Poliquin - Healthy. Lean. Strong.

A well-fitting dress with the right accessories can create the illusion of fitness – although it does seem a bit suspicious when a woman’s wardrobe consists primarily of tent dresses and muumuus. But if there is one true test of the success of a woman’s workout program, it’s a figure competition. Just ask PICP coach Luke Leaman.
 
Leaman is a BioSignature practitioner and PICP Level 2 coach who works out of Gold’s Gym in Austin (Bee Caves), Texas. He’s a trainer who walks the talk. Six feet tall, Leamanhit the stage at his best bodybuilding shape at 232 pounds and 3.1 percent bodyfat. In strength competitions, he has performed raw lifts of 475 pounds in the bench press and 650 pounds in the deadlift, and in training he has done a triple with 630 pounds in the Olympic squat with no wraps and no belt. Currently he is competing in NPC physique competitions. Most of his business centers on fat loss, and most of his clients are women. He says, “The bread and butter of my business is making people look good naked.”
 
If there was a single incident that sparked Leaman’s interest in weight training, it was the movie Conan. After watching Arnold slash and flex his way to box office riches, Leaman was hooked and got himself a Diversified Products barbell set from Sears with purple plastic plates filled with concrete. Later, his older sister convinced her boyfriends to give him their old weight training equipment. When Leaman moved up to junior high school, he joined the football team and started lifting under the guidance of competitive powerlifters; he continued lifting hard through high school. Unfortunately, a serious ankle injury prevented him from playing at the next level, and he had to quit football. However, Leaman never stopped lifting; he moved on to competitions in powerlifting, bodybuilding, physique and strongman, and he is considering trying the Highland Games.
 
Leaman first heard about Charles Poliquin in the ’90s, reading his articles in Muscle Media magazine. Says Leaman about those articles, “Everything made sense – he didn’t second-guess himself. I tried his programs and they all worked, whereas with the rest of the writers there was no structure – bodybuilding at the time was just ‘go lift, eat and grow’! At the time I was a strength athlete first and a bodybuilder second, so I related more to what Charles was saying about getting bigger with heavier weights and cycling through periodization.”
 
As a trainer, Leaman has seen his clients enjoy tremendous success. And beyond “thank you’s” and checks, he has seen many of them display their success on the stage in figure competitions. Two examples are Brianna Garza and Kim Michalik, who, like transformer robots in movies, have morphed themselves into new creatures.
 
Transformer #1: Brianna Garza
Brianna Garza, age 27 and 5' 8", is a former competitive volleyball player whose playing days ended when she tore her ACL. After the surgery she was told she would never squat again. Months later, in September 2009, she found herself at a bodyweight of 186 pounds with 38 percent bodyfat. That’s when she started working with Leaman.
 
Leaman started with a structural balance assessment, and found that her hamstrings and VMO were weak, she had little knee stability and she had tightness in her hips and ankles. The initial workouts included many types of step-ups and lots of flexibility work. To motivate her, Leaman showed her before-and-after photos of a competitive cheerleader who’d had double knee surgery and had been told by her doctors that she would never squat again – within six months of working with Leaman the cheerleader was squatting. Likewise, Garza was able to squat again – doing more than 200 pounds in Olympic style – and she could also deadlift 235 pounds and do reps in the wide-grip pull-up with 35 pounds. “Brianna was very strong and very dedicated,” says Leaman. “She knew her way around a weightroom, having been a volleyball player, but lacked direction.”
 
As for Garza’s body composition, Leaman did a BioSignature assessment and found that her estrogen level was her major issue. He worked on her nutrition, getting her to make smarter food choices, and put her on fish oil and several specific supplements to help her detox the estrogen. Within 10 months she was 154 pounds bodyweight and 9.9 percent bodyfat and competed in her first figure competition. Eventually she got down to 147 pounds bodyweight and 7.9 percent bodyfat, in effect gaining 17 pounds of muscle and losing 43 pounds of fat!
 
Transformer #2: Kim Michalik
Kim Michalik, age 34 and 5'6", started working with Leaman in November 2010. A friend of hers was going to do a bikini show and told Michalik that she didn’t have the discipline to pull off this type of a challenge. “Six months later Michalik took home a trophy, and her friend came home with nothing!” says Leaman.
 
Michalik was a distance runner, putting in three to four miles a day, three to four times a week. She was 132 pounds and 26 percent bodyfat. “She wasn’t overweight and her figure wasn’t awful, but she was just very soft with no muscles – oh, and her legs looked like toothpicks. Leaman told her that if she were serious, he could get her down to 9.5 percent bodyfat at 125 pounds bodyweight – and those are exactly the numbers she hit at that show. “And although she looked fine in clothes when we started, after the contest she said she would never look like that again,” says Leaman.
 
In Michalik’s BioSignature assessment, Leaman found her biggest issue was insulin, and he put her on supplements to control her blood sugar. Leaman says, “As for her nutrition – there wasn’t any: coffee and doughnuts for breakfast, chicken and a salad for lunch, happy hour, and whatever for dinner.” What Leaman did at first was focus on having her increase her protein and calories, and on making better choices. “Coach Poliquin taught me that if you take something away, you have to give something back. So when I told her to stop eating white rice, I would tell her she could eat brown rice instead.” In terms of training, Leaman said that the toughest challenge was convincing her that “she didn’t need to do cardio to get her bodyfat down.”
 
Luke Leaman is one of those rare athletes who has achieved an elite level in multiple sports and has coached his clients to reach their health and fitness goals –and, in many cases, to achieve physical superiority. We look forward to hearing about his future success stories.