Dorian Yates Quotes

It is fortunate that I am quite a secure person and my training flew in the face of what everybody else was doing as they were all just copying what the American bodybuilders did, as reported in the magazines. But it didn’t take long before people were listening to me: it happens when you are Mr. Olympia.

I find when I meet people in person it’s different because everyone wants a bit of advice on how to lose a bit of weight. Everybody wants to be in shape and likes to talk to someone who has been there and done it, so I find it is always positive.

Protein is crucial to supplying muscle tissue with the building blocks it needs for its growth.

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

When I was getting ready for a contest I was not thinking size, I was thinking I want to come in shredded, so shredded that people are going to be shocked.

If I were to organize somebody’s diet I would first of all ensure they were getting enough protein, make sure it is the right quality with first class proteins primarily.

Even when I was on vacation after the Olympia, I was looking for gym to train in. Not only was it 24 hours a day, it was 365 days a year. That may have been a little too extreme, but that is what got me there from that little backstreet gym in England to becoming Mr. Olympia.

A lot of people think growth hormone is going to increase the size of your internal organs which bloats the waistline. So I went and had a battery of tests where they actually measure all of your internal organs and mine were all normal.

I came from quite a free background living on this small holding farm, getting on my bike and running round the field and going on little adventures and always felt like a very independent person.

I’ve no wish to run into a contest and make a fool of myself, leaving my career in a cul-de-sac. I want to be a success in the sport of bodybuilding.

I don’t have ambitions to be a movie star or multi-millionaire.

Every single workout counted when I trained, I didn’t miss any meals and made sure I got my sleep.

There are two drawbacks to steroids, one is the potential problems with your health 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.’

Yes, it is not all about training hard. If you do too many sets and too much volume overall, your body is just going to be spending all its time trying to recover and not overcompensating because it doesn’t have enough resources for that.

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

Splitting your meals up into smaller, more frequent portions will enable food absorption and utilization of nutrients.

Your schedule really gets thrown off when you are traveling. And a schedule is very important when you’re training.

I would like to get some points across about my sport and hopefully people can understand it a bit more and appreciate what goes into it, instead of being monkey in a cage.

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 programs and diets and all that. And the pioneers of all that is bodybuilding.

You see guys in amateur contest who are much better conditioned than the professionals. To me the professionals should be better. Just because they are bigger, it doesn’t mean they are better.

I put myself in a trance before I even entered the gym. I’d lock myself in the office and go over the poundages from my last workout and visualize what I’m going to wear, how powerful I’m going to feel.

I grew up in a small holding in Staffordshire near Tamworth, and we had a few ponies and chickens, ducks and dogs and my mum used to do horse-riding lessons, but we moved to Birmingham when I was 13.

I started messing around in my teen years but didn’t really begin training properly until the age of 21. I did a lot of reading prior to that – Mike Mentzer, Arthur Jones and all other notable bodybuilding authors – and just came up with a routine that worked for me.

People told me it was impossible to beat the Americans at their own game; there was a lot of politics involved and outsiders didn’t stand a chance. But if you’re good enough, nothing else matters – I’m living proof of it!

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, let’s be honest.

It’s not good to lose your dad at any time but at 13 years of age you are just going through puberty and growing up and that was a very crucial time and was a hard time to lose my dad and it had a big effect on me.

I didn’t have my dad there and I had another mate who didn’t have his father, and you kind of form your own little family and that’s what gangs are, that’s why you have so many gangs now because there are so many kids without fathers that they seek their own male bonding.

It took me nine years to get to the level of being Mr. Olympia, and it’s pretty much a 24-hour-a-day job every day of the year, really, if you want to compete on that level.

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.

I purposely kept covered up because I didn’t like people looking at me.

Lots of people who do bodybuilding want to walk around in tank top and shorts, because they want to show people what they’ve got – and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t care what people thought.

As long as I’m in good physical shape, that’s a passion for me, to be physically fit. That’s the main thing now, the look is secondary. But I think I look OK, not too bad for a 55 year old.

I was only 30 years old, and the second Mr. Olympia was probably the most outright win in the history of the sport. It literally took the judges two minutes to see the winner, and then they concentrated on who is coming second.

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

What I like is the journey, the year-round struggle to improve.

As an early teen, soccer is the number one thing that you do – and I wasn’t very good at that.

If your body produces more blood glucose than the muscle needs, it gets converted into fat. So always choose low-GI carbs like green vegetables and low-GI rice like basmati.

Exercise and fitness will always be part of my life but it does not have to be lifting huge weights; I like yoga, cycling, walking swimming, anything.

I trained for size in the off-season, but when it came time to get ready for a contest it was all about coming in shredded. The glutes must be striated, with the lower back shredded, no water anywhere, no loose skin. Like you are covered in cling-film.

I think what’s perhaps lacking in Indian body builders is advanced knowledge of the sport. You’d be surprised to know that even the average European isn’t really that aware about it either.

My sole goal when getting ready for a contest was not building a lot of size, although when I was coming up pure muscle size was still very important. I was always really concerned about coming in very sharp conditioning wise.

I was a pretty fit and physical kid, and my first interest was in martial arts and kung fu with all the Bruce Lee movies.

I don’t really care what other people think.

Back when I was competing in the Olympia I think you saw a lot of guys who were in really good shape.