Steve Weatherford - What He Started Doing at 14 Made Him One of the Fittest Guys in the NFL

These 3 strategies changed Steve Weatherford's life, and they could do the same for you.

To punt a football in the National Football League, you need a leg that kicks like a nitroglycerine-powered pendulum.

Steve Weatherford, who airs out pigskins for the New York Giants, has that. He has a Super Bowl ring to prove that he’s damn good at it, too.

But it isn’t just his leg that’s impressive. Weatherford’s entire physique puts Michelangelo’s David to shame—the 6’2”, 230-pound punter is tore up from the floor up, claiming a year-round bodybuilding-competition-worthy 5 percent body fat.

No punter has that. Heck, hardly a man in the entire league is that shredded. But if you think this guy emerged from the womb with God-blessed genetics that make him look like Schwarzenegger, think again.

“I entered my freshman year of high school weighing 107 pounds. I was the lightest person in the entire school, except for a couple of girls,” says Weatherford. “I played sports, and I was athletic, but I lacked the size to compete at an elite level. So I made the decision to get bigger, faster, and stronger.”

Fourteen-year-old Weatherford headed to the library and devoured all of the fitness and nutrition information he could. What he came away with wasn’t so much a plan as it was a complete revolution in living.

“From then on, every day was the same: I’d go to the weight room at 6 a.m., then I’d go to class. After class, I’d go to sports practices—I played four sports—then I’d hit the weight room again. 

Afterwards it was home to do homework. And if I wasn’t doing one of those three things, I was eating to put on muscle.”

Four years later, he walked across the graduation stage weighting a ripped 225.

“The rumor in my small town was that I was on steroids,” he says. “No one could believe that through fully committing to a healthy lifestyle, someone could literally double their body size.”

That’s the wisdom. All great things Weatherford has—one of the most coveted bodies on the planet, a great family life, a $12.75 million contract—stem from giving all of himself to that commitment he made at 14.

“I believe that you can achieve anything you want in life if you make sacrifices and commit to yourself,” he says.

Indeed, his routine hasn’t changed much since high school. Today he works out and practices the game he loves, although class and homework have been replaced with family and philanthropy. 

“The investment of my time has to yield something,” he says. “That’s why all my time goes into fitness, football, family, and philanthropy—those have the highest yields for me.”

Weatherford looks like a champion bodybuilder because he takes a bodybuilding-style approach to his workouts. Each day of the week, he works a specific area of his body—for example, legs on Monday, chest on Tuesday—hitting the gym six days a week with one day of active rest.

The routine is peppered with fitness truisms that just “work” regardless of your approach to training. 

He says that his most important exercises are total-body lifts, like the barbell back squat, bench press, and deadlift. In those, he puts up 420 pounds for 10 reps, 525 for 1 rep, and 335 for 3 reps, respectively.

Football practices provide him with dynamic, athletic training that helps maintain his mobility and speed.

Unlike bodybuilders—whose body fat fluctuates around competitions—Weatherford sits around 5 percent for 12 months of the year.

Sure, the man probably has a strand or two of Adonis DNA running through his veins, genes that expressed themselves when he combined iron and heaping calories at an age when his body was primed for growth.

But genes can only take you so far, he thinks. “Freak genetics can get you to about 6 percent body fat,” he says. “To get below that, you need to be extremely regimented with fitness and nutrition.”

So what about you? Do you have cover-model potential like Weatherford? Perhaps the last time you saw your six-pack was senior year of high school. Or maybe a slight (or not so slight) gut has hung with you ever since you can remember. It doesn’t really matter. Unless you commit, you’ll never really know just how ripped you can get.

The following three strategies worked for Weatherford. Commit, and see if they work for you.

Make Sacrifices

Getting to low-single-digit body fat can’t be attained with a flippant, on-again off-again approach. You must go all in.

“I missed out on a lot in high school—I didn’t go out drinking with my friends, I didn’t stay out late at night. I went to the weight room,” says Weatherford. “It wasn’t always easy, and guys would often tease me for living in the gym. But I don’t regret anything—and now those same guys ask me for free tickets to games when I’m playing in town.”

Yeah, you can still look good without being 100 percent on-point with your workouts and eating, but getting seriously shredded takes a commitment most guys just won’t give.

Work What Works

“I don’t want to say that I’ve got fitness totally figured out,” says Weatherford. “But I have it figured out for me.” It will likely take some experimentation on your part, but determining which approaches work for you will get you better results faster.

For example, some people tend to put on more fat when they eat carbs, others are able to pound pasta and be completely ripped. (Weatherford loves whole wheat pasta.)

Figure out what works for you and work the heck out of it, says Weatherford.

Commit for Life

“What if I told you that I’d buy you any brand-new car you wanted?” asks Weatherford. “The catch is that you have to keep the car for your entire life. What would you do?

You’d probably be impeccable with keeping the car perfectly maintained and clean so that it would last. Well that’s how our bodies are. So why don’t most people do the same with their body?”

Find a good plan that works for you (see above) and ride it into the sunset. “It might take you years to reach your goal,” says Weatherford. “But over those years, the healthy habits become second nature, and you’ll be healthier and likely happier and more confident for life.”