SWAP FAT FOR MUSCLE
Instagram star Obi Vincent fuses Crossfit with heavy lifting for extraordinary results. Build on his example
Crack Your Body’s 6-Pack Code
Obi Vincent has always been big. But before he developed his superhuman pecs, he was, well, very overweight. His love of his family’s fried Nigerian dinners left him “big, but in all the right places” – or so he told himself at the time.
Vincent’s journey from teenage TV addict to fitness super-influencer has been directed by moments of realisation, the first of which came at his first job. Stung by a colleague’s joke about his weight, he started “running around the local fields”. (“I was too self-conscious to be out on the roads,” Vincent explains.) He overhauled his nutrition, too, opting for an extremely restrictive diet. “I was clueless, and it wasn’t exactly healthy, but it worked. I lost nearly 20kg,” he says.
Down from XXL to M, Vincent had his second epiphany. “I saw a man in a club with huge muscles and decided there and then I wanted to look like him,” says Vincent. The next day, he joined a gym and put an end to the aimless cardio. As with his early dieting, however, Vincent was unorthodox. “I was a typical bro trainer,” he recalls. “I worked on my chest and arms and hated legs.” But when a personal trainer suggested taking bodybuilding seriously, Vincent went all in. “Crucially, I started to learn about nutrition – macros and daily expenditure,” he says. “I went from lean to shredded.”
But then he got found out. “I did a Youtube video pitting bodybuilding against Crossfit,” says Vincent. “I was supposed to be an athlete, but I just couldn’t keep up.” So came Vincent’s final awakening and his shift to “Crosslifting” – his versatile training system, which combines bodybuilding, flexibility and endurance. It’s an admission that working out to look good is OK – we all do it – but it shouldn’t be the sole focus. After years of trial and error, Vincent has finally found the sweet spot. It’s simple and pragmatic and, as you can see, it damn well works.