He actually had a lot of muscle for a basketball player, especially if he wasn't lifting weights at all.
Exactly. Sometimes - I find this to be especially true with Arnold nut-huggers - I see threads where everyone agrees with the previous poster and it becomes a giant online circle jerk.
I don't join in on such discussions unless I firmly believe that the previous posters in agreement are correct, and to me it seems obvious that Phil had bodybuilding potential here. But I can actually explain that, at least from my POV: Phil has an above average muscle fiber density, which is apparently in those photos. It's completely clear that both his biceps and his triceps extend and proliferate all the way to his elbow joint, which means that - once properly developed - those muscle groups will both be huge.
And eventually they were.
Humble - by lifting, do you mean actual lifting, or do you mean juicing, or do you mean both?
I think he said he didn't start working out until 2002, which would have made him 22 at the time [23 as of December 2002...I think Phil's birthday might be next week].
It's possible that in that photo, he literally walked through a gym only a week earlier, and started an oral steroid [or pro-hormones, which were big at the time - and legal], and literally shot up 7-lb of muscle and water over the course of that week [beginner gains + his amazing genetics], and the result is what we see in that photo.
If I saw a guy who looked like that, it wouldn't be the body size that stood out to me - it would be the muscle fiber density/concentration, which he most definitely has.
He doesn't have a pro bodybuilders size, and if the point is to say that Phil had average person dimensions before he pursued bodybuilding competitively, then yeah. But bodybuilding genetics are more judged based on number of muscle size, shape of the muscle, how small someone's waist can stay while putting on major size, and even how well a person's genetics are to respond to the side effects of steroids. Some people cannot tolerate the side effects of the gear use to become a pro bodybuilder, and that's a part of "genetics" when we're talking about BB.
affeman - with Phil's birthday this month, all I can say is: way to ruin a BB's day.
