Solomon MacyS
Owner, coach
2000-2001
Quick History
I was always a fairly thick individual. Before I began resistance training I'd never had a body-fat percentage below 16%. At my heaviest I was a whopping 228lbs at age 13. Needless to say I received my fair share of teasing.
In 1999 I moved to London, Ont. to begin my high-school career. In my second year I joined the football team and the wrestling team, where I received MVP honours for both. I also started pumping iron in the school gym most lunch hours and before/after school. With the combination of intense sport conditioning and resistance training I managed to go from 228lbs entering high school (my heaviest) to about 168lbs (my lightest) gradually over 4 years.
This was just enough to make the 77kg wt class for my final year of wrestling when I clinched first in my division and won "Best Male Athlete" at the London & Region Championship. I followed that up with a 2nd place finish at WOSSA, making my consecutive return to Provincials, and graduated "Outstanding Male Athlete" from Montcalm S.S. (an honour I shared with G. Thomas).
During that time training my butt off with weights, football, wrestling, and a dash of rugby - I did indeed take an interest in my diet. As I thumbed through pages of fitness magazines and supplement books I realized that the common threads were eat more protein, eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, and if I wanted to lose fat, to eat less. I think a key component to my successful implementation of these concepts was that I already had a solid foundation of strength & conditioning, which gave function to the food.
Early on I adopted this idea of "functional eating" - that is, eating to serve or support a purpose. It didn't matter if I wanted to build muscle, get faster, or get leaner - every morsel played a part. From a physiological standpoint, this really is the often overlooked (at least by the lay-media) crux of weight management and sport performance. You can't just eat protein and get bigger, you can't just cut calories and improve your body composition, you can't just drink beet juice and expect to be a Ronnie Coleman in the gym or an Usain Bolt on the track.
Training drives adaptation - not nutrition. Nutrition merely facilitates good training. People say, "You can't out-train bad diet", or "Results are 90% nutrition", and lets not forget "Abs are made in the kitchen". If you erroneously believe that energy intake is 90% of creating a calorie deficit, running a 5-min mile, or increasing your bench, you're wrong. Is it important? Extremely. But acute and longitudinal results in strength & aesthetics depends on all its facets: resting metabolic rate, sleep duration and quality, NEAT, TEF, training frequency, intensity, consistency, injury prevention, skill acquisition, multi-lateral development, food behaviours, mental discipline, kitchen skills...
When all is said and one, the more you commit yourself to mastering your own mental discipline, your physical skills, and your positive habits, the more muscle you'll develop (and retain over your lifetime), the more fat you'll burn, and the less you'll have to dwell on the type of food you put into your body. Enjoy life, enjoy food, work hard and expect success.
Coach Solly
I was always a fairly thick individual. Before I began resistance training I'd never had a body-fat percentage below 16%. At my heaviest I was a whopping 228lbs at age 13. Needless to say I received my fair share of teasing.
In 1999 I moved to London, Ont. to begin my high-school career. In my second year I joined the football team and the wrestling team, where I received MVP honours for both. I also started pumping iron in the school gym most lunch hours and before/after school. With the combination of intense sport conditioning and resistance training I managed to go from 228lbs entering high school (my heaviest) to about 168lbs (my lightest) gradually over 4 years.
This was just enough to make the 77kg wt class for my final year of wrestling when I clinched first in my division and won "Best Male Athlete" at the London & Region Championship. I followed that up with a 2nd place finish at WOSSA, making my consecutive return to Provincials, and graduated "Outstanding Male Athlete" from Montcalm S.S. (an honour I shared with G. Thomas).
During that time training my butt off with weights, football, wrestling, and a dash of rugby - I did indeed take an interest in my diet. As I thumbed through pages of fitness magazines and supplement books I realized that the common threads were eat more protein, eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, and if I wanted to lose fat, to eat less. I think a key component to my successful implementation of these concepts was that I already had a solid foundation of strength & conditioning, which gave function to the food.
Early on I adopted this idea of "functional eating" - that is, eating to serve or support a purpose. It didn't matter if I wanted to build muscle, get faster, or get leaner - every morsel played a part. From a physiological standpoint, this really is the often overlooked (at least by the lay-media) crux of weight management and sport performance. You can't just eat protein and get bigger, you can't just cut calories and improve your body composition, you can't just drink beet juice and expect to be a Ronnie Coleman in the gym or an Usain Bolt on the track.
Training drives adaptation - not nutrition. Nutrition merely facilitates good training. People say, "You can't out-train bad diet", or "Results are 90% nutrition", and lets not forget "Abs are made in the kitchen". If you erroneously believe that energy intake is 90% of creating a calorie deficit, running a 5-min mile, or increasing your bench, you're wrong. Is it important? Extremely. But acute and longitudinal results in strength & aesthetics depends on all its facets: resting metabolic rate, sleep duration and quality, NEAT, TEF, training frequency, intensity, consistency, injury prevention, skill acquisition, multi-lateral development, food behaviours, mental discipline, kitchen skills...
When all is said and one, the more you commit yourself to mastering your own mental discipline, your physical skills, and your positive habits, the more muscle you'll develop (and retain over your lifetime), the more fat you'll burn, and the less you'll have to dwell on the type of food you put into your body. Enjoy life, enjoy food, work hard and expect success.
Coach Solly
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QUALIFICATIONS
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Credit: Matt Burn Photography
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