This will put all your fitness problems into perspective.
If you’ve got a niggling injury, if your gym is a mile walk away and doesn’t have the latest weights machines or if your training partner always lets you down, maybe just pipe down and crack on.
All of these classic gripes just pale into insignificance when you hear the story of Andrew Jones.
The American was a successful fitness model and had just won his pro card for physique bodybuilding. He was in amazing shape.
But then he got ill. Not just ill – he was at death’s door with a heart condition called cardiomyopathy where thickening of the heart tissue means the organ no longer works and can’t pump blood around the body properly.
He was so critically ill with the condition that they couldn’t wait for a transplant and had to hook him up to an artificial heart, which he carries around in a backpack, just to keep him alive.
“I essentially don’t have a pulse,” he told Great Big Story. “You can check anywhere you want and you won’t feel a pulse. I’m pretty much the best-looking zombie you’ll ever see.”
When everyone else is plugging their iPhones in to charge before bed, he has to plug himself in to keep his artificial heart pumping through the night.
Most people would have just quit and given up at that point. But after four months in intensive care Andrew just wanted to get back into the gym.
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He was even doing press ups in the hospital hooked up to all the machines.
It hasn’t stopped him training and he was soon back lifting weights, building his strength and slowly rebuilding that awesome physique.
Not having a functioning heart doesn’t stop him from doing physically demanding exercises in the gym – whether that’s HIIT sprints, heavy bench press or squats.
Andrew, who is still searching for a donor match for a new heart, chronicles his fitness journey on Instagram and YouTube.
He had to start slow and go back to bodybuilding basics to build his body from the ground up again. Doctors orders were not to be hitting the crazy workouts that he used to do to make his muscles grow back before his heart condition hit.
His leg days consisted of using light weights on the leg press machine as he didn’t have the base strength to be able to squat straight away.
“The basics are our foundation,” he says in the first episode of his YouTube series ‘Starting Over’. “It’s what you started with and without it you have nothing. You shouldn’t be afraid to refer back to your basics.”
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He wasn’t able to do chest exercises for some time after the open heart surgery he underwent, which required surgeons to cut through his breast bone. Doctors told him it could be anywhere between six months and a year before he was hitting the bench again.
It didn’t stop him training his arms though or getting back to hitting push ups.
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“I’m not able to go into the gym and smash the weights like I used to. I have to take it baby steps at a time. Things have to be taken slow.
“I want to inspire you guys and make you guys believe that if for some reason you hit a low moment in your life in your health, your social life or yourself, you can always bounce back.
“It may take a while, and that really sucks, but you will bounce back.”
What a man.
