Natural Bodybuilding & City Style

UNDERDOG MENTALITY

keeping showing up, keep showing out, block all the noise, and do what you do best.

  

Here’s a never seen before photo from the ’96 Olympia showing an angle that is rarely seen by people at the event.

The photo shows, I think, just how hard I worked on building a physique that was never designed to display pure mass for the sake of it but rather, how I meticulously focused on which areas of my physique I set out to improve each year.

The term of the ‘first of the mass monsters’ has been put to me frequently by others, both during my career and after, but all that does is show how little they actually know about my mental strategies and the effort I took to bring not just a slightly bigger physique each year but one that was improved in specific areas that were very pre-planned. I came in absolutely bone-dry shredded and sacrificed some muscle mass, if it meant I could come in even more diced to show a crazy amount of detail. Probably the opposite to the current day of the Open Class Mr. Olympia strategy of competing with maximum size and fullness, but lacking detail and conditioning, especially from the back.
Like I said last week, I think purely chasing the numbers game is the wrong approach, it’s about combining size, conditioning and having good proportions… making small increases in the right places.

From the top of my traps to my calves, I wanted everything to flow as well as present a level of density and conditioned muscularity that would allow me to dominate my competition.

As much as the photo displays the thickness and width of my lats, which were well-known strong points by now, it also highlights the tremendous sweep to my quads and the hamstring/glute tie-in which although rarely picked up by commentators were an essential component to my legs… especially due to the size of my calves!

And even to the size of my forearms on display here, although I never directly trained them, I managed to build 19inch forearms!
I think forearms and even perhaps calves are slightly lacking nowadays, what do you think?🤔

TOP Bodybuilders Of The World: Lee Priest Ifbb Pro