Introduction
My name is Justin Rys, a.k.a. “Big Kiwi”. I am a former Oceania, and a former Mr. Australasia. I have competed professionally against the best bodybuilders in the world, including Ronnie Coleman and Chris Cormier. I’m proud of my accomplishments, but the road to my success has been a long and difficult one. I would not have achieved my goals without my steadfast determination, motivation, and hard work. I was always a sportsman at school, and I played your typical sports like rugby and soccer. I also became a great sprinter. One day, as I was sprinting, I basically tore one of my quadriceps from the bone. The doctor concluded that my muscles were growing too fast for my tendons to keep up. As you can imagine, that put a fast stop to my sprinting career.
Although I was good at athletics, had never even thought about lifting weights until this point.
I didn’t know anything about supplements or weight training, but I started going to the gym for rehab and physical therapy. Being a sprinter, I had a lot of fast twitch muscle fibers that I thought would respond quite well to weight training.
So at seventeen years old, I started going to a gym called “Better Bodies” after school in my uniform. I really had no idea what I was doing, but I started lifting some weights and within the first three months I gained 20 kgs.
That is a ridiculous amount of weight gain for such a short period. People thought I was on steroids, but I didn’t even know what those were at that stage !
I didn’t know anything about muscle groups or body parts; I just thought I’d lift weights to heal my leg and get some veins to poke out because I tho ght that looked good. After my first few months at the gym, another member tried to explain the ins and-outs of weight training. Thinking I knew everything, I blew them off and continued to train the only way I knew how. After awhile, I decided it would be better to listen to someone who knew what they were talking about and I achieved even greater results.
After about five months of training I decided to talk to someone about competing in the Teenage Mr. Wellington bodybuilding show. I’ll admit I was a bit nervous – being a little white boy, I thought it would be really hard for me to do well. However I did better than I thought I would: I weighed in at about two percent body fat and was absolutely shredded to the bone. People couldn’t believe that I had only been training for a couple of months. I went on to compete in the Mr. New Zealand show and won Teenage Mr. New Zealand. I had so much fun running around in my underwear on stage that I thought this could be a good sport for me. It was such a thrill to be in front of an audience and have people cheer for you. I went out there and had fun. From then on, I was hooked. I gave up all my other sports and concentrated on going to the gym for weight training. My parents and family all hated weight lifting, but it’s what I was passionate about so I went at it one hundred percent. I don’t like to do things by halves, so I just focused and did everything I could to reach the goals I set out for myself.
I decided that I wanted to take steroids after about a year of training. I thought steroids would help take me to the next level. I was able to find someone who sold them, and although steroids were more freely available in New Zealand at that time, they were still extremely expensive. Not having much money, I told my parents that I wanted to attend a personal training course and asked them to lend me the money for my first lesson.
I took that money, about $500, and used it to do my first course of steroids. After that first course, I did another ten week long course of 250 mgs of testosterone per week. After about four weeks I had put on another 25 kgs to reach 112 kgs. People were absolutely amazed at the amount of weight that I was able to gain in such a short period of time. From then on, my goal was to achieve as much as I could for my training.
I eventually moved to the Gold Coast, and even though I still trained hard, I got caught up in the party lifestyle. As you know, partying doesn’t mix very well with hard training. I still grew in size, but between having no money for steroids and partying too hard, I didn’t grow as well. I did win Mr. Gold Coast at twenty years old, and was competing at 105 kgs absolutely shredded to the bone. I also won Mr. Australasia during my time in the Gold Coast. I did enjoy my time in Australia, but although I was moving forward, I still wasn’t where I wanted to be. I decided to come back to New Zealand and work towards becoming a professional bodybuilder. I wanted to stand up on stage with the best in the world.
Being a bodybuilder, you use a lot of supplements and performance enhancing drugs. This helped influence my leap into partying and I was exposed to an entirely different form of drugs, which I found very hard to say no to. I started getting caught up in taking party drugs like GHB and Ecstasy. I wanted to stop and concentrate on my training, but I didn’t have the strong will I needed at that point. I did find that GHB was a great tool for weight training, and the best part was, it was totally legal in New becam Zealand at the time. GHB my ultimate bodybuilding too ; it was able to increase your strength, lower your recovery time, and give you an overall sense of wellbeing. It was also very easy to get and easy to use.
After training for many y ars I finally won the 1999 o erall Mr. New Zealand title.
I looked great and felt that I thoroughly deserved my win – I was shredded, proportioned, and looked my best. Continuing on my path to stand on stage with the best in the world, I finally turned professional and started competing as a pro. I competed in the New Zealand Pro Show against the likes of Ronnie Coleman, Chris Cormier, and Marcus Ruhl. I also competed in Australia at the Australian Grand Prix. The top fifteen bodybuilders from the Olympia were at that show, so the Grand Prix was probably the hardest show of the year. Although I didn’t place in the competition, I was still extremely proud of my accomplishment. I’d rather walk away empty handed after standing on stage with the best in the world, than compete against the worst and get a place. I really enjoyed my time in the pros. Not everything was fun and games though. I did see a lot of scary stuff and came to realize that the bodybuilding world has many deep, dark secrets. I did have fun with many of the professional bodybuilders as well. Chris Cormier is one of my good friends and we had a lot of fun times together.
I never thought I’d go to prison, but I found myself there all the same. GHB had been legal to import and use for the past ten years, but the law changed: I got sentenced to ten-and-a-half years for importing GHB, a newly categorized Class B drug. I was classified as a high security prisoner, which put me in the same prison unit as murderers. I was unable to use any weights due to the security classification they placed on me. For a full year, the only weight training tools I had were lifting people and using objects like brooms, towels, and buckets. Unless you wanted to shrink to nothing, you had to improvise. You had to do whatever you could to try and keep weight on and stop from shrinking. I starved in prison with the food they provided. We did get three meals a day, but it was all carbohydrates. I had to try and eat everyone else’s food. That wasn’t hard – I was big and ugly so they would always give it to me. I always expected prison to be a dangerous and dodgy place, but there were a lot of nice people in there. They were just people who made stupid mistakes.
Training in prison was definitely hard, and I don’t recommend it. After about a year in prison, I was moved down in classification and was finally able to start working with some weights. We only had really light barbells and dumbbells so I still had to improvise. I’d have people stand on top of barbells or even hang from the end of a dumbbell. It was definitely dangerous, but luckily, everyone survived.
While I was in prison all I did was study subjects like business, drug and alcohol addiction, and marketing. I also started my own clothing brand, “Big Kiwi Convict Gear”, which is sold nationally and internationally.
The line focuses on training gear for the average person who goes to the gym. After finishing my time in prison, I also founded my own gym, “Big Kiwi Convict Gear Training Studio”, where I train people by using my own techniques. The basis of these techniques is what I want to talk to you about in this book. We’ve had fantastic results at the gym: One<