Bodybuilding Tips With Mike O'Hearn

I’M ONE OF THESE GUYS who believes in getting up early and getting to bed early. So I’m actually up in the morning at 3 a.m. and already into my workout by 4 a.m. It’s just one of those beliefs that you can get everything in if you just get up in time. That’s my belief. I know that the most successful people are morning people. I know we all, as humans, get caught up at night in trying to relax and sit in front of the TV and stu like that, and that’s just something I’ve eliminated. I’m usually in bed by 9 p.m. and wake up at 3 a.m. Sunday is when I do all my meal prep. I cook all my steak and chicken, open up all my cans of tuna, and cut all my vegetables, and then, day by day, I pack as I go. I’m a scale guy—have been for 30 years. I weigh every gram and ounce that I put in my body. If I go out to eat at a restaurant, I go where I can gauge portion sizes, or I go where I know they have the nutrition info available. For my cheat meals, though, anything goes. I don’t count calories. I just enjoy myself. I never miss a scheduled workout. I train five days a week, even when I’m on the road, shooting, doing anything. I don’t believe in excuses or people who say they don’t have time. You make time. Cardio, I don’t do year round; I believe it’s a tool to be used when you’re trying to get ripped. If you do cardio all the time, your body becomes immune to it. My goal is to be able to eat the maximum amount of food and do the least amount of cardio I can in order to stay lean. So I try to keep my carbs as high as I can until it’s time for me to diet. I don’t believe in eliminating them at night; I’ve never done that. When it comes to cardio, if you’re doing 30 minutes every time you train, then it’s going to take a lot more than that for you to get lean. Personally, I’d rather work out longer and harder and get to eat more than have to take my calories down to cut up. Let’s say you start at 250 grams of carbs. When you’re not dieting, you want to try to keep pushing that number as high as you can so that when you need to take your carbs down, your diet doesn’t have to be painful. But if your carbs are always low year-round, then dieting is just going to be brutal. That’s why I try to push my intake to maximum capacity while staying lean and keeping my cardio down.

You really just have to treat this like a lifestyle, not an on-season, offseason thing. You don’t create longevity in this industry by being that guy who needs 12 to 16 weeks to diet down because he went up 30 pounds in the off-season.