Kyle is known as THE Human Strength Expert….

Kyle

but there’s more to the story….

I could bore you to death with all of my certifications, but they aren’t important.  If you are interested in that, there will be a list waiting at the bottom of this section with all my qualifications.  What is important is that you know and realize that I was once in your shoes, probably worse off.  People often ask me how is it that I can combine elite and aspiring athletes with alpha males and the answer is simple: I am both of them; I know what they need to do to get to where they need to be.

I grew up in a household of four boys, admittedly the least bright bulb of the bunch. I could never compete with my brothers when it came to academics or sports early on.  All 3 of them got near perfect scores on their SAT’s and were superstar athletes growing up.  I was never in an ‘advanced’ class in my life and got only triple digits my first time around on the SAT’s.  I couldn’t keep up with them through pure talent alone, it simple wasn’t there.  I did figure out a little later though that I had a discipline lying dormant in me that very few people possess. 

Maybe the reason for this discipline comes from my parents.  Both of my parents are very, very intelligent and driven.  Growing up, my dad would coach at least 4 teams per season and never miss a school event or work.  My dad was also able to dunk a basketball well into his 4^th decade.  My mother is small in physical stature, but she looks like she is 25 years younger than she actually is….amazing considering that she too never took her eyes off the four of us, still works 18 hour days and does very little working out.  I was blessed with ‘superhero’ genes from a physical and mental toughness point of view.  (As an aside, you have to see the leg muscles on my parents, freaky big and ripped for two people that can’t count on one hand how many times they have weightlifted in their lives).  Both of my grandfathers were on the front line in World War II, living to tell me stories of a bygone era.  I still have three grandparents that are alive and well, my one grandfather so muscular from his life as a stone-mason that his hands could rip a deck of cards clean in half.  He was lifting up 300-400 pound slabs of stones into his 80’s, I kid you not. 

When I got to high school, I decided I was going to be the best basketball player in the town, a long shot in a big town, especially since I was only six feet tall.  I remember going to a basketball camp at Villanova and the coach told me: “Every single time you pick up a basketball you get better, even if it is just one thousandth of a percent.”  I took this idea and ran with it.  I decided that I would take 500 jump shots per day for 1 straight year.  I went to the YMCA after football practice (my junior year) every night to shoot.  I shot so much on the basket in my driveway that the net literally ripped apart.  I shot when it was 100 degrees, I shot when it was snowing….I had learned the principal of setting my sights on something and going for it.  I made the varsity team that year, my older brother got cut and I remember thinking, “If only he’d come out and practiced with me.”….

Come my senior year, I had gotten so into weightlifting in order to help my basketball dreams that I fell in love with weightlifting, basketball fell behind to second fiddle.  I became so entirely obsessed with bodybuilding and weightlifting that I would spend up to 3 hours lifting and trying new things out.  I ordered Russian and Bulgarian ‘Secret’ weightlifting manuals.  I needed to know the secrets to the best weightlifting programs in the world.  In fact, much of what I learned and read back then I still use as a foundation today (I don’t even think the books are in print anymore).  I put on 30 pounds of muscle in one summer!  I didn’t want to play basketball anymore; I was going to dedicate myself to bodybuilding….or so I thought.

The coach was after me to play and I talked it over with my parents, realizing that I could no longer be the same player I was due to how much my body had changed.  I agreed to play as long as the coach promised to let me lift every day.  Soon enough, I realized that I would need to start lifting before school at 5 AM (for a high school kid!) so basketball wouldn’t interfere with the quality of my workouts.  I did this religiously and I wound up starting at center for my high school my senior year.  I was going up against kids 6 and 7 inches taller than me, some of them division 1 basketball or football players and I had a great year.  I don’t think I shot the ball more than 20 times the whole season, but I was using my strength which I loved and none of the other centers could budge me an inch.  I had literally transformed myself from a skinny high school kid into the strongest high school basketball player in the county!  I am always fond of those memories when I think back to those days and the foundation that was laid in weightlifting and discipline.

When college rolled around, I was fortunate to study under a Dr. Jose Antonio, the world’s foremost authority on sports nutrition.  He was only there for one semester but I benefited because I could pick his brain anytime I liked.  I also remember going to other professors with theories and diets I had created asking them if it would work and why and I often left frustrated because the professors had no clue as to what I was talking about (I later proved the theories to be correct).  I was doing full body hypertrophy and strength workouts in the college weight room long before anyone had been doing those types of workouts. 

However, with a bit too much enthusiasm for gaining muscular weight, I had ballooned to 260 pounds, strong but fat.  I should have realized sooner as people would drive by me while I was riding my bike and they would yell out, “Lose some weight, fatty”!  This was really the point at which I developed my nutritional theories, full-on.  I shed the extra fat within a matter of months to become a lean and ripped 212 pounds (this was the point at which competing in bodybuilding first entered my mind) and was heading home to do an internship with the #1 collegiate strength coach in the nation, Jay Butler of Rutgers University.  Jay was just one of the first ‘leading experts’ that I was fortunate to be mentored by.  I had the chance to work with athletes that had phenomenal physiques to go along with their superior athleticism.  I absorbed everything they were doing, noted how they ate, and spent as much time as I could around the athletes and Coach Butler.  I trained that whole summer blending what they were doing with what I had previously been doing and by the end of the summer my ‘knowledge’ of strength training was so unique that people at my regular gym couldn’t help but stop me to ask me how I was getting such superior and advanced results….It was at this point that I decided I would compete in my first bodybuilding show. 

Fast forward 2 years and a few top finishes in bodybuilding shows when I was mysteriously stricken with a two year stomach disease.  I traveled the country trying to find answers to no avail.  I urged and convinced doctors to perform ‘experimental’ procedures on me, some of them helped, some of them didn’t.  (It was those first ‘experiments’ that would later add fuel to the fire in my self-experimentation and the methods of strength and nutrition that would best help the body grow bigger, faster and stronger than humanely possible).  I lost a total of 40 pounds of muscle during those two years and competing was longer a possibility.  When I had finally hit this rock-bottom time of my life, I decided to go against the doctor’s wishes and compete again.  I applied different theories of the mind, cutting edge nutritional science and my training methods to gain 45 pounds of muscle during that one year alone!  By the time I was done competing that Spring, I had been cured of my mysterious disease!  I learned more about psychology and the human spirit during that time than I did during my previous 25 years of life.  In fact, I stress the mind and spirit as much or more during the physical challenges my guys face in the gym, day after day. 

Kyle at competition

During my comeback year in bodybuilding, I lost one of my contests in a legendary battle against Tim Martin, who would go on to win the Team Universe in 2008, making him the best natural bodybuilder in the world.  Instead of becoming rivals, Tim and I became training partners and friends and during my two years training with him, I was able to pick up countless tips and secrets from a living legend.  It seems that during every turn in my life I had been fortunate enough meet mentors that are/were nothing short of miraculous.  I have taken the life and lifting lessons from each and every one of them like a sponge absorbs water and I truly believe that is a big part of what makes me “The Human Strength Expert”.

It is now present day and I am constantly hustling to find out the ‘truth’ behind the physical human potentials of athletic performance, fat loss, muscular hypertrophy, strength, power and speed.  My library is overflowing with books from the Orient on human energy, manuals from Eastern European Olympic weightlifting, the transcripts of recordings of my phone calls with other top strength coaches around the globe are scattered across my desk and my DVD case is full of rare footage strength seminars and courses.  I continue to draw and map out new theories and plans on my ‘Think Board’ every morning, aiming to transform ordinary athletes into super-athletes and ordinary men into ‘super-men)…..let the legend continue……

Kyle and the Pro Maker, Joe DeFranco

Kyle and Matt Kroc

Certifications: BS in Fitness Management, MS in Exercise Science, Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, Certified Sports Nutritionist, Physical Education teacher, HUMAN STRENGTH EXPERT!