• After switching up his workout routine to help avoid injury, Taylor Weller began to see dramatic results.
• He also began to take his diet more seriously, and combined healthier eating with intermittent fasting.
• Now much leaner and stronger, Weller has seen serious gains, as well as regular PRs on his deadlifts, squats, and more.
Taylor Weller got into mixed martial arts to see whether he could survive it. As a “slightly overweight, under-muscled 21-year-old,” he says, he didn’t have much of an athletic background. After his first grueling training session, he was hooked; despite the exhaustion, he wanted to see how far he could take it. “It was such a crazy combination of fun and fear,” says the now 25-year-old from Yakima, WA.
He pushed himself hard, but being under-muscled (and improper eating) left him prone to injuries. On top of that, an inherited condition called femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) afflicted his hip joints and cause so much pain that his wife would wake up early to tie his shoes—it hurt him too much to bend over. After surgery to correct it, he figured he was done competing. “But I knew I needed to find a way to get stronger and still stay in shape after surgery,” he says.
Weller started training with his dad, a former Crossfit competitor. Where previously he’d heard weightlifting “gets in the way,” it became essential for him to build muscle and stave off injury. He started with deadlifting and squats, along with kettlebell workouts and CrossFit-style exercises.
Almost counterintuitively, it took not pushing himself so hard to get Weller on the right track to bulking up. Instead of wearing himself down, he began paying attention to how he felt. “I stopped pushing so hard that my body would hurt and ache all the time,” he says. (He also hasn’t completely dropped martial arts—he trains a couple days a week in Brazillian Jiu Jitsu and can jump into the ring with old training partners.)
He dialed in his diet, too; healthy food and intermittent fasting, three or four days a week, with about 19 hours for each fast. He still let himself have the food he loved, including burgers, pizza, and chocolate-covered almonds. As he experimented with more healthy food, he found more that he actually liked.
“My chest, arms, waist, thighs, and even my neck suddenly were growing by the day,” he says, “But not my calves. Damn my small calves!” Despite his lagging calves, he was hitting milestones, including a 225-pound bench press. “The first time I pulled 405 on my deadlift,” he says, “I straight-up ripped my shirt off and fist-pumped the sky.” In about five months, he added 15 pounds to his body weight.
Taylor Weller
The biggest changes have definitely been mental, though,” Weller says. “I’m a more confident person, because I’ve demonstrated for myself what I can accomplish through effort and consistency.” He feels more outgoing, less anxious when he meets new people. “I’d say I’m a happier and more content person because of my progress.”
For anyone looking to follow in his footsteps, he says: Start small. “Nobody wants to hear that, because small isn’t big.” But finding those little things you can consistently do, then sticking to them, is the route to big gains. “So, start small, and stay consistent,” he says. “If you do that, and make a serious effort to improve, there’s a really good chance that you’ll be lifting big, or running far, or taking home medals someday.”
