155 @ 5'7" @ 6-7% is pretty damn good actually, especially if he had tiny joints
He did have tiny joints. He never grew much, but he didn't need to. At 5'10" and 215lbs at 6%BF for my show, my upper body got beat by his. We'd be in the gym, and I'd pull up the shirt to show the abs. Then he'd come by, take his shirt off, hit a few poses, and crush me. Then he'd eat a granola bar and laugh about drinking some scotch for supper and smashing broads.
It was one of the many reminders in my youth where the world was teaching me that genetics are the lion's share of the battle. That no matter how many drugs I took, no matter how hard I worked or the food I ate, this guy who I outweighed by over 50lbs could beat me easily by eating granola bars, spray cheese, crackers and Budweiser. And no, he didn't take a lot of gear, if any. He knew I was gassed to the nines in those days, and he never once asked me about it, my source, or what I did. He couldn't have cared less and used to just shake his head at me when heard me talk about it...like a disappointed older brother.
If you have shit genetics, you'll always be shit, just slightly less so if you have decent drugs and a good work ethic. But if you have great genetics, you can be a GOAT with some decent work and maybe a bit of drugs, if any at all. It's amazing how naturally great some people are.
It's like intelligence. I can spend the rest of my days and nights studying advanced mathematics and physics. I will never even come close to sniffing what professors in great universities are doing. They're simply operating at a different plane, and have a head start whose gap can't be closed by a hardworking average person. I say that as a guy who earned his masters from the best school in the country, finished top 8% globally on the GMATs. At my school, everyone was smart like that. And then there were the really smart guys...the guys who scared you with how fast and smart they were with numbers and logic. Guys who smoked up before a financial engineering final and scored a 98% and were bitching about not getting perfect. Meanwhile, I studied my ass off and limped out with a "B". It's genetics. Always has been...always will.
The "hard work" mantra is what average people tell their average kids to give them hope that life can be made fair. It really can't. You have it or you don't. If you don't, you can do better, but the chances of being great are so slim, and the margin for error so small, that an average person being great is statistical anomaly to be ignored.
