This Guy Went Back to Basics to Get Lean and Pack on 20 Pounds of Muscle

The dreaded “freshman fifteen” is inevitable, but it there’s a reason it’s so well-known. Getting away from home for the first time, the stress and abnormal sleep schedule of a first-year student, and often free reign of a dining hall can add pounds to even the most conscientious undergrad. That’s what happened to Aidan Winter, a 20-year-old mechanical engineering student in Boston, MA. He came back after his first year and saw that extra 15 on the scales. “I realized that I was unhappy with what my body was becoming and wanted to change,” he says.

Winter didn’t want to just slim down, though. He also wanted to bulk up. So he started with a lot of bodyweight exercises, focusing on his core, in part because he didn’t have access to a gym. When he got back to school, he ramped up his cardio and started weightlifting; he did lots of compound movements, like benching, squatting, and deadlifting, combining those with dumbell and cable exercises. He developed his own regimen based on advice online and exercises he’d done previously as a fencer. He also changed his diet, loading it with whole meat and protein that kept him feeling full.

At first, the change was hard to see, and it was difficult for Winter to stay motivated without that visible transformation. But he knew he was getting stronger. He lost ten pounds, then he started to gain, going from 140 up to 158 pounds. “I felt a giant increase in strength and size,” he says. “I used to always feel really small and the increase in muscle really helped diminish that feeling.”

His chest, deltoids, and lats have especially grown. “Together they all helped form that ‘taper’ a lot of people try to achieve—something I didn’t have before,” he says. With the changes came an increased confidence in daily life, and he says he’s started to eat healthier foods and be more generally active. He’s pushing through with new goals—”Every time I meet them I end up creating new ones,” he says. Right now he’s aiming to run a Spartan Ultra race.

Aidan Winter

He says that staying consistent and being determined were the two keys to getting him where he is now. Like many, he started small; looking back on his early workouts, it’d be easy to dismiss them. But every little bit helped, he says, as he developed healthy habits—emphasis on both the “healthy” and “habits.” He started slow and small, finding his way through this new terrain, and stuck with it. He powered through with the support of his friends and family, and once he got past the initial phase, he never looked back. “It was 100 percent worthwhile in the end,” he says. “My only regret is that I didn’t start sooner.”

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