“They say no sane man would inflict my degree of discipline on himself. Perhaps they’re right, but I feel that extremism in the quest of your best is no vice.”
So sayeth the late Austrian bodybuilder Andreas Münzer in a 1995 article titled “The Ideal Way to Massive Legs”.
He died a year later from internal bleeding brought on by a combination of his diet that was extreme even by the standards of professional bodybuilders (he maintained a bodyfat percentage close to zero year round), blasting buckets of gear, and ignoring his body when it was screaming for him to stop.
Sure looks like a pretty vice-ridden way of living to me.
But what do I know?
Onward.
According to an account from his last full day on this Earth I found on Reddit (no clue on the original source, but tallies with other sources I have read so seems legit):
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“On the morning of March 13, Andi’s stomach pains became intense. His gut was swollen and hard. His bill had come in. He was fairly sure that this time he couldn’t meet it. The debt was too big. The agony grew. Andi had a 15-year relationship with pain. Pain was an old pal of his. He thought that he knew pain pretty well by now. Pain had thrown a lot at him and he’s taken it. Pain meant change. Pain meant growth. It meant strength. Andi was a king of pain.
Andi tried to ride it like he’d ride the hardest reps, to use pain as joy. Inside the bulging horror that began under his ribcage, artificial testosterone had docked on to the receptors of the muscles. Once there, it instructed the production of proteins which thickened the muscle walls. The blood vessels, already strained, could no longer withstand Andi’s blood pressure. They ruptured. Under the dense gut muscle, Andi was bleeding to death.”
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According to his autopsy report, Münzer’s liver contained “numerous tennis ball sized tumours” and “half his liver consisted of a crumbly mass, similar to polystyrene”. Additionally, he had “shrivelled testes” and a heart twice the average size of a normal man’s (650g vs 300-350g).
When I first learned about Münzer, I was deep in my dumb HaRdCoRe phase, revelling in my injuries and pushing my diet to the extreme (would starve myself all week then eat two pizzas, six muffins, and a cheesecake to “carb up”), all the while bragging to anyone who would listen about having literally no life outside of training.
Reading his sad tale shocked me out of that shyte pretty sharpish.
It’s also why I’m now at best indifferent to most Fitness Content™ and the coaches, athletes, and dimfluencers producing it, because usually what they are shilling isn’t so distant from what put Andreas in the ground at just 31 years old.
All that said…
I am not anti working hard by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just the hard work I advocate is not so much about developing the fortitude to withstand horrendous punishment, but rather the patience to wait for your efforts to bear fruit.
‘Cuz you are going to be doing a lot of waiting, if you opt to do things the smart, sustainable, safe way.
Especially in the arena of weight loss.
But that actually works to your advantage, because the slower you lose the weight, the easier time you have keeping it off in my bountiful experience.
For more on my “painfully slow” weight loss methodology, see my book:
“The Weight Loss Manifesto”
Unlike almost all of my other Real Paper books, this one’s not too pricey (just £20 with free postage).
Read all about it here:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/manifesto/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman