My Best Mate Went to Prison for Six Months and Came Out Massive

Years and years ago, me and my best mate fell out.

And when I say fell out, I don't mean we had an argument on Friday and were back speaking by Monday. We didn't speak for a solid two years. That's genuinely not an exaggeration.

I'm not going to go into the circumstances surrounding what happened next, partly because it's his business and partly because I'm not even 100% sure of everything myself. All that matters for this story is that my mate ended up serving around six months in a UK prison.

When I eventually saw him again after he came out, I couldn't believe what I was looking at.

The man was absolutely wham.

His chest was huge. His legs had clear definition. His upper back, lats, shoulders and traps looked massive.

And there's something important you need to know about him.

This was actually the person who originally taught me how to train. He'd been a big lad before, but after losing his sight he'd also lost a significant amount of the muscle he used to carry.

Then he went to prison.

Six months later, I'm looking at him thinking he somehow looks like the bloke he was before he went blind.

I'll admit it: for a brief moment, I was genuinely jealous.

I'm looking at him thinking, mate, you've gone to prison, spent half your life sitting in a pad and somehow you've come out looking like this?

We were laughing about it, but I was genuinely curious.

What the hell have they got in prison that we haven't?

Because that sort of physical change in six months looked ridiculous.

Then he started telling me what he'd actually been doing.

And suddenly it made a lot more sense.

His "Prison Workout" Wasn't What I Expected

There wasn't some secret prison bodybuilding programme.

There wasn't a magic machine hidden behind the cell door.

A lot of what he was doing was incredibly basic.

Bodyweight squats.

Bulgarian split squats.

Push-ups.

Burpees.

That's basically it.

Doesn't sound particularly impressive, does it?

That's what I thought.

Until he told me how many he was doing.

His target for push-ups eventually became around 1,500 in a day.

Not 15.

Not 50.

1,500.

With his squats, he'd gradually increase the amount he was doing. It might start at 100, then 200, then 300, 400, 500 and keep going.

Same sort of idea with his split squats and burpees.

He wasn't doing a tidy little three sets of ten and calling it a day.

He was doing hundreds and sometimes thousands of repetitions because, frankly, he had an enormous amount of time to fill.

The One Thing He Had Was Time

This was the bit that changed how I looked at his transformation.

A large portion of prison life can involve being locked in a cell with very little to do. You've potentially got a small TV if you're lucky, four walls and time.

A lot of time.

My mate used that time to train.

He'd be in his pad sweating, grunting and hammering out rep after rep after rep.

He did get access to weights as well. From what he told me, he was getting into the prison gym roughly three times a week for around 40 minutes.

So there was some conventional resistance training involved.

But the majority of what impressed me wasn't coming from him spending two hours a day in some incredible gym.

It was the sheer amount of work he was doing outside of it.

When most of us finish the gym, training is over.

We go home. We go to work. We see our families. We walk the dog. We sit on our phones. We watch television. Life takes over.

For him, exercise had become one of the main ways he filled his day.

That's a very different environment.

But There's Another Massive Factor: He'd Been Big Before

This is where I don't want to pretend his results prove that everyone should start doing 1,500 push-ups a day.

They don't.

My mate wasn't an untrained person who suddenly discovered push-ups in prison and built an enormous physique from nothing.

He'd already built that muscle years earlier.

Remember, this is the man who taught me how to train.

After losing his sight, he'd lost a considerable amount of his previous size. Then he suddenly entered a period where he was training constantly again.

That makes muscle memory an important part of the story.

People who've previously built significant muscle can often regain lost size faster than someone building that muscle for the first time. So what I witnessed wasn't necessarily six months of completely new muscle growth.

Some of it was probably his body rebuilding something it had already possessed.

Combine that with an absurd amount of training volume and several weight sessions each week and suddenly his transformation isn't quite as mysterious.

Still impressive as hell, though.

There Wasn't a Secret Prison Diet Either

Naturally, I asked about food as well.

Again, nothing magical.

He ate the normal food he was given and supplemented that with things like tins of tuna and noodles.

That was pretty much it.

No carefully weighed meal-prep containers.

No perfectly calculated bodybuilding diet.

No supplement cupboard containing 15 different tubs.

No pre-workout ritual.

He ate what was available and trained.

A lot.

I'm not suggesting tuna and noodles is some optimal muscle-building diet, because it isn't. But it was another reminder that you can spend an incredible amount of time obsessing over tiny details while ignoring the biggest variable staring you in the face:

Are you actually doing the work consistently?

Would 1,500 Push-Ups a Day Work for Everyone?

This is where the story needs a reality check.

I wouldn't tell somebody reading this to go away and immediately start doing 1,500 push-ups every day.

More isn't automatically better.

Doing huge amounts of the same movement repeatedly can increase the risk of overuse problems, particularly if your joints and connective tissues aren't prepared for that workload. Your body also adapts to repeated movements, and there are much more controlled ways of progressively overloading muscles than simply chasing enormous rep counts.

What my mate did worked for my mate, under some very unusual circumstances.

His previous training history mattered.

His access to weights mattered.

His bodyweight training mattered.

His consistency mattered.

And the ridiculous amount of time he had available mattered.

That's very different from saying "prison workouts build more muscle than gyms."

I don't think they do.

So Would He Have Got Even Bigger Outside?

This is the question I've thought about since.

Imagine taking exactly the same person.

Same previous muscle.

Same determination.

Same six months.

Same willingness to train relentlessly.

But instead of putting him in a prison cell, give him access to a fully equipped gym, good food, proper recovery and all the equipment he could possibly want.

Would his results have been even better?

Possibly.

The problem is that on the outside he'd also have something he didn't have much of inside:

distractions.

Work.

Relationships.

Phones.

Social media.

Going places.

Seeing people.

Jobs around the house.

All the normal things that eat into our days.

Most people technically have access to better training conditions than he did.

What we don't necessarily have is the environment that resulted in him doing hundreds upon hundreds of reps because there wasn't much else competing for his attention.

For About Five Minutes, I Was Jealous

I still laugh when I think about seeing him.

I'd been living normal life while this man disappeared for six months and somehow returned looking like he'd been preparing for a bodybuilding show.

For that brief moment, I genuinely thought:

How the hell is this fair?

Then reality kicked in.

Yes, he'd got himself into phenomenal shape.

But look at what he'd given up in exchange.

Freedom.

Normal life.

The ability to decide where you're going tomorrow.

Seeing the people you want to see whenever you want.

Suddenly my gym membership didn't seem so bad.

And that's probably the biggest thing I took from the whole experience.

There wasn't some magical secret hidden inside a UK prison.

My mate had previous muscle, some access to weights, simple food and an absolutely enormous amount of time.

Then he did something with that time.

He trained.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I don't think the lesson is that we should copy prison training.

I definitely don't think the lesson is that anybody needs 1,500 push-ups a day.

The lesson I took from it was much simpler.

If you could take the same level of dedication and consistency and apply it to your life on the outside — while keeping your freedom, having access to better equipment and eating better food — imagine what you could actually achieve.

I'll take that option.