At one time, I ran a blog called Fitterverse: A universe of fitness. One of my favorite features of that blog was an interview series I did with a variety of people at different stages in their fitness journey. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I’ve been able to recapture the text of those interviews. I’ve published them here on their original publication dates.
Frank Gigante is a Natural Pro Bodybuilder from Rochester, New York, and the author of the book The Everyday Warrior. Fitterverse found Frank through one of his sponsors, Gymface, on Facebook. The interview was conducted by phone.
FV: Frank, what got you started in bodybuilding?
FG: I played a bunch of sports as a kid, and I got in an occasional workout, lifting some weights now and then. My dad had bought me a weight set, you know the old Weider weights with the plastic covers. It wasn’t something I was really passionate about at the time. I wanted to be fit and get in shape, and I was a gymnast, so playing sports helped. But that laid the foundation of the discipline and the consistency and sticking to it. I had a gymnastics coach at the time, Ken Friedheim, who preached the same thing at school. During gymnastics season we were practicing, but after the season, during the off season it was “I want you guys in the weight room. I want you to build muscle, make healthy choices.” So the two of them, my dad and Ken, kind of unknowingly started the passion for me, and led me in that direction.
By the time I was 16 or 17, I was hooked. I was buying Muscle and Fitness magazine, waiting every month to get it. My parents ended up getting me a subscription for Christmas each year. Every month I’d wait for that magazine and tear through it cover to cover, bringing it to the gym. By the time I was 18 or 19 and had started college, it just followed suit. I went to college, and followed the same habits. That’s when I started competing the first time.
FV: Move forward a little bit. There was a gap in competing for you.
FG: Yeah, I started competing in college and a little bit thereafter in natural shows. I was away at school, but when I’d go back for the summers, that’s when I’d compete. I grew up in Long Island, and there was a much bigger bodybuilding scene back then. When I did graduate from college and I stayed here in Rochester, I didn’t find the organizations to support local drug-tested shows. I’d start getting ready for one and the show would get cancelled. Competing kind of fell by the wayside. But I’m out of college, I’m looking for a job, eventually looking to get married, all that kind of stuff. The training never stopped, though. My training partner, who I met in college, we still lift together today. So we kept that up. I trained just as hard as I always have, but I just wasn’t competing.
So this went on, I got married, had some daughters, went through a divorce, and then 10 years after that… I don’t know what turned me back onto it, but I had this urge to want to compete again. I guess it was something that wasn’t done for me yet. So about four years ago, I told my lifting partner, Pete, “There’s a natural show in April, I think I wanna do it.” I’m sure he thought I was crazy. It had been fifteen years since I’d even been to a show, never mind competing in one. He said “Okay, whatever you wanna do, I’m behind you 100%.”
It started from there. I went and found my notes from fifteen years ago and what I ate and trained and adapted it to fit me now and the knowledge I’ve gained over the years about different practices, and we went for it.
FV: And how did you do in that show? How did that go for you?
FG: You know, I placed second in that show. I was a middleweight, and I placed second in the division. I didn’t know going into it what I’d look like compared to everyone else. But I went in and placed second, and that was great. There was another one that fall, so I said to Pete “Hey, why don’t we do another one?” I placed second again. He said to me “We’re this close, why not try and win your pro card?” Which… we were laughing before the first show because I told him “Hey, this is a pro qualifier. I can go in and win my natural professional bodybuilder.” We laughed about it because I had no clue, but it did become reality.
FV: So it sounds to me like being a natural was always part of your plan. What made you choose?
FG: I remember this back from when I was a teenager. Lee Haney was Mr. Olympia at the time, you had Rich Gaspari, Lee Labrada, and those guys were not overly humongous. They were well-built and put together. I never really knew “Are they natural, are they not?” I always had the idea that I wanted to get as big as I possibly could. And it was sometime in high school, once that passion had ignited, I made a decision that I wanted to get as big as I possibly can and take it as far as I can without ever using drugs. So I told myself at that point… I remember it exactly… that the day I contemplated using steroids or using other drugs, is the day that I stop lifting weights completely.
I mean, I enjoy this, and I enjoy seeing those really big guys. I’ve met Dorian Yates and I’ve met Levrone and some of the other guys a few times, and they’re phenomenal. They’re huge. But I have no desire to do that to myself.
FV: On your website, you also mention not doing any supplementation beyond protein. Is that preferential or part of the regulations?
FG: Back 10 or 15 years ago, these supplement companies were a bit too unregulated. New stories were coming out that this was in such and such product. Then there was the beginning of the “creatine phase,” which is what I call it. You’d hear that certain ingredients weren’t labeled right or included or the proportions weren’t right. After a while I just said “That’s enough.” I don’t need to take a risk of taking protein powder and getting some foreign substance in there. That was the end of that.
When I started to compete again, and really started adjusting my nutrition and fine-tuning things, it was time to get back to “How do I get enough protein in?” and started getting some protein powders. I started from there. But the rest of it I can pretty much do with food. As far as proteins, carbs, and fats go. I know people are big into creatine and a bunch of other supplements, and they’re not bad, I just never really used them for any period of time. Sometimes I’ll get free samples of different proteins and such in the bags at competitions, and I might try it, but mostly I just give them to Pete.
Even now, I started looking into things like branch chain amino acids, and they have some good benefits, maybe I should start utilizing those more. I don’t think I’ll ever be one of those guys with 47 pills in a day or stuff like that. To me supplements should be a supplement to your nutrition, which should come from food. Beyond that, you should supplement. I try to get as much protein and stuff as I can from food.
Even the last few months I’ve tried, and I wrote an article about, pre-workouts. Every ad for pre-workout says “You’re gonna take this, and you’re gonna go to the gym and rip your shirt off and lift the building off its foundation. Your squat is going to go up 500 pounds in a day…” I just can’t buy that, because I get fired up to go to the gym. Pete and I, when we go in there, it’s time to work. We don’t talk to each other, we don’t have our phones out. I throw my headset on, I put my head down, we have a job to do, and it’s intense. I can’t imagine some powder or pill is going to make it more intense than that. But I’ve read more behind the science of the pre-workouts and the different ingredients and what helps warm the muscles and what helps deliver more nutrients and moves certain things around helps with some chemicals. On a chemical level I can understand that it might be beneficial. I started to dabble with those, but I’m on the fence.
FV: So what does your nutrition plan look like, and how might it be different from other bodybuilders?
FG: Well, definitely less supplements. I don’t know how different it would be. There’s a lot of whole food in there. I try to go as unprocessed as possible. I’ve got the probably insane ability… I kind of eat the same thing pretty much every day. My meals are pretty consistent. I eat 6 times a day. There may be a few changes in a day that I’m going to the gym and a day that I’m not going to the gym. But pretty much the food and the meals stay pretty much the same each day. Oatmeal is probably the most processed food I’m eating at the moment. Otherwise it’s eggs, chicken, brown rice, lentils, yams.
FV: What’s your thought on cheat meals?
FG: I’m not opposed to cheat meals. It seems at least when you’re trying to lean out, it’s helpful to throw in a cheat meal because from what I’ve read, it can jump start your metabolism if things get too stable or too restrictive. The extra fats and the extra nutrients and whatever else is in there should be helpful to get your metabolism kick-started in there and then get right back on track and keep going.
The other thing about cheat meals – there’s a difference between a well-planned out, tasty meal that you wouldn’t otherwise eat and an all out free-for-all of whatever you can get your hands on and are just throwing into your body.
FV: As you approach a competition, how do things change for you?
FG: I just competed a few weeks ago, so I have about seven weeks between competitions. So I prepared for the first show since about June or July. So it was kind of a double thing, where I’ve got so many weeks to that show, but I have so many more weeks until the November show. Hitting that show was great, it was a good checkpoint for me to figure out where I was, and knowing I had another show in seven weeks, where do I want to go. I came back and I had a couple cheat meals and got right back at it to get where I want to be.
FV: What do you feel is your strength? What’s your weakness?
FG: Every competition I do I always ask for feedback from the judges. And right away, they all say “You’ve got the size, you’ve got the symmetry, you’ve got the proportion, your posing is good.” The one weakness is just coming in conditioning-wise hard enough, or harder than I have been so that my legs are as tight, defined, and hard as my upper body. I’ve been fortunate enough over the last year that I’ve been able to fine-tune conditioning to get my upper body… the skin’s thin, the muscles are full,defined, and striated, it’s just a matter of getting the legs that much harder to match. That’s my focus at the moment.
FV: You’ve written an eBook, The Everyday Warrior. Tell me a little bit about that. What prompted you to write it?
FG: The whole premise started the night I won my pro card. We were eating a pizza after the show, and I said to Pete “You know, there’s gotta be something more, besides competing as a professional, to this pro card thing. There must be some way we can do something with this of value.” In the next few days after that he said to me “You’ve got a great story to tell. You took 15 years off, you’ve got kids and a full-time job. Lifting and training and eating are not your full-time job. You go to work, you take care of the house and the family, and yet you make the time to get into this kind of shape.” So we developed a website called The Working Men’s Guide to Health and Fitness which was originally geared towards guys like me and him who have families and bills and obligations but still made time to be healthy and fit, though not to the extreme of bodybuilding, per se. So that was the premise of The Everyday Warrior. As you get older, you hear about guys who are “weekend warriors,” who go out and play football with their buddies and reminisce about their high school and college days, run 10 yards, pull a hamstring, and then go out and have a couple beers… which is fine. The everyday warriors are the people who – they don’t have to necessarily compete or anything, that to me is a whole separate area – but in general, they have busy schedules, running kids around, paying bills, going to full-time jobs, but somehow want to stay healthy and in shape. They want to find time to get fit and eat well and not spend 20 hours a week doing cardio because they don’t have the time. That’s what The Everyday Warrior is all about. In our busy schedules, how do we incorporate this stuff into our busy schedules without creating a whole “other thing to do.” How do we make it part of the routine.
So the book talks about what we call the four pillars of health – healthy eating, healthy weight training, healthy cardio, and healthy well-being, how to take time out for yourself and not get so stressed out and bogged down because that’s going to effect the rest of your health. It’s more of a guide to incorporating little changes into your lifestyle to make health and fitness part of your lifestyle rather than something separate.
FV: So what do you find the most difficult?
FG: Probably just keeping up the consistency of it. I look at it this way: there’s my weight training, there’s my cardio, and there’s my nutrition. The weight training is automatic, and without question is the easiest of those three. Nutrition’s not bad, once I have it fine-tuned. I’m very meticulous about it, I write it all out on paper, I count all the nutrients up and play around with different foods to get where I want to be. Once I have that done it’s just a matter of cooking those foods. I usually try and cook once a week, maybe twice, I cook in bulk. During the week it makes it a lot easier to just grab stuff that’s already in Tupperware, throw it in my cooler and go for the day rather than having to cook every night.
With cardio, it’s a matter of how do I schedule it in around the girls, around work, around my gym times. How do I fit that in? Sometimes that can get a little tricky, but between that and dialing in the nutrition. Once that’s dialed in it’s just a matter of taking three hours on the weekend and cooking and prepping everything and packing it all up. So I guess scheduling would be the hardest part.
FV: What do you enjoy the most?
FG: I guess there’s two sides of that. I enjoy the personal side of training and competing and meeting new people every time we go out, and seeing how far I can push my body, how far I can progress, and what goals I can reach. On the flip side, the whole social media thing, and I write for Natural Muscle magazine every month. I’ve been writing for them for just over a year, which is mind-boggling to me. Having the Facebook page that came out of the early conversations about how we deliver something of value out of having a pro card. I mean, who cares about some isolated bodybuilder in Rochester? It’s really not that big of a deal. But how do we deliver value to more people. The development of that page and the website and all the people that have taken the time to go there or write me a message or ask a question – that part has been extremely rewarding. It was something I didn’t expect.
FV: Do you have any advice for anyone who might want to start a bodybuilding program, particularly as a natural?
FG: My biggest piece of advice is learn the proper form and technique first. I just started a fitness club at the high school where I teach. A bunch of people signed up, and most of them are guys, and they’re asking “How much do you bench?” and saying “I wanna be huge!” and I tell them “Guys, forget it. Don’t come in here with the how much can you bench question to any one of you. I don’t care if you lift five pounds. I can take any one of you and give you a five-pound dumbbell and make you sore for three days. This is not about how much you can lift and what you bench, because who cares? You’re going to learn form. You’re going to learn technique. You’re going to learn a variety of exercises on how to build your body. The weight will come.”
The rest is just consistency and persistence. It’s continually doing more or reaching for a higher goal. Start small, hit a small goal, and then plan another goal. You can have large goals, but then you break them down into little chunks along the way, because there are a lot of things that go on between point A and point B that you have to be able to recognize and celebrate and acknowledge.