Iron and Anarchy: How Sam Sulek Blew Up the Fitness Industry

 

I still remember with horror the words of a girl from the office who had barely been training at the gym for a few weeks: "I'm going to take a week off to let my muscles rest and avoid overtraining."

What a terrible idea! What a betrayal of the sacred spirit of iron!

When I started training over 30 years ago, I wanted to live in the gym. I trained two hours every day, sometimes more. Training wasn't an obligation, it was pure oxygen. It gave me an addictive happiness that pushed me toward double sessions. The day they opened the local gym on Sundays, I felt an almost childlike joy. Yet I discovered an uncomfortable truth: going every single day without exception didn't allow for optimal muscle recovery. I stopped training on Saturdays and Sundays, switched to Monday through Friday only, and my gains exploded again like gunpowder.

But here's the secret that beginners don't understand: for a novice, it's nearly impossible to generate the nuclear intensity that a battle hardened veteran can unleash after years of war. A couple of years ago, I was living in another city. I had little to do besides work, so I chose to train in the morning and at night. Overtraining? Not at all. My body adapted and improved quickly, and that was in my fourth decade of life, when recovery isn't the same as in your 20s. Take a whole week of "recovery" after just a couple of weeks of training? Not a chance. That's for lazy people looking for excuses, not results.

Sam Sulek emerged from the bowels of social media like lightning in the darkness. His YouTube channel became an unstoppable viral phenomenon. In it, Sulek documented his gym adventures with brutal honesty: his training routines, his no frills diet, his tangible progress, and above all, his genuine, irrational love for the gym. Sulek became a cultural phenomenon in the era of overproduced fitness "gurus", those smoke sellers with their six week programs and Instagram poses.

I confess I was skeptical of Sulek at first, just as I was with Jake Paul. "If Paul isn't a boxer, Sulek isn't a bodybuilder," I thought skeptically. Yet Paul has done well for boxing: he's ignited a spark of interest in a sport that seemed to be losing appeal among younger generations. Sulek's work is similar, perhaps even more revolutionary.

I'm firmly convinced that Sulek and Chris Bumstead have done more to draw attention and popularize bodybuilding today than any multimillion dollar marketing campaign. But I wouldn't directly compare Sulek to CBum. Bumstead was forged in the gym under the sacred canons of the old school. He stepped on stage and won brutal competitions with impeccable preparation. That's where his astonishing popularity on social media came from, putting him almost on par with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the godfather of the sport, in followers.

For several years, Sulek lived solely in the gym and on social media as a fascinating anomaly, building his myth brick by brick, rep by rep. I thought that while Sulek's influence was genuinely good for the sport, the young man would be nothing more than a viral social media phenomenon who would never step on a professional stage. But I was completely wrong. And sometimes, contrary to what many think, I love being wrong when reality surpasses my expectations.

One day, Sulek announced his participation in an amateur competition at the Arnold Classic. Despite his massive social media fame, the influencer stepped on stage with humility and earned his professional card. A quantum leap that few achieve in so little time, a feat that left critics speechless.

But the Sulek phenomenon wasn't born overnight, that would be a misunderstanding. Sulek had been living in gyms for years like a voluntary prisoner in a dark dungeon of iron and sweat. I like to think my 20s and 30s in the gym were the same: self imposed confinement. Beyond the training gurus with their weekend certifications, like Sulek, I loved training every day for hours in the gym. It was a way of life, not a casual pastime or an Instagram hobby. I find Sulek's nuclear intensity deeply similar, his anti authority philosophy, very punk rock, very DIY (do it yourself).

Rest days? No, thanks. Deload days? No, thanks. Light weights for "mind-muscle connection"? No, thanks. Isolation movements on cutting edge machines? No, thanks. Expensive brand new clothes to look good in the gym mirror? No, thanks. Luxurious gyms with plush carpets and perfect climate control? No, thanks. Certified trainers charging fortunes and self proclaimed diet experts? No, thanks.

For many years, my cardio was walking from home to the gym at 5 a.m. in the dead of winter, then from the gym to school at 7, with my muscles still pumped. My bulking diet for years was simple and brutal: drinking a liter of whole milk every day after school on the way home. I started training with improvised concrete blocks and old scrap pipes in the backyard or my parents' laundry room. The first gym where I trained for nearly 10 years had no windows and a rusty tin roof. It was a brutal freezer in winter and an infernal oven in summer, and I loved it with irrational passion.

There were no gurus or personal trainers charging for generic diets and copied routines via WhatsApp. No fancy brand creatine, no experimental peptides. Just eggs, red meat, and milk. Period. There was no internet with infinite resources either. You learned from wrinkled magazines and pure trial and error, using your own body as a laboratory. I could have grown like Mike Mentzer applying orthodox heavy duty, but I loved going crazy from time to time with excessive volume. Up to 15 sets just of deep squats, and my legs thanked me by growing like never before.

What Sulek represents is a revolutionary return to that golden era. It's the thrill of pure instinct and addiction to raw adrenaline. The primitive pleasure of getting under a bar loaded with monstrous weight and moving it with iron will. Sulek is about knowing yourself better every day, centimeter by centimeter. Nowhere do you know yourself better than lying on a bench, moving a bar loaded with plates in the bench press, when the bar lowers slowly and your life depends on pushing it up one more time.

Sulek is grabbing that old cap because you don't care about looking like a model, and that ripped T-shirt because you think you're Dorian Yates in his prime, and going to train heavy without hesitation. Sulek is returning to the glorious past and training while completely disconnecting from the outside world. Sulek is letting instinct flow without restrictions and sometimes riding the momentum, literally. It's about going beyond the imaginary limit and breaking free from the paralysis by analysis that plagues modern fitness.

Back to basics, to Raw Power, to deep squats, barbell deadlifts, and paused bench presses. There's no more mystery. Machines are fine as long as you use the maximum weight available and the pulley cables don't snap. Isolation exercises are valid, of course, but only when they're heavy and leave you breathless. Arthur Jones and Mike Mentzer left us that lesson carved in stone: it's about progressively increasing intensity and load, not making things comfortable and easy for the ego.

Dropping the weights when you can't go anymore and hearing the metallic clang and floor shaking crash, that's a mortal sin in today's gyms with their absurd rules.

Sulek sometimes trains the same muscle group multiple times a week. What a wonder! What heresy for the dogmatists! Sulek recently announced his prep team for his professional debut in March at the Arnold Classic Physique: it's just him, his own team and no one else. No guru, no expensive coach, no ten person squad.

It's his pro debut. I don't expect him to win the competition against seasoned veterans. The Ramones never had platinum albums selling millions, but they made history by transforming rock with less, three chords and attitude. Sulek won't win the Arnold on his first try, but he will measure his real effectiveness against those who spend millions on super equipped gyms and teams of a dozen people watching every gram of food and every hour of sleep.

Sulek is pure controlled beastliness. While "training to failure" becomes trendy and turns into an empty cliché repeated by everyone, Sulek uses brutal and strategic rest-pause, something I've fully embraced for decades. Going beyond technical failure and maxing out intensity absolutely, as Mike Mentzer and Tom Platz taught with his legendary legs.

Sure, all this is easier for Sulek in his 20s with sky high natural testosterone. But it's not impossible at 40, I guarantee it from personal experience. I'd happily go back to training twice a day, five days a week, if I had the time.

While modern fitness influencers obsess over flashy expensive brand clothes, trendy experimental peptides, and professional lighting tripods for the perfect angle, Sulek records himself austerely with his phone in hand, like making a raw documentary of his life, and drinks simple chocolate milk for uncomplicated bulking.

Once again, Sulek beats many by becoming the authentic punk rock of bodybuilding and a true outsider who doesn't ask permission, which reignites my love for the basic, raw, and primal essence of the sport. A beautiful anarchy against rigid orthodoxy, overproduced artificiality, and gurus with dozens of weekend certifications framed on the wall.

It's clear that at some point Sulek will have to reduce intensity or adjust his approach. That's normal, the body changes with age, and we inevitably adapt. Still, I firmly believe that maximizing his youth, with peak natural testosterone, is a biological window of opportunity that should never be wasted. It's the best time for optimal physical response to sustained effort, considerable training volume, and even technical imperfections.

Sulek treats himself as a living experiment, and that's profoundly inspiring for millions. He's not a passive guinea pig in someone else's lab, he's Bruce Banner and Hulk simultaneously, the brilliant scientist and the brave volunteer in the experiment. That duality is his superpower.

In the end, Sam Sulek's punk rock bodybuilding poses an uncomfortable question that echoes throughout the industry: What if we've absurdly overcomplicated muscle growth with unnecessary science and marketing disguised as knowledge?

The answer terrifies thousands of self proclaimed "experts" because it suggests something revolutionary: that for some, perhaps many, the secret was never the perfect 12 week program, the magic supplement, or the complex periodization protocol. It was simply the iron will to do the hard work, even when it's brutal, ugly, and no one's watching. When there are no cameras, no likes, no external validation.

It's the will to load one more kilogram on the bar than yesterday. To squeeze out one more rep when the muscle screams to stop. To come back tomorrow, the day after, and next year. To turn the gym into your personal temple and iron into your religion.

Sulek hasn't reinvented the wheel of bodybuilding. He's done something more powerful: he's reminded us that the wheel always worked perfectly. We just needed the courage to use it without asking anyone's permission.