I met months ago.  He had lost over 45 pounds and was weighing in at a muscular 180.  Then he told me about his family growing up, and he said that I was the first person he had known who had actually encouraged him in anything.  He said he had a thought he was a loser, but that I had taught him what it was to be a winner.  He had fallen in love with bodybuilding just the same as I had years ago.  Dominick went on to tell me that even his wife, far away back in the States while we were in Iraq, had started to lose weight and get in shape.  He sent her some pictures of himself and she didn’t recognize him anymore.  Then he looked me right in the eye—something he would not do when I met him—and said, “Thank you.  You were the only person who’s ever believed in me.  I feel like for the first time I can go to a beach and take off my shirt.  You made me feel like a winner.  You changed my life. “  I didn’t know what to say, I thought I just answered a few questions…

Yes, I have I have won trophies.  Yes, people compliment me on my physique.  But nothing has been as fulfilling as what Dominick said to me.   He reminded me that bodybuilding doesn’t just build a better body, it can build a better you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 10:21 am and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.