By Mike Carlson, online editor

Mike Carlson: What was your athletic background before you started bodybuilding?
Brian Whitacre: I was always the scrawny kid growing up and like anyone else in high school I tried to lift weights to get better at sports. I was a reasonable soccer player in high school.

I wasn’t good enough to play in college but I just fell in love with lifting weights and the idea that you could improve slowly but surely. I really didn’t know anything about competitive bodybuilding until I turned 25 or 26. So I was kind of late bloomer. I competed in my first contest at 26. After that first experience onstage I fell in love with it.

MC: You’re known for your insane conditioning. How would you rate your genetics?
BW: My genetics are above average. At 16 I weighed 120 pounds. I don’t grow very quickly but I do get lean without a whole lot of work. There are certainly a lot of people out there with better genetics than me. I just need to make sure I am working as hard as I can to take advantage of what I do have.

MC: Name an aspect of your training that has made a positive difference in your results?

BW: A couple come to mind: I got a lot of feedback this past year because I really brought my legs up in a one-year period. And that is hard when you’ve been training for 15 years like I have. The one thing that I credit for that is that I implemented kind of a unique two-week split where I would hit my legs really hard with traditional squats and all the regular leg movements one week, then the next week I would throw in some front squats at the end of my back workout. So I would hit them in a way they were not used to being hit. That would be my main recommendation: Hit the muscle in a way that it’s not used to. You have to avoid stagnation at any cost. I’ll throw in some 10x10s, some powerlifting stuff, just to keep the muscle guessing,

MC: Tell me more about this two-week split.
BW: It’s not a very traditional split. I wanted to focus on either heavy squats or heavy deadlifts every weekend. So every Saturday I would do heavy legs or heavy back. The rest of those two weeks I fit in all the other bodyparts. With this program I would typically hit legs three times in two weeks. One would be really heavy and the other one would have more of a hamstring focus. Then I would also throw in seven sets of front squats at the end of my back workout. I haven’t seen a split like that before.

MC: What is your training like right now?
BW: Right now I am on that 10x10 program I mentioned. It’s called German Volume Training (GVT). You do two bodyparts a workout and I have tweaked it so I can go four days a week. You usually go three days a week and do two bodyparts a day, but I have split it up so I go four times a week. I’m really happy with how it has worked. I did it once before in this off-season and when I went back to my usual program to see what kind of numbers I could move with the squat and deadlifts I was really impressed with the strength gains I got with just one month of GVT. I am doing that for a month and once that gets over with, I am going back to my two-week split that I really like.

MC: What is something that you’ve tried in your training but discarded because it didn’t produce results?
BW: I rarely do ab training anymore. When you‘re growing up you always want to have a six-pack and I eventually learned that it is 90% diet. I’ll get my diet taken care of and then I might do a total of 200 crunches through my entire prep. My abs are already developed. I developed them over the first 10-15 years of my training.

MC: Have you ever considered bodybuilding that is not drug-tested?
BW: Not going the natural route was never ever a thought for me. I was always a pretty straight-laced kid growing up and I had heard enough about steroids that I knew it wasn’t for me. A lot of natural bodybuilders are strictly anti-IFBB but I do follow them. I think a lot of those guys work extremely hard, just like we do. In some ways I feel like they are taking shortcuts but they are certainly more popular than we are and I am not going to take anything away from them.

MC: What is your favorite Scivation product?
BW: XTEND is awesome, all flavors of it, and I love the Chocolate Scivation Whey, but I am actually a really big fan of the Scivation Essential-FAs (essential fatty acids). I use both the Essentials-FA and the Sesamin.