Life can be a balancing act, as we spread ourselves thin between our home life, work life, and fitting in the time to do the things we love. Something that wrestler and founder of Fitness Informant and Fit Butters knows only too well.
Ryan recognizes that to have it all, it takes commitment, dedication, and often sacrifice. But he manages it all with his love of fitness, saying that running two businesses, being a father of two and a husband means that by his own admission, he lives a pretty stressful life.
He says that it’s totally ok to spend a lot of money on psychotherapists as many people do, but for him, fitness is his therapy. Every day, he’s up at 4 am ready to work out, and incredibly, he’s so focused that he “rarely hits the snooze button” even at that hour of the day.
He loves the mental health benefits of going to the gym and keeping fit the most, as it enables him to do all the things and be all the people his busy life needs him to be.
Ryan started wresting because he loved it, just like anyone who grows up wanting to do any sport or any profession. “I wanted to grow up to be a pro wrestler, simple as that.”
However, this also meant that Ryan had the opportunity to “dabble in steroid use, a lot”. He isn’t afraid to admit that he used steroids, and “got huge”. But he didn’t do it with an educated approach, thinking “that he knew everything there was to know”. Even though he enjoyed the size he got to, the “aftermath of steroid use made him a miserable human being”.
When he decided to come off the steroids, after a couple of weeks, he just wasn’t feeling normal. He had depleted energy levels, felt depressed, and started to become agitated and irritable. It got to the point where Ryan went to the gym, something he would normally love, but took one look at a weights bench, turned around and went home again.
Ryan knew something was wrong and so he made an appointment to see an endocrinologist, a medic who looks at hormone levels. They found that his testosterone levels were “pretty much nonexistent”. By this point after stopping steroid use, his natural levels should’ve been getting back to normal, but they weren’t. Instead, they’d simply bottomed out.
So he started taking a natural testosterone booster. His energy levels started to increase and he was no longer having to go to bed super early – which was good, as this was around the time that his daughter was born and he was able to play with her and spend quality time with her.
Ryan started enjoying being himself once again and began taking pleasure from hanging out with friends and doing normal things.
His message is that it is possible to recover after steroid use and that it is possible to manage a busy life – by using the gym as his therapy alongside the right nutrition and the right natural supplements. And we salute that!