Who I am (and why you should care)
Hi, My name is Drew and creating a site like Outmatch Fitness has been a dream of mine for a long time.
However, in order for you to understand, who I am and why I do what I do, you probably first have to understand a little bit about how I got here. And to keep this from getting too incredibly boring, I’ll try to keep this as short as possible and use some pictures along the way.
From the very beginning, I’ve always felt like I was physically behind everyone else and needed to catch up. This tends to happen when you’re born two months early and only weigh 4 1/2 pounds.
So growing up, I was always that skinny kid who looked like I might be a decent basketball player because I was tall, but unfortunately, I lacked the other necessary skills involved in playing the game such as dribbling, shooting, and jumping.
This was also back in the 80’s and 90’s when being skinny wasn’t nearly as cool as it is now.
This was back in the day when massively muscled action heroes like Stallone and Schwarzenegger filled our movie screens and larger than life professional wrestlers were on our televisions
Back then I had one goal. I wanted to get bigger in order to be more like these guys.
This was long before Google was a thing so I was forced to go old-school and rely on books in order to try and learn the secrets behind building these massive physiques.
I tried everything from full body workouts, to split routines, to supersets,
I took vitamins and every supplement I read about in the magazines. I drank gallons of milk mixed with weight gainer powders and ate sacks of cheeseburgers until I felt sick… but still nothing.
Of
Not only that but at that point, I was still growing 2-4 inches a year so what few muscles I had back then were probably just trying to hold my bones together, let alone become massive like Arnold.
So eventually, I simply gave up.
For the next ten years and all the way through college, I was convinced that there was nothing more I could do. I was simply destined to be that tall skinny awkward guy who hated the way he looked in shorts and a t-shirt.
Dude, do you even lift?!
Later in my thirties, I had kids and gradually found out that I was able to gain weight thanks in part to eating all of the leftover chicken nuggets, hamburgers, and fries from my kid’s happy meals.
It was at that point, that I finally got back into the gym and changed my focus more toward powerlifting because I had noticed that as long as I continued to add weight to my body (which had become remarkably easy), my lifting numbers kept going up. It’s no coincidence that the strongest guys on the planet are also some of the biggest.
This also meant that I no longer had to worry about things such as losing weight, doing cardio, or being able to walk up a flight of stairs without gasping for air. The only problem was that when I looked in the mirror all I could see was some fat pudgy dude who looked like he had never set foot in a gym a day in his life.
Something had to change
Sooner or later in your thirties, most of us start to realize that those carefree days of eating whatever the hell you want and lying on the couch binging on Netflix begins to take its toll.
Things that you used to take for granted like being able to easily lose 10 pounds, playing a game of basketball with your kids, and riding a rollercoaster without feeling like you’re going to puke now become harder.
Even though I was now lifting more weight than I ever had before, I still hated myself every time I looked in the mirror.
Since I obviously had no plans to become a competitive powerlifter, I began to question why exactly I was doing any of this?
I was now 70 pounds overweight, my blood pressure was high, my thyroid had given up, I constantly felt like crap, and I was quickly running out of pants sizes.
I knew something had to change.
So after spending half of my life trying desperately to “bulk up” and gain muscle, I knew that it was time to reverse course and lose some weight.
Like anything else, I began to do my research and as you probably already know, there is no shortage of information in the “how to lose weight” category. Hundreds of books and thousands of online articles are published every year explaining the secrets of weight loss. I had never tried to lose weight before, which is probably why I fell for every fad diet and online diet guru out there.
I tried low-carb, low-fat, paleo, keto, intermittent fasting, no sugar, no grains, no white foods, no food after 6 p.m., and probably a dozen other diets that promised to melt the pounds away. Some of these diets worked better than others, but I constantly found myself jumping from diet to diet with the promise of better, faster, and easier.
Eventually, the weight started to come off, but looking back now, I have a feeling that it was as much the fact that I was suddenly paying attention to all of the crap I had been eating rather than the magical nature of any of these diets themselves.
So why should you care about any of this?!
First of all, let me start off by saying that I certainly don’t claim to have all of the answers.
As someone who has fallen for a lot of fitness lies misinformation and purchased a lot of crappy exercise gadgets over the years, I will be the first to tell you not to believe everything that you read on the internet or see on TV. There’s a lot of bad (or at least badly outdated) fitness information out there and anyone who tells you that they have the answer is probably moments away from trying to sell you something.
Let’s face it, despite what my youthful picture above may indicate, I’m not some young twenty-year-old Snappy-Gram mega influencer who has the ability to effortlessly lose weight and gain muscle all while taking selfies on a vacation I can’t afford because I’m currently putting two kids through college.
In reality, I’m a forty-something-year-old guy who has made a lot of mistakes along the way. Just as I struggled to put weight on early on in my life, I struggled just as hard to take it off, and keep it off (ironic I know).
In fact, one of the reasons that I finally decided to put in the work to become a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS-NSCA) and a personal trainer (CPT-NASM) was the fact that I was sick and tired of getting crappy information off the internet and falling for every fitness superstar out there who was willing to sell me the answers.
If I’ve learned anything along the way, it’s the fact that we are all the same but different.
In some ways, we are all alike. There are some basic principles that apply to everyone since we all human beings and operate essentially under the same biological system. Science has told us that we share 99.9% of our DNA with every other human being on the planet. So as much as we may want to believe otherwise, we are probably not the unique snowflakes we think we are.
This is why when we continue to eat more energy food than we need, we’ll eventually get fat. And when we end up not using something for a while whether it’s our muscles, heart, or brain, it will eventually atrophy and weaken.
At the same time, we are also very different in some important ways. We all have different heights, weights, hormones, medical issues, muscle fiber types, limb lengths, and muscle insertion points, all of which can significantly affect the way our bodies function both inside the gym and out.
This is also the reason there are thousands of diet and workout books out there but none of them are a one-size-fits-all solution.
I’m certainly far from perfect but I continue to work hard everyday trying to get a little bit better.
By the time you get to be my age, you no longer have the option to coast.
The truth is that when you’re in your twenties, almost any diet or workout plan will work if you do it consistently. However, sometime between the ages of
Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean that people in their 40’s or 50’s can’t lose weight, get stronger, and look like a rockstar. It just means that you can’t play by the same rules as that 20-year-old fitness guru you follow on Instagram.
The proof is in the pudge
If you stick around here long enough, you’ll discover that I really dislike posting selfies and I’m usually not a big fan of those who do.
Having said that, however, I also hate people who aren’t willing to practice what they preach. I don’t know about you but I’ve seen far too many personal trainers and fitness gurus out there who look like they haven’t stepped in the gym for a very long time.
So I’m going to break my own rule here and post a few
Unfortunately, the picture to the left wasn’t even me at my heaviest. Not surprisingly, I avoided shirtless pictures during this period of my life (which explains my savage tan) and thankfully very few of them exist.
Not that you would know by looking at this picture, but I was still working out and deadlifting over 400lbs, which sounds more impressive than it is because it was much less than 2x my bodyweight at the time.
Finally, this is today. Far from perfect, but much happier and healthier than I was in the picture above.
The journey continues
So that’s my story so far.
Who knows where it will lead from here, but I wanted to share it with you, not so that I could post obnoxious selfies of myself, but to give hope to those of you who may be currently struggling.
Maybe I’m wrong. but I have to believe that there are a lot more people like me out there than Johnny Instagram awesome face.
Despite what you might believe, no one is born knowing this stuff.
Nobody is born knowing the difference between a deadlift, a dumbbell, and a dip. Let’s face it, fifty years ago, nobody cared. Back then, the only people who hung out at gyms were weirdos and bodybuilders. At the same time, we didn’t have a Chipotle and a Starbucks on every corner and most of us didn’t sit on our asses for 8 hours a day at work, drive home, and then lie on our couches binging Netflix until it was time to go to bed.
The world has changed, which means that we may need to make some changes as well.
We need to find a way to educate ourselves on nutrition, health, and fitness so we don’t fall victim to all of the lies, marketing hype, and misinformation that is out there. The information and research on this website
So welcome to Outmatch Fitness, I’m glad you’re here!
Now let’s get started…
Outwork. Outlast. Outmatch