Dorian Yates in the Daily Express

[The Grim Lifter]

http://www.express.co.uk/sport/othersport/593333/body-building-dorian-yates-mr-olympia

HIS screaming body used to wake him at night urging him to eat. His strict discipline forced him to ignore all that and it made him the UK's most successful bodybuilder.

By GARY CHAPPELL
PUBLISHED: 08:08, Fri, Jul 24, 2015 | UPDATED: 08:43, Fri, Jul 24, 2015
   
   
   
   



DORIAN YATES
Dorian Yates is the UK's most successful ever bodybuilder
At his competitive peak, Dorian Yates weighed 265lbs and boasted 21-inch arms, a 58-inch chest, legs with a circumference of 30 inches and body fat of just three per cent. The average man has an acceptable body-fat percentage of 15-20 and 13-inch arms.

Your first thought is almost certainly, 'anabolic steroids'. And you would be right. But it is also right that such substances did not make Dorian Yates the best in a sport which takes mental discipline to another level.

It is 24 hours a day, seven days a week, attacking each individual muscle with weights, then putting all the pieces into place for those muscles to grow – weighing out each of your six to eight daily meals to the gram to calculate the right amount of protein and carbohydrate in your 5,000 calories, getting the right amount of sleep.


"You are hungry all the time for the last two months before a competition," said Yates. "Every survival thing on your body is telling you that you must eat.

"Your sleep gets broken too because your blood sugar gets low and it sends a signal, 'wake up you're starving'. It needs a lot of mental discipline to get ready for a contest at that level."

That was ingrained in him from a young age. His dad died of a heart attack when Yates was 13 and, when his mum moved the family to Birmingham years later planning to remarry, her new love died of a heart attack within 12 months. At 19, Yates was in a Youth Detention Centre.

"Losing my dad affected me massively," he said. "When I was a teenager, you were either a punk, a skinhead or a mod or you weren't on the scene. Me and my mates were skinheads."


Yates' no-nonsense muscle-building era also provided the bedrock of today's gym craze
When one of those mates decided to undress a mannequin from the smashed shop window of a gentlemen's outfitters during the 1981 riots, the rest of the glass already broken came crashing down.

"Within about 30 seconds there were 20 coppers on top of us," said Yates, who served three months. It was in there, amid a cacophony of crying kids, that the penny dropped and not just because he found bodybuilding.

"Something that sticks in my mind was a guy having an incident with one of the screws," said Yates. "The prison officer was saying, 'if you don't change your attitude, you are going to spend the rest of your life in and out of prison'. And the guy looked him in the eye and said, 'yeah and I don't give a ****'.

"And I thought to myself, 'well I clearly do give a ****'. I never want to be in this situation again where I am not in control of my life and not free to do what I want, where I want and when I want to do it. You are a number - you're not even a person.

"The only thing I knew was that this thing I was doing [bodybuilding] was positive and if I did it and was disciplined enough, something good was going to come out of it.

"Three years later I was British champion. I didn't have a car, no spare money but I didn't care, I was really enjoying what I was doing."

Early success saw him backed by an investor and soon Temple Gym was born – the dungeon in which he hid himself while building a monster physique that would win six Mr Olympia titles, the highest accolade in international bodybuilding.

He remains the only athlete not based in America to have won Mr Olympia – "It was massive. Almost a fantasy, not real. But it is real. I made it real."

Six-time Mr Olympia Dorian Yates
Dorian Yates
Yates graduated from being a young skinhead to a fledgling bodybuilder
Yates' no-nonsense muscle-building era also provided the bedrock of today's gym craze. "All sports now are accepting that bodybuilding can assist them in their sports," he said.

"We had a minor league football team at Temple Gym strength training twice a week and their coach told me that their results and their game improved dramatically because they were stronger players.

"It's not going to make you a better footballer but if you have that skill and you add weights then you are going to be a better athlete.

"I remember when I was a kid rugby players were some big guys that drunk a lot of beer but now they have proper training programmes and diets and all that. And the pioneers of all that is bodybuilding."

Today, at 53, the mass might have gone but priorities change. "I am more interested in health, quality of life, longevity and how training and nutrition affects that as you get older," he said.

"That is what is close to my heart now and possibly being a role model for people who are getting older, want to stay in shape and maintain their fitness and mobility - more practical concerns than a 21-inch arm."

Food for thought? 5,000 calories worth.

[The Grim Lifter]

http://www.express.co.uk/sport/othersport/593336/former-champion-bodybuilder-Dorian-Yates-drugs-bodybuilding-and-Mr-Olympia

Steroids, stardom and sunglasses in the gym: Dorian Yates on the life of a bodybuilder

Yates on drugs:

"There are two drawbacks to steroids; one is the potential health problems and the second one is it is very easy for people to dismiss everything you have put into it by saying, ‘yeah but he takes steroids, that’s why he looks like that’.

“Well obviously it is not because there are millions of people who take steroids and there are not millions of people who look like Mr Olympia. It gives you a certain advantage but years and years of hard work and years of sacrifice and dieting go into one of those physiques, so for people to dismiss that and not realise that is the main drawback. They do not make the champion.

Yates on the public image of bodybuilding:

"Everybody is interested in being in shape and having a good body and my feedback is only positive. Everyone that speaks to me it is always very positive.

"Of course if you put a picture of a bodybuilder in context shape with two per cent body fat huge muscle mass and veins sticking out all over the place, in his underwear covered with oil and put that picture in front of somebody and say do you like this you will probably get a totally different reaction because you are looking at something so extreme.

"But you are just looking at a picture. I find when I meet people in person its difference because everyone wants a bit of advice how to lose a bit of weight. Everybody wants to be in shape really and like to talk to someone who has been there and done it.

Yates on bodybuilding:

"The whole image projected from the Weider’s, was a guy on the beach with a protein shake and his sunglasses on. I took a whole new approach.

"When I did the photoshoots I wanted to do real workouts with real weights. Before they had never done that, they wanted to get the correct lighting and I said it is not about that it is about the energy of the photo.

"If people see me lifting weights with veins ******* popping out of my neck and they can see that is really genuine and they will be inspired by it and people will more interested in that than whether the lighting is OK and the angle is right.

"So I started doing that and doing the pictures in black and white and not wearing sunglasses, I mean why the **** am I going to wear sunglasses in a gym, I come from fucking Birmingham.

"It was a whole new image, hardcore, blue collar, working class, in the dungeon, in the gym and this inspired a whole new generation of people. And I think the reason for that is these guys who were lifting weights, they could relate to me because the majority of them are working-class guys. They were like, ‘****, this guy is like us’.

Yates on posing in trunks:

"Most bodybuilders are somewhat extravert so they probably enjoy that whole thing of people looking at them all the time and being on stage. I was an introvert and not really interested in that.

"So initially getting up on stage I was really nervous, I was like, ‘wow, I am going to be standing there and all these people are going to be looking at me’? But funnily enough it wasn’t too traumatic.

"It felt quite natural because I felt I looked good and I knew how to do the poses.

"The audience can see you very clearly because you are under the lights but you can’t really see the audience unless you really focus because you want to see somebody. So I just concentrated on looking at the back of the hall and not making any eye contact.

Yates on Mr Olympia

"My first Mr Olympia was 1991 in Florida against the great Lee Haney, who became Mr Olympia in 1984. I started training properly in 1983.

"I realised at this point that I had a legitimate chance to beat this guy - who was actually my hero.

"So I had to change my mental outlook from being, ‘Wow, this is Lee Haney, the icon we are all trying to aspire to’, to, ‘This is the guy I am trying to beat’. I couldn’t be in awe of this guy because if that is your attitude then I am not going to have much chance of winning.

"By the time I went there I did believe in myself and went there trying to beat him and I actually got a very close second and that had never happened before that someone beat Haney in one of the three rounds of judging. After making it a record of eight, he retired.

"So the title was open in 1992, which was strange because I was almost there as a favourite. I had a mental battle with myself going into this contest thinking, ‘I could win this thing. That means I am going to be the best bodybuilding in the whole world, the whole ******* planet. How can that be? Hold on, but it can be.

"Let’s be honest, is there anyone else that has given more to this sport than you, or who trains harder or diets better, not possible. It is not possible to do any more. So there is no one out there doing more than me, so there is nobody out there who deserves it more than me, so why not, why not me?’ So I got over the mental hurdle and by the time I got to the contest I was ready to win it."

[The Grim Lifter]

Ditch drug tests to make sport more honest, claims the UK's most successful bodybuilder

Dorian Yates won six Mr Olympia titles in the 1990s in a sport in which performance-enhancing substances are "an integral part". And he says not only are the current policing of such drugs in mainstream sport a waste of time but believes steroid use is now so widespread it is akin to breast surgery or botox.

"Does anyone seriously think there are no drugs in Olympic sports just because they do some kind of testing?" said Yates. "They are highly competitive sports with highly competitive people and, just with competitive business, people do whatever they can to get ahead.

"Maybe in bodybuilding, because it is such a small sport, we can be totally honest and say, 'look, it is part of the sport, we use steroids', whereas if you are part of athletics, or one of these mainstream sports with TV and sponsors, you could never say that.

"People see these guys on TV and it is all squeaky clean - but it would be so naive to think that if you could take something that would increase your performance by whatever, two per cent, five per cent, 10 per cent, one per cent, even half a per cent, it is not being used. People could not afford not to take it.

"But it's not like you are putting a rocket pack on your back in the 200m, you still have to run it, it is still your body, you're enhancing an aspect of it."

Yates claims that there are various ways to avoid a positive test and that is making sport more dishonest. "There are so many ways round the test that it is more honest to say, 'we don't do the test'," he said. "It's just a cosmetic exercise to say to the public, 'hey, we do testing, we don't want drugs in the sport'.

"It would be more honest if testing was abolished. With the drug tests throughout the ages, you actually create more of an imbalance because the people with the funding and the doctors can really avoid getting a positive [test] and they will be at a bigger advantage than someone from a poor country or with less facilities. So does testing make it a fairer or even sport?"

The IFBB, the governing body for bodybuilding, became an official signatory to the WADA anti-doping code in 2003 and officially says it tests its athletes.

"I never see bodybuilding on the sports page and it is not considered to be a sport because of the drug question, because of steroids," said Yates. "Steroids are used, they are an integral part of professional bodybuilding.

There is no testing because, if you buy a ticket and you see someone run 100metres in under 10 seconds, you will not want to buy a ticket to see someone run 100m in 10 and a half or 11 seconds. It's the same thing with professional bodybuilding.

"But steroids are so widespread that guys are using them as a cosmetic improvement just as girls are getting a breast implants or botox."

[njflex]

AS HONEST AS HE COULD BE,,,I ALWAYS LIKED HIS APPROACH/AND ANTI WEIDER APPROACH TO MARKETING A BBER,LIKE HE SAID SUNGLASSES AND USING PROP WEIGHTS AND PHOTO SHOOTS..HE WAS REAL DEAL...MOST PEOPLE USE HIM AS THE AMBASSADOR TO HARDCORE TRAINING/PUSHING THE DOSAGES AND NEWER COMPOUNDS TO THE EXTREME,,SO BE IT..I ALWAYS LIKE THE SMALLER GUYS IN TERMS OF PHYSIQUE ,BUT HE WAS A BRUTE..

[Dokey111]

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