by Nate Green
Mike Scialabba is the first guy you'd expect to enter a natural-bodybuilding contest. He has the kind of physique almost everyone reading this aspires to: six feet tall, 230 pounds, muscular, athletic, symmetrical. He speaks slowly and walks confidently.
As a bodybuilder, he's competed three times in contests in Idaho and Montana, always finishing in third or fourth place, but with clear potential to take home the big prize. And, at one point, he considered going for it as a full-time career.
Mike on stage in 2006.
Kyle Hibler is the last guy you'd expect to enter a physique competition, a fast-talking, quick-to-make-fun-of-himself college student and unrepentant class clown.
He's been fat — 5'6", 240 pounds — and he's made himself skinny, going all the way down to 155 on a steady diet of ephedrine, Slim-Fast shakes, and "a shit-ton of cardio."
He's also been a powerlifter — and a good one, winning local and regional meets. But he's never been mistaken for a bodybuilder.
Kyle at a powerlifting meet in February 2008.
All that changed last May. That's when Mike, a successful personal trainer in Missoula, Montana, challenged Kyle to join him in entering the Washington Ironman, a contest that was less than six months away.
Mike had decided it would be his last competition; with growing business and family obligations, he wanted to take one last shot and, if it worked out, go out on top. It would be Kyle's first.
From August 21 through the competition on October 4, I followed Mike and Kyle as they prepped. I trained with them when I could, and kept in touch via phone and email when I couldn't. I also asked both guys to keep journals and take photos to document their adventure.
This is their story.
Before Mike ever stepped onto a stage, he'd already made an amazing transformation.
Mike at 16.
"I was the typical skinny-fat kid," he told me. "When I moved to Montana from Idaho during high school I started doing football, basketball, track — you know, whatever my friends were doing." Mike excelled in football, and made the all-conference team as an underclassman. He was all-state as a junior and senior, and had multiple scholarship offers.
But his friends were into more than just sports.
"I started smoking weed when I was 14 years old," Mike said. "I'd smoke before school, at lunchtime, and before and after practice every single day. When I turned 16, I began taking pharmaceutical narcotics, and soon after started methamphetamine, cocaine, and got really heavy into hallucinogens. I'd do anything you put in front of me."
By 2002, he had more than $150,000 in felony warrants in Montana, not counting numerous misdemeanors in Montana and Idaho. He'd been to jail three times, and his roommate had just been arrested and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
That's when Mike decided it was time to man up. He turned himself in and made it clear to the authorities that he was ready for a different approach to life. The Montana courts gave him his chance, sentencing him to three-year deferred felony probation.
"It was an absolute breath of fresh air," Mike told me. He stopped taking drugs, went to college, and discovered a passion for fitness. Today, at 26 years old, he does more than 50 client sessions a week and has a nine-month-old son that he's raising with his girlfriend.
Kyle is no stranger to substance abuse, although his was the legal kind. After his crash weight-loss plan dropped him from 240 to 155 in just five months, he was soon back over 200, thanks to some impressively prolific beer consumption. "I could drink up to 24 beers pretty easily," he told me.
Not that Kyle is one to bring you down with his regretful moping. Spend some time around him and you realize he has two public personalities, neither of them boring: In the gym, he's all scowls and business, clapping chalk clouds, pacing with headphones on, slapping himself on the chest. Anywhere else, he's the guy who makes you think twice before taking a drink of water for fear he'll say something funny enough to make it shoot out your nostrils.
But, like lots of funny guys, he uses humor the way Batman uses black. And at age 24, he was tired of being the funny fat guy. "Funny" was okay, but "fat" was getting old.
That's why he jumped on the chance to compete in bodybuilding, all 200+ pounds of him, 25 percent of which were fat, according to Mike's measurement.
By mid-August, when I started working on this story, Kyle had already made astounding progress. He was down to 175 pounds, with most of his muscle intact — impressive under any circumstances, but especially so when you consider he did this with college, a new girlfriend, and a part-time job at a taco stand competing for his time and energy.
"I've still got a lot of work to do," he admitted. "I need to make it to 165 or so. I just hope I can get lean enough."
He had good reason to worry. Despite losing more than 40 pounds of fat in less than four months, he didn't yet look like a bodybuilder. He had fat around his chest and lower back, and a roll of flab and excess skin where his lower abs should've been. A potentially more serious challenge: his legs don't quite match the muscularity of his upper body.
But while Kyle lacked polish and symmetry, he made up for it with confidence. "I bet I'll place in the top three," he said. "I'll be bigger than all of them."
In private, Mike said what we were both thinking: "I know he's working his ass off — that's definitely apparent — but I don't know if he'll be ready for the show. I just don't want him to embarrass himself."
Mike, though, had another concern — one that caught me by surprise. "I just went through a four-week stretch where I was busting my ass and my weight didn't budge," he said. Despite dropping down to 2,100 calories a day and going into ketosis, Mike was stuck at 9 percent body fat. When he got home, he told me, he was going to "get on the stair stepper, put on the movie 300, and rock the fuck out."
Mike's training philosophy is relatively simple: "I don't follow a traditional split routine. Right now, I'm doing compound movements with heavy loads and tons of volume." He doesn't do any direct, isolated work for his biceps, triceps, abs, or calves until the end of the workout.
Mike put Kyle on a carb-rotation diet, but Kyle admitted to me that he was struggling with the details. "Food preparation sucks my balls," he said. "I try to cook all my meat on one day, but I've got to get better at packing stuff to eat when I go to school or work."
He also forced himself to wake up at ungodly hours to do fasted cardio. "I get up, I'm pissed off, and I go running. It's just what I've got to do right now."
On some days, that's the first of three workouts — cardio in the morning, weights in the afternoon, intervals in the evening.
Each workout is a step closer to his goals, but even three workouts a day might not be enough with so little time left.
Today was the first day of school and I thought I'd get some extra cardio in, so I parked a mile and a half from campus and decided to walk. I realized after my first class that I'd left my food and protein in the car. I'm not normally emotional but I really wanted to cry like a little bitch. I composed myself instead and walked all the way back to grab my shit. I didn't find my second class until it had ended.
I kicked ass in the gym, though, and have been avoiding tacos. So at least I've got that going for me.
Kyle doing hex-bar deadlifts with 365 pounds.
A setback: Mike pulled his hamstring while doing Romanian deadlifts, and it's a bad one. When we talked, he put the focus on the positive: "My legs are one of my strong points, so they'll be fine as long as I maintain my muscularity." The strategy: maintain quad size with sissy squats and leg extensions, and use the downtime to focus on his upper body.
Things were going better for Kyle. He weighed in at 171 on August 27, and he picked his posing music: "Sweep the Leg," by Karate High School.
But with one problem down, two more arose: "I have no fucking idea how to pose," he wrote in his journal. He also has no idea where to buy posing trunks.
"Kyle's been slacking on the details a bit, but I think that's just the way he operates," Mike told me when I dropped in.
Kyle cheerfully agreed. "I'm more of a shoot-first, then-aim type of guy."
But Mike's observation, if anything, was an understatement. A month out from the competition, Kyle had just begun learning the mandatory poses.
Mike helps Kyle with his posing.
He bought his posing trunks online, but even that was an adventure. "I had to get my friend to buy it with his credit card because mine was maxed out," he said. "The fucker almost got me the tiger-striped ones. He called it a 'friend tax.' "
The good news is that Kyle was down to 167 and still holding most of the muscle he started with. The bad news? A pouch of fat and excess skin on his stomach.
"I'm rubbing all sorts of shit on it, trying to get the skin to tighten up," he said. "I think I'm using stuff that pregnant women put on to prevent stretch marks." Whatever it is, Kyle can see it's not working fast enough.
In private, Mike is skeptical of Kyle's chances. "The guy has worked his ass off and he's got a ton of heart, but his physique just isn't up to par yet."
To Kyle, he offered some sobering words about his first bodybuilding show: "I talked a lot of shit before I went onstage, thought I'd really do well, and just got fucking slaughtered. It was an incredibly humbling experience. I needed the wake-up call."
I feel like I'm getting closer, and am noticing some major differences in my body now. I actually have abs, which is pretty cool. I'm also drinking so much water that people must think I have a bladder issue. I need to buy some laxatives, too. Half the time I can't shit, and the other half I shit violently.
My body feels like it's starting to break down. I'm waking up with headaches and extreme body aches every morning. And my skin hurts. I need to take a few days off. Still, it's all in the name of progress.
Back in May, Kyle thought that if he could get down to 165 pounds, he'd be lean enough to compete, and win. But he recently weighed in at 164, and his body fat still measured 9.9 percent — as high as you can go and still technically be in single digits.
Knowing that, I told myself not to be surprised if I got a phone call from Kyle telling me he'd decided he wasn't ready. A week before the contest, I got the call.
"Hey, man. I just wanted to let you know that I'm dropping out. I'm just not ready."
Except it wasn't Kyle on the phone. I looked at my caller ID twice, just to make sure it really was Mike.
"I've got too many distractions and shit just isn't working out," he said. "I'm dealing with some oblique fat storage and my glutes, lower back, and abdominals aren't where they need to be. I'm about 7 percent body fat right now, and I need to be around 4.5 percent."
I tried to talk him out of quitting. By this point, Mike and Kyle weren't the only ones with an investment in the bodybuilding contest. I'd been working on the story for six weeks — an eternity for a staff writer at an online magazine.
"Look, I still plan on going and helping Kyle out," Mike said. "But I'm not ready. I got in my Speedo earlier and just looked defeated. I've been kidding myself these past few weeks. I know I could have gotten on stage and looked good, but I don't need the experience."
I called Kyle later to see how he had taken the news. I was dreading the conversation; if he was looking for an excuse to quit, Mike had just delivered it. To my surprise, he was unfazed. "I'm still doing it," he told me. "I'm just glad Mike's coming along."
My diet is intense and I'm pretty much living off of tuna. I'm sick and tired of eggs and chicken. There's one week left and I'm feeling pretty good. I feel like I should at least place in the top three. Either way, I'm definitely stepping on stage.
I've pretty much isolated myself from everyone else. My girlfriend blew up at me yesterday. She says I'm being way too selfish. She's right, though. I'm too busy with school, training, tacos, and tanning to give her attention. I'll be glad when this is over.
On Friday October 3, we climbed into Mike's Chevy Tahoe for the eight-hour drive to Everett, Washington, "we" being Kyle, me, and Julia, Mike's girlfriend.
Mike and Julia, his incredibly brave girlfriend.
"So what's the carb-up plan?" Mike asked Kyle. "What'd you eat for breakfast?"
"I didn't eat breakfast yet. I'll just grab some stuff on the road."
I half expect to see Mike's head explode. "You're supposed to have 50 grams of carbohydrates per meal, man. What the hell are you doing?"
Kyle didn't really have an answer for that. One day before the contest, he still wasn't focused on the details.
Mike pressed him: "But you're cutting water out at 3 p.m., right?"
For the past week, Kyle had been taking in close to three gallons of water per day. He'd told me earlier that morning that he had to piss every 10 minutes.
"Yep, I'm cutting out water," he told Mike. "But we'll have to stop. A lot."
We hit the road, stopping every couple of hours to pee, grab food (Kyle, in need of simple sugar, got to eat an entire bag of Hot Tamales), stretch our legs, and find a place as far away from Julia as possible to let out our urgent and pungent protein farts. With a hot chick in our midst, we couldn't let 'em rip in the car.
"I just wish she'd rip one first," Kyle grumbled. "That way I won't feel guilty."
Resting in the back of the Tahoe, Kyle looked relaxed, but he also looked a little soft for a guy who was going to compete the next day. I caught eyes with Mike in the rear-view mirror. Kyle knew what both of us were thinking but were afraid to say out loud.
"Just a little water retention," he told us. "I'm going to rock it!"
Kyle relaxes in the back of the Tahoe.
We arrived at the Holiday Inn in Everett at 4 p.m., two hours before Kyle's weigh-in. That's when we learned that the hotel was hosting three events that weekend: the bodybuilding show, a Cocaine Anonymous convention, and Shop Till Ya Drop, some kind of get-together for overweight women who like to spend money.
It felt like we were walking onto the set of some weird, low-budget movie: Big guys with orange skin walked around with girls who looked like beef jerky. Fat ladies drank Pepsi and gossiped about why all the "in-shape" people were eating rice cakes, Snickers bars, and hamburgers. Weren't they supposed to be eating chicken breasts and broccoli? (Nobody stopped to explain the concept of carbing up.) To our relief, there was no obvious sign of the Cocaine Anonymous folks. Either there was significant crossover with the fat ladies and orange people, or they were all holed up in their rooms, doing whatever it is recovering drug addicts do when they get together.
When we got into our rooms, Mike had Kyle strip down to go through his mandatory poses. Kyle assured us that he'd worked on his posing routine, and choreographed it to his song. For some reason I can't really explain — perhaps the triumph of hope over experience — we took him at his word.
And then it was back down to the lobby for the weigh-in. We tried, with limited success, to push our way through a phalanx of self-tanned individuals who were preening and posturing and refusing to yield an inch of their space to anybody. It was like navigating an obstacle course in Jurassic Park.
When we finally made it to the weigh-in, we got some unexpected good news: Kyle was down to 161 pounds, putting him in the "lightweight novice" division. "You're going to be so much bigger than any of those guys," Mike told him, showing renewed optimism for Kyle's prospects. "So what else do you have to do before the show? Have you shaved yet?"
Kyle hadn't shaved anything other than his chest.
"You at least trimmed everything down so it'll be easier to shave, right?"
"No," Kyle admitted. "But I've got a Venus razor. And some scissors."
"Jesus Christ," Mike muttered as he walked away.
Kyle went back to his room, took a two-hour-long bath in Epsom salts, and emerged a less hirsute but wiser man. "Never shave your armpits and then put deodorant on," he advised me. "It burns like you wouldn't believe." I promised to keep that in mind next time I needed to shave my armpits.
With wisdom and less body hair came a very different look for Kyle: Thanks to the magic of the razor, he now looked leaner — and whiter — than I'd ever seen him before.
A little sleep and a big breakfast turned Kyle into a new man. Veins he never knew he had were popping out everywhere. But at the same time, Kyle was increasingly dehydrated, having had just a few sips of water in the past 24 hours. The combination of high energy from simple sugars and decreased brain function from lack of water led to our next dilemma: Nobody knew where the hell we were supposed to go, least of all Kyle.
Directions weren't the only things Kyle forgot. We had to make a quick detour to Walgreens to buy gloves and saran wrap so Mike could help Kyle apply his Dream Tan, a gunky mess of brown tar.
When we finally got to the venue, we were late. Not fashionably late; this was borderline disastrously late.
We descended to the downstairs bathroom, where Mike tried to put the Dream Tan on Kyle. But Kyle's hyperactivity made his skin a moving target; he couldn't stop bouncing back and forth from foot to foot.
I laughed, but Mike didn't find it funny at all. He shouted at Kyle to stand still, worried that he'd end up getting some of the brown crap on his clothes. For good measure, he warned Kyle that he'd better cover himself from head to toe before he got back into Mike's car. A brown stain on his upholstery might've been a fitting memento of the weekend, but at that moment Mike didn't give us the impression that he wanted to remember anything about the trip, least of all this part.
In a rare moment, Kyle appears to be standing still.
Still, for all the chaos and unforced errors, one thing became clear: Kyle really did look like a bodybuilder. The tanner, dehydration, and carb-up combined to bring out the cuts and striations Kyle had worked so hard to achieve.
There was still the stomach-fat issue to worry about, but it seemed to be the last thing on Kyle's mind. He had a more practical concern: "Do I have to walk all the way to the stage in my Speedo?" he asked Mike.
"Yep. Now get your ass up there."
Kyle ran upstairs and disappeared behind a curtain. Mike and I went into the auditorium to find our seats.
"Lightweight novice men are up first," we heard the emcee announce. "Oh fuck," Mike said. "He's got less than five minutes to pump up."
In reality, Kyle actually had even less time to get ready. Behind the curtain, among 30 or so bodybuilding and fitness competitors, Kyle heard the same announcement and frantically dropped to the floor to do some push-ups. A few seconds later, Kyle told me after the show, officials backstage told him he was up first. First weight class, first competitor.
"There was no warning at all. They asked if I wanted my music to come on before or as I walked out. I wanted to vomit."
As Mike and I took our seats, I felt something in my gut that, even now, I can't really describe. It might've been guilt over my role in this — if I hadn't started working on this story, would Kyle have taken it this far? Or it might've been second-hand embarrassment for Kyle, my fear of seeing a friend fall on his face.
I asked Mike if he was worried. "I'm more nervous than I'd be if I were up there," he said.
A spotlight hit the stage and music blasted. A new thought popped into my head: "Did you ever see Kyle's posing routine?"
"No. Did you?"
"Oh God."
Kyle swaggered onto the stage, waved his arms in the air, smiled, and hit a most muscular pose just as "Put 'em in a body bag!" blared through the speakers.
A great start. The audience was with him, yelling and clapping.
He switched to a front double biceps, then another most muscular.
Then another front double biceps.
Then another most muscular.
Then another front double biceps.
The audience got quiet. The applause stopped. Never mind that bodybuilding has eight mandatory poses, all of which he'd learned from Mike. For the entire 60 seconds he was onstage, he hit those two poses over and over and over again, interspersed with more arm waving.
The pose-down with the other four guys in his category didn't go much better. As Mike and Kyle had guessed, he had more upper-body mass than the others, but that was his only advantage. They were leaner, more symmetrical, and knew more than two poses.
Kyle finished fifth in his five-man division.
Kyle is on the far right. The eventual winner is second from the left.
We caught up with Kyle in the lobby.
"You did ... good," Mike offered.
Kyle wasn't having any of that. "Yeah, yeah, yeah." He dismissed the entire debacle the way you'd tear up a losing lottery ticket. "Next time I'll take it. Now let's go get a beer."
We spent much of the afternoon and evening laughing. That's the great thing about Kyle — a minute after it ended, he'd moved on.
"I definitely wasn't lean enough," he told us. "But I know what to do next time. And I'll actually have a posing routine."
He wants to get surgery to remove the extra abdominal skin, and figures to compete again in May. Kyle knows he can do it, and for now he's focused on doing it even better next time.
As for Mike, he still likes the idea of training for something, pushing himself beyond his boundaries for some type of challenge or competition. But it probably won't be in bodybuilding. And if he never competes in anything again, that's okay too. He knows how far he's come — from teenage meth head to a successful trainer and responsible father.
Besides, if he could help transform Kyle from a 200-plus-pound powerlifter who'd never seen so much as a single ab to a 161-bodybuilder willing to step on stage, what can't he do?
The show was a learning experience. I placed last but that's okay. I was bigger than everyone but definitely not as lean. My posing wasn't good and really knocked me down a peg.
I'm going to keep my head up, though. Too many times in my life I haven't followed through. I can't stand the idea of saying "what if." I'm going to learn from this and keep moving forward. This has been the best experience of my life. I've turned myself from an anxious, frightened person to a warrior. This is what life is all about!
Here's a short video recap of the experience:
Nate Green is the author Built for Show: Four Body Changing Workouts for Building Muscle, Losing Fat, and Looking Good Enough to Hook Up, which will be in bookstores nationwide on November 20.
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