Quotes from Dorian Yates

I was always criticized through my whole career because I wasn't doing the whole smiling thing on stage. But I didn't feel like doing that, I felt like I was there for competition and it was tough and I wasn't there to smile.

I was a pretty fit and physical kid, and my first interest was in martial arts and kung fu with all the Bruce Lee movies.

Yes, it is not all about training hard. If you do too many sets and too much volume overall, your body is just going to be spending all its time trying to recover and not overcompensating because it doesn't have enough resources for that.

You are hungry all the time for the last two months before a competition. Every survival thing on your body is telling you that you must eat.

In every sport, at the competitive level, there's always a danger of injury. But there are considerably less chances in body building comparatively, than say in soccer.

Most bodybuilders are somewhat extravert so they probably enjoy that whole thing of people looking at them all the time and being on stage. I was an introvert and not really interested in that, I was doing it for myself.

I would like to get some points across about my sport and hopefully people can understand it a bit more and appreciate what goes into it, instead of being monkey in a cage.

I don't have ambitions to be a movie star or multi-millionaire.

If you undermine people's confidence, they turn up at the contest trying to get second place.

If I listened to my instincts, I'd be down at the pub chasing women, not under a 400 pound bar squatting

We're different people. Politics and films were an ambition for Arnold, but never for me. But I would say that his contribution in broad-basing the sport can hardly be matched.

Everyone gets the impression that bodybuilders are narcissistic, and we look at ourselves in mirrors all the time. But that side of the sport doesn't appeal to me.

I wanted to set a new standard for competitive bodybuilding.

I had only been training for a year and half when I did the World Games. Then the next year I did the British championship as a heavyweight and won that.

I kind of stumbled into this. I used to do karate and then I started reading muscle magazines. Eventually, I began training and competing.

You can convert amino acids into glucose so your body can turn protein into energy and this could result with excessive protein intake. But it is an expensive way to increase your energy as well as an inefficient energy source. And your body has to eliminate it as well so it will put further stress on your system. At best it's unnecessary.

I never see bodybuilding on the sports page and it is not considered to be a sport because of the drug question, because of steroids, let's be honest.

I trained for size in the off-season, but when it came time to get ready for a contest it was all about coming in shredded. The glutes must be striated, with the lower back shredded, no water anywhere, no loose skin. Like you are covered in cling-film.

Splitting your meals up into smaller, more frequent portions will enable food absorption and utilization of nutrients.

Even when I was on vacation after the Olympia, I was looking for gym to train in. Not only was it 24 hours a day, it was 365 days a year. That may have been a little too extreme, but that is what got me there from that little backstreet gym in England to becoming Mr. Olympia.

I never started bodybuilding because I thought I'm not big enough, I'm not strong enough.

If your body produces more blood glucose than the muscle needs, it gets converted into fat. So always choose low-GI carbs like green vegetables and low-GI rice like basmati.

If those guys with better genes trained as hard and intense as me, I wouldn't stand a chance!