Story #6 Dorian Yates... The juvenile who became a bodybuilding legend

Dorian Yates is a former professional bodybuilder, one of the 

greatest the world has ever seen. He was  crowned Mr Olympia 

   six times from 1992 to 1997. 

   His childhood was pretty 'idyllic' until his dad died of a fatal 

   heart attack. From then on, his life turned upside down. Hung 

   around with the wrong people and got into trouble with the 

   law. When he was at the youth detention center age 16, he 

   discovered bodybuilding which he felt he could excel in and get

   somewhere in life through it and, eventually, he did - Dorian 

   would then become Dorian The Shadow. 

    I saw him in the bodybuilding magazines back in the 1990s. And 

    then I have never heard of him since then until recently when 

    he was interviewed by Brian Rose on London Real and then by 

    Tim Ferriss on his podcast.

     

    Below is an excerpt from the The Tim Ferriss Show's transcript...

Tim Ferriss: Could you tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what your childhood was like?

Dorian Yates: Yeah, well initially I guess it was quite idyllic because I was brought up on what we call in England a small holding. So it’s kind of like a very small farm. We had horses there and dogs and chickens and all kind of animals and stuff like that. That was pretty cool. But everything changed when I was 13 and my father died from a heart attack. Then my mom was going to get remarried. We moved to Birmingham, which is the second biggest city in the U.K. I went from a more rural existence and my father dying and moving to the city. When I was 16, I left home. My mom wanted to live back in the countryside and so on.

I decided to stay on in the city. I was 16 years old, no qualifications from school, and nowhere to live really. I was living at a friend’s place and stuff like that. When I was 18, I got arrested. It really was just a stupid thing. Me and some friends were drunk and in the wrong place at the wrong time. But anyway, I got sent to a detention center when I was 18, which is like a youth jail facility, I guess. The idea is to put the young guys that are getting in trouble, put them in there for a short period of time and it’s very military, the discipline. You’re marching everywhere.

You do a lot of sports and you try to learn some kind of skill or job or something like that. In any case, they had weights in there, which I’d done a little bit of previously, and saw in the magazines and everything.

I think I’d trained for that six months when I was at school. I was doing karate first and then started doing the weight training. So I had an interest and a little background in that. In the facility, they had weights in there and I got – you had to do this. I remember one of the first times we were in there in the sports hall. They gave us this circuit training to do. You know, squats, pull-ups, push-ups, all kind of like circuit. You had to go around the circuit three times and do so many reps, and when you’re finished sit down.

I ran that thing three times and sat down and the prison officer thought I was making fun or something. He’s like, “You’ve got to go around three times.” I’m like, “I did go around three times.” He didn’t believe me, so he made me do it again. There were a few hundred guys in there and I was stronger than most of them and had the best physique.

I was good with the weights. At that point, I think I found something that was, you know, stop screwing around. There’s something here you could do something with at that point was as far as it went, you know?

To listen to his full interview, click here...