Another Muscle and fitness quote
Concurrently, Stallone has immersed himself in a decidedly different project — launching a supplement company, InStone Nutrition. “InStone has been something I’ve thought about for 7–8 years,” he says. “I’ve experimented so much with my body, training and diet-wise, coming up with different looks for movies. For instance, in Cliffhanger I had to develop more leg and shoulder power; in Rocky 3 I got down to 2.8% bodyfat; and of course Cop Land, where I lost all that definition and gained 40 pounds.”
One key in turning his vision into reality was a hands-on approach. “I wanted to stand behind the product by saying, ‘I am the guinea pig,’” he explains. “This isn’t something that I’m just putting my name on. I think that would be quite a disappointment to people. I use the products, and I can safely say, everything is extraordinary. Each of these products is the best in the market in its particular niche.”
Making appearances for The Contender and promoting InStone, Sly is holding steady at a chiselled 196 pounds, 4%–7% bodyfat. Through the years, he’s learned an important lesson about diet and training: keep it simple. “I follow a high-protein diet: anything with a face, that’s what I eat, with something green next to it,” he says. “Over the years, my biggest flaw was overtraining. In the gym six days a week, doing more sit-ups at night…my body was in a constant state of breakdown. Now I focus on a variety of exercises, working out three times a week for 90 minutes per session. I really feel good — much stronger than I’ve ever felt, actually. Something’s working.”
That something will be revealed in depth in the coming months, as he takes the lessons he’s learned over the years and puts them to paper. “It’ll be a retrospective of how I’ve trained,” he says of a book he has in the works. “From the first time I changed my body for a role, going from 162 to around 200 to play the gang bully in [1974’s] Lords of Flatbush, to Rocky, how all that was done — what worked, what didn’t, the trials and tribulations. Hopefully the end result of my experimentation is that I make it easier for other people to transform themselves.”
