Capt. Ryan Lowe got his start in competitive bodybuilding around the same age that most athletes begin to phase it out of their lives.
Lowe, an action officer at Fort Jackson's Army Training Center Operations, was no stranger to the gym. He said he's always tried to stay fit, but a chance encounter led to him to consider taking his relationship with weight training to a more serious level.
"I've been lifting forever," he said. "Someone I knew was at the gym one day and had competed, and he told me I should try it. I'd seen his pictures and was impressed. I'd been training my whole life and figured if he could do it, I might as well give it a shot."
Lowe took third place in his first competition in 2015. After that, he set his sights on securing a first place trophy. He was 35 years old at the time.
Prior to that, he said, his goals at the gym were more practical.
"It wasn't about being stronger," Lowe said. "It was about looking better, feeling better and performing better at work. I just did it. It was not about competing. I had no aspirations
about competing. I thought it was weird."
That chance encounter with an old friend offered a new point of view on bodybuilding, both as a hobby and as a sport. The key, he learned, was in changing his diet -- which proved to be more difficult than he imagined.
Burning body fat and isolating the strengths and needs of specific muscles required the kind of attention he'd historically avoided.
"I struggled that first month because you have to drop everything you enjoy," he said.
"Most people doing it for fun will train for a couple of days and then take a day off. Now, I was going seven days a week and, prior to a show, sometimes two or three times a day. You've got to do a lot of cardiovascular training to burn the fat off."
Lowe's training suffered a setback in 2016, courtesy of the Army. He was deployed for 12 months and unable to train at a professional level, setting him back to "Day One" in 2017. Regardless,
he quickly made up for lost time. This year, he competed in four shows, winning first place in three of them. His most recent competition qualified him to take part in a national event in 2018.
"I'll be 38 years old in a couple of weeks," he said, "so I'm pretty late to the game. But there are people doing it into their 50s and 60s, even competitively and professionally. Within the next decade, I'd like to place top three in a national show, possibly earn an International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness pro-card and do it until I can't do it anymore."
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