Zane Watson Interview

We’ve all seen what I’ll call “fitness couples” attending bodybuilding shows, or walking around the associated expo, or even training in your gym. They’re built and in shape and they train really hard and more than likely at least one of them competes. I know people look at such couples and wonder what kind of offspring you’d pull out of the gene pool of such a couple’s combined DNA. How could the thought not cross your mind? It’s like wondering how the new Corvette is going to drive. Unfortunately for such curiosity, we rarely ever get to see what such a union can bear if left to play out.

In any such melding of DNA, one requires an incubator. In the case I’m going to tell you about, the incubator is the Canadian Nationals. Once upon a time, 1978 middleweight champion Mike Watson married 1982 women’s lightweight champion Michelle Tennier. Sometime later, they gave birth to the 2012 light heavyweight Canadian Nationals champion, Zane Watson. That’s right—mom, dad, and son are all Canadian National champions!

As far as father and son go, it adds an element to this story that’s going to end up tugging on your heartstrings, because it features perhaps the most unique, if not as successful, father/son relationship since Mat Ferrigno and his son, Louie—only without the toxic element.

“I’m spoiled,” Zane told me. “I have the best coach in the world. My dad and I used to train at home, or at friends’ gyms. We recently trained in a tiny 500-square-foot gym in the back of a friend’s house. I think we trained at that little place for a year and a half straight.”
“Just you and your dad?”
“No one was there,” he said. “No distractions, just him and me. Sometimes I’d invite a friend or two over to train with us, but they could never hang.”
“How old were you when you realized your parents had muscles and that muscles are cool?”
Zane thought for a second and said, “I can remember being really little and my dad would put me on his feet and do leg extensions with me. I thought it was fun, and I thought it was just normal.”
“Were you forced into training or was it something you were champing at the bit to do once you figured out what it was?”
“Oh, I was all in,” he said. “I couldn’t wait to start lifting.”
“When did you start?”
“We lived out in the country. My dad had a beautiful house. There was a 3,000-square-foot room attached to it with a swimming pool. My dad filled in the pool and put a gym on top of it. That was really my first gym where I started training.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”

Now, to any growing bodybuilder, this sounds like the life of Riley. Your dad—the Canadian Nationals champion—is training you for free, you’re not paying rent, and you get bodybuilder food made for you. How much better does it get? Well … sometimes it’s also wise to ask how bad it can get. Reality has a way of making things difficult, even if it looks good on paper. The adversity, however, shapes the things to come. It is, unfortunately, usually uncomfortable and usually not worth the anxiety over sharing it with too many people. It takes a cool, laid-back dude to open up about such things. And, I have to tell you, Zane sounds chill to me. like he’s wearing a straw hat and sipping a mojito.

“So, you’re 16, living at home, with this amazing gym attached to your house, being trained by your dad. What was life like for you back then? It seems like paradise.”
Zane began speaking, very at ease. “My dad owned a large string of fitness centers when we lived in the big house with the gym over the pool.” Zane paused for a few beats and continued. “My dad was very successful and very wealthy. But, he always had struggled with a drug addiction. He ended up losing one of his main gym chains and was left with a small gym chain called Watsons, which he ended up selling for way less than it was worth.”
“This was going on while you’re 16?” I asked.
“While I was between 14 and 17,” Zane replied. “Dad just wasn’t right and still struggling and when he lost Watsons, things were out of my father’s control. He got thrown out of the house. I got thrown to the curb too.”
“You got thrown out? Why?”
“Well, starting at about 16, I had a hard time finding myself. I had gotten into drugs, and by the time I was 19, I had gotten arrested and did about six months in jail.”
“You were going in a bad direction.”
“I was,” Zane agreed. “I was hooked and in trouble. I wasn’t even training then.”

One good thing about spending six months in jail is that if you’re addicted to heroin, you won’t be when you get out. Let’s not talk about the hell you’ll live through while you kick it in jail, but rather, just focus on the fact that in your cleaned-out state, you’ll be able to make some good decisions. Some people go right back to what got them in trouble in the first place, while others wake up and smell the coffee. Luckily for Zane, he likes coffee.
“So, you got out of jail with a new perspective?”
“I did. I got out of jail and worked a few jobs. I stayed clean and started a kind of pest control business.”
“A kind of pest control business? You mean like bugs?”
“No, wildlife.”
“Wildlife?” I asked a bit confused. When I hear wildlife, I think the Discovery Channel.
Zane set out to clarify the term for me. “Like if you have raccoons in your garage, or possum in your attic, or a boa constrictor in your hall closet, you call me, wildlife control.”
“Ah … so, no bugs?”
“No, no bugs.”
“Was the business successful,” I asked.
“Yes, it’s doing great. I started a roofing company too. I straightened my head out, stopped getting high, and started training again.”
“What happened to your dad?”
“I had lost track of my dad. It wasn’t until 2009 that he kind of got back on his feet and we started reconnecting. I was training again, but not like when I was with him.”
“You got back together in the gym?”
“Yes, in 2009 he started training me again. This time we were going for it. We set our sights on the Nationals. But, I was a mess. My shoulders were messed up, and my AC joint was a wreck. He started rehabilitating me, then we had about eight weeks to get ready for Stratford, Ontario. I won first and overall. Then six weeks later, I entered the Ontario and won first and overall. That permanently qualified me for Nationals.”
Which Zane won in 2012, earning his IFBB pro card. “How did your dad approach your contest prep?”
“He’s like a scientist,” Zane replied. “He planned the whole year; he wrote it all down on a chart: what I’d be eating, how much I should weigh at certain points, how I should be training. He does everything: diet, training, all planned in incredible detail. And it’s strict!”
“It seems like a good team,” I said.
“It is, and as much as I hate to admit it, I need my dad. He keeps me steered straight.”

SIDEBARS

Training for Off-Season Mass

Off-season we follow a Dorian Yates style of training, very high intensity—5 sets of 5, or German volume, 8 sets of 10. That’s really hard; we usually only do that once a month. The mainstay is really 5 sets of 5 and working drop sets. I’ve learned a lot of things, and my dad has learned a lot from me. Now that I’m a pro, I’ve been exposed to a whole wealth of info from all the guys talking about it. Dad is old-school. Drugs have changed, different supplements have changed, and some of my training has changed. But I stay in good shape. I’m very comfortable now around 240 instead of 260. Remember, I’m competing at 212, so I don’t need to be big.

A Full Week of Off-Season Training

The frequency of my training days depends on my workload. If I’m training with Dad, we train 4 or 5 days a week:

Monday: Back

Tuesday: Chest and bi calves

Wednesday: Off or legs

Thursday: Shoulders, tris, calves

That’s pretty much what I’ve done to get my size, up until this last year. Now I have a five-day split because I need to improve my weaknesses:

Monday: Back. I go to the gym in the morning and do heavy deadlifts or heavy rows, like Yates would do. Then in the afternoon, I come back and do the rest of my back. I’ll do 4 or 5 different exercises. This gives me time to rest after doing deads or rows.

Tuesday: Chest and calves and biceps if I can. I pick 4 or 5 exercises. They change every workout. Superset 1 and 2 or 1, 2, and 3 exercises. 5 sets of 5, or 8 sets of 10. Working set, followed by a working drop set followed by a drop set (2 working sets, one of them a drop set). Or, superset push-pull.

Wednesday: Another two-day split. In the morning, I’ll pick one or two exercises of biceps, and I’ll just keep doing them, like 8 sets of each exercise. Then, at night, I’ll come back and do quads and triceps.

Thursday: Depending on what I did for quads, I’ll pick a few exercises for hams. Like if I did leg presses for quads, I wouldn’t do a one-legged press; I love one-legged press for hams. I’ll also do lots of stiff-legged deadlifts. Ben Pakulski showed me that. And, I’ll throw in a back exercise, usually either a D-handle cable row or a heavy D-handle barbell row. I like quarter rows too, I really feel that exercise. I may also throw in a pullover or a lat pulldown; it depends how I feel. I never train the same way twice.

Friday: In the morning, I’ll do triceps again. I pick two different exercises and do high-rep sets—20, 15, 10, 10, 15, 20. This is awesome, especially for arms. And, pyramid the weights—5 sets of 5, 8 sets of 3 with 45 seconds to one minute of rest between sets. It’s very rare I’m not timing my workout for time over tension. At night, I’ll come back and do shoulders. Maybe a couple of sets of calves. My shoulders are healthy now, so I’m really getting into presses. I do clean and jerks for the first exercise. They make you huff and puff too! Great cardio. I usually superset two rear delt exercises like seated side lateral and reverse pec deck butterfly. Then I’ll do dumbbell press or front laterals.

A Word about Zane’s Ridiculous Traps

My traps are overpowering now, so I don’t train them too much anymore. But guys always ask me what I do for them. What got them so good was this: You set up a Smith machine by pushing the sliding bar all the way up and tying it out of the way. Then you put an Olympic bar up against the Smith machine’s upright where the sliding bar would go. You pull against the slide while you’re pulling your traps up. Then reverse it by turning around and pushing against the upright with your palms facing the mirror. This put the most muscle on my traps. And we had this old Nautilus lying rear delt machine I used a lot. That was awesome for traps too.

Zanes’ Top 5 Favourite Mass/Strength-Building Exercises

I just like the meat and potatoes for building mass: deadlifts, squats, different kinds of rows, heavy dumbbell presses, 90 degree angle one-arm Scott curls. I like basic power exercises—nothing with a Swiss ball! I do like to get two to three hours of cardio in a week, at least in a perfect world.

Off-Season Nutrition

On-season, I eat every day at the same time: 7 a.m., 10 a.m., 1 p.m., 4 p.m., 7 p.m., and 10 p.m. This is strict, so I keep it the same in the off-season as well. I like to keep my first three meals in the off-season because I like them. So, every day, I try to get my 7:00, 10:00, and 1:00 meal in, with a little extra carbs.

My 7:00 off-season meal is 1½ cups of oatmeal, then 8 egg whites (250 mL) mixed in milk with an espresso.

At 10:00, I have a can of tuna with a one-inch slice of a pineapple and a sandwich—a big sandwich.

At 1:00 in the on-season, this is a cottage cheese, yogurt, and fruit meal, but off-season I change it to two cups of rice with steak or chicken and a vegetable. I eat 40 to 50 grams of protein at each meal.

An hour later, I work out. I drink branched-chains during the workout.

My after-workout shake is the most important part of the day. I’ll mix 50 grams of protein with waxy maize, a big serving of greens plus, and psyllium fibre. This is a very important part of my diet.

An hour later, I eat a big meal, either out or prepared, like a steak, or a rack of ribs , or double bacon cheeseburgers. I like to eat! The idea is this: I try to get three clean meals in first, then after that, I eat what I want!