Happiness According to a Bodybuilder
“What are you having for dinner?” is not a question I ever ask my boyfriend. First of all, he doesn’t eat just one dinner, he has at least six meals a day. The answer to what he eats is the same every night, and has been for years. Chicken and rice. Maybe a little bit of broccoli so he doesn’t get scurvy.
He’s used to getting weird looks in the grocery store. It’s not typical to buy thirty eggs at once, especially in this economy. While I could spend hours wandering around Target, his shopping trips are hyper-focused. Chicken. Rice. Eggs. Broccoli. A little beef if he’s feeling creative. The end.
His middle name is Rockford, so as a baby, his parents nicknamed him Rocky. It’s certainly a unique choice for a baby, but it’s funny how fitting it is now that he’s training to be a professional bodybuilder. The name fits him; as long as I’ve known him, he’s marched to the beat of his own drum.
Rocky and I met on the first day of high school, and we were best friends for years before we ever dated. Even today, after years of dating, I still think of him as my best friend. It definitely seems strange to author a blog about my partner. But this blog is about happiness, and although he might seem serious on the surface, Rocky is without a doubt the kindest and most positive person I know.
Rocky has always loved going to the gym and used to be a competitive powerlifter. The obsession with bodybuilding, though, really developed over the pandemic. At the time, his grandparents owned a gym, and like everything else during the pandemic, it shut down. This left us in a unique and lucky spot–as everyone else learned how to workout from home, we had unlimited access to an empty commercial gym. So, in the middle of the night, after hours of taking college classes online, we would unlock it to go workout.
Since there wasn’t much else to do during the pandemic, we spent all of our free time there. I got into the best shape of my life, and found a lasting love for fitness. Rocky, though, found his life’s purpose. He began making “insane gains,” as he would say, and he realized fitness was what he was meant to do for a living, mostly because it made him so happy.
“I found something I was good at and ran with it,” he says. “[I love it] because I get to constantly progress at something I view as a project.”
And, as I’ve learned, if you’re serious about being a professional bodybuilder, every aspect of your life has to change.
Every Sunday, I watched as he filled the kitchen with smoke learning to cook pounds of chicken. Instead of impromptu date nights, he started asking me days or weeks in advance so he could plan his “cheat meals.” As an extremely organized person myself, this level of planning was a dream come true for me. And as Covid restrictions were lifted and we returned to work and school full-time, he had to plan every hour of his life to build training into his schedule. But he made it a priority, and he did it.
“My whole day is centered around eating and training. If I’m training, that’s what I look forward to all day,” Rocky says. “Just eating enough on a given day is a top priority.”
Today, he lives an extremely healthy but atypical life for someone in their twenties. He doesn’t drink. Dessert isn’t even on his radar. He goes to bed before 10pm, and wakes up ridiculously early. Although his ultra-health conscious life sounds miserable to most people, for him it’s a perfect fit.
“It provides me with a lot of structure that I wouldn’t otherwise have, and because of that allows me to be better at everything else that I do,” he says. “Being a good person is always going to be more important to me than bodybuilding. But I know I’m a better person because of bodybuilding.”
Rocky strongly believes that mental and physical health are intertwined. And although his main source of happiness is “being around people [he] care[s] about,” not bodybuilding, he believes fitness can positively change most people’s lives. Before bodybuilding, he admits that he never tried to become exceptionally good at anything. That, more than the sport itself, is what impacted his life.
“It’s not for everybody, but if you really feel lost in life, you need to get in the gym and see how it feels,” he says. “Just having a routine can help a lot of people, even if it’s not competitive bodybuilding. Just going to the gym three times a week, and then making that four, and then eating a little healthier makes a difference.”