Building the Man I Always Wanted to Become

I was always what's known as a hard-gainer — naturally thin, small-boned, with a fast metabolism that made it difficult to add any size no matter what I ate.

That wasn't just a physical fact — it became a deep insecurity. I remember being teased for it in school, and the feeling of not measuring up followed me long after the jokes stopped.

I started dreaming about a stronger, more capable version of myself as a teenager. I just didn't know yet how far away that version of me actually was.

I planned to join a gym for around two years before I actually did it. Not because I didn't want to — because I was genuinely afraid to.

Afraid of a place I'd never been. Afraid of not knowing what to do. Afraid of what people would think of me, a skinny kid, showing up to lift weights.

I dragged friends along for support, backed out more than once, and finally — out of frustration with myself more than confidence — signed up.

There was no coach waiting for me on day one, just a generic printed routine and a lot of guessing. Progress was slow, and so was understanding.

Over the following years, I taught myself — reading everything I could find, studying training and nutrition books from Lithuanian and international authors, and later formalizing that interest by studying Sports Coaching at LSMU.

I made mistakes along the way, including injuries that came from not understanding proper technique. Every one of them became part of what I now know.

Alongside building my training knowledge, I began working offshore in the North Sea — on oil and gas platforms, doing physically demanding work at height in one of the most unforgiving environments in the world.

I had to work through a real fear of heights to do that job. Storms, steel, fire, and open ocean became my everyday backdrop, on a rotating schedule that left no room for excuses.

The lesson offshore taught me wasn't really about the platform. It was that the hardest battles were rarely the ones happening around me — they were the ones happening in my own head.

Competing in bodybuilding had been a dream I carried for years, always pushed to 'someday'. After a difficult personal chapter forced me to rebuild my life from scratch, I decided someday had to become now.

I reached out to a coach, Mantas, and with roughly six months until competition day, the real work began.

What followed was a strict, tracked routine — every meal photographed and logged, every training session accounted for — alongside hours of posing practice and a mind that didn't always cooperate, even as my body reached its best shape yet.