Transformation: Albert Aldridge Packs on 52 Pounds!

October 2013 to October 2015  |  2 years  |  @aafitness01

Albert came to lifting from distance running, having pushed his training volume far past what his body could support. Learning to eat properly was the whole transformation.

Where he started

Albert grew up active, playing football for his school and for a local club as a goalkeeper. What he liked was sharing the wins and losses with a team.

Then he wanted a sport where the outcome was entirely his own. Watching Mo Farah compete over 2010 and 2011 pushed him toward distance running, and he threw himself at it completely. He joined a local club, trained with them twice a week, and trained alone the other five days.

The problem was that he knew nothing about nutrition or how it relates to performance. He looked up the weekly mileage of an elite marathoner and simply decided to match it, which is an enormous load for an inexperienced teenager and nowhere near what his body could recover from. Eventually he developed shin splints severe enough to stop him running, directly because of the volume.

By the spring of 2013 he was underweight, and a visit to the doctor with his mother made that unavoidable. That is where the transformation actually starts.

The turning point

The day before the appointment, his mother kept commenting on how thin he looked, and the rest of the family joined in. It made him angry, and he changed the subject every time it came up.

At the appointment they went through his training and his eating, and then the doctor asked him to step on the scale with his shoes off. Albert says the thing that got him was not the number itself, but that his mother was standing there to see it. That embarrassment was the turning point.

Switching from running to lifting took months. He is honest that you cannot flip a mindset overnight when you have organised your life around one thing for years. By October 2013 he had stopped running entirely and started his first proper bulk.

What he changed

His training went through three distinct phases over the two years, which is worth following because it shows someone actually learning.

Phase one, roughly six months

A standard bodybuilding split: chest and triceps, back and biceps, legs, shoulders, arms, with the weekend off. He notes he was only doing three or four sets of direct arm work on the paired days, so barely anything.

Phase two

He experimented with upper and lower splits and with strength and hypertrophy blocks, then landed on a legs, push and pull structure adapted down to five days. It worked for a while, until he realised squatting and training back on the same day was leaving him wrecked, particularly since he likes to push hard on squats.

Phase three, where he ended up

A powerlifting and bodybuilding hybrid he has kept tweaking since: bench and push work on Monday, squats and pull work Tuesday, bench and shoulders Wednesday, deadlifts and pull work Thursday, then bench and push again Friday and squats and pull Saturday. He adjusts it around recovery, joint comfort and which muscles need the focus.

On food, he tracked throughout. He started with the idea that any chocolate, sweets, crisps or junk would ruin his progress and that he had to avoid all of it. He learned that was wrong, started working those foods in moderately, and has since run both gaining and losing phases using flexible dieting.

The hardest part

Undoing the belief that eating more would work against him. He had spent years associating food with slowing down, and rebuilding that took longer than the physical side. It also did not help that he had a fast metabolism, so he needed to eat considerably more than he assumed to gain anything.

His three mistakes: too much cardio, which was burning through calories he needed and loading his joints for no benefit; workouts that ran two hours because he assumed more was better, when he got his best results once he cut them to about 75 intense minutes; and taking advice from everyone, since motivated beginners attract a lot of it and not much of it is expert.

Where he is now

The moment he counts is around March 2014, when people started telling him he looked healthier and bigger. Going from skinny to solid was the whole point.

Three lessons. Focus on progression, whether that is load, time under tension or control, because it is the principle everything else sits on. Build the mind muscle connection, since feeling the target muscle work gets you there faster. And eat enough, accepting that the amount is individual and probably higher than you think.

Less is more can definitely apply to bodybuilding. Albert Aldridge

His advice if you are starting today

Talk to people in your gym, especially those with a similar build, so you can learn from each other. Be selective about advice, including from trainers. And use the enormous amount of good free information available, because whatever your question is, someone has answered it well.

Results vary. This customer's results are not typical and depend on individual effort, training, nutrition and consistency. Statements on this page describe one customer's personal experience and have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. No product mentioned is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.