Jay Cutler was a bodybuilding phenom. (He’s only 23 in the photo above.) He rose rapidly from a Massachusetts farm to a Muscle & Fitness cover. In his first four months after joining a gym, he gained an incredible 50 pounds. And he just kept growing. So disciplined was Cutler that he wrote every calorie and rep down and never once deviated from his plan, not even to add a dash of catchup to all the pounds of ground beef he was eating, one cow at a time.
From The Barbell‘s exclusive interview, this is the story of how young Jay Cutler, bodybuilding wannabe, grew incredibly fast to become a physique phenom by his early twenties, on his way to becoming a four-time Mr. Olympia.
JAY CUTLER’S CHILDHOOD
Located five miles north of Worcester and 35 miles west of Boston is the farming community of Sterling, Massachusetts (population: 7985). On August 3, 1973, Jason Cutler was born there, the youngest of seven kids (three brothers, three sisters). On his family’s 175-acre farm in Sterling were cows, chickens, pigs, goats, and horses, and the last child tended animals, baled hay, and chopped wood, but the Cutlers were not full-time farmers. His dad was a highway department superintendent, his mom worked in finance at a military base, and his brothers launched Cutler Brothers Concrete Foundations, where Jay began working at the Dickensian age of 11, continuing until just after he turned 18.
“I hated that job,” the bodybuilding legend confesses. “Every weekend, every school vacation and all summer long I was getting dragged out of bed at six A.M. and carrying 80-pound concrete forms until sundown. But it taught me you have to work for what you get in life, and when it comes down to treating this [bodybuilding] not only as a job but as a do-or-die situation, I train at 100%, and I don’t complain. Because of where I began, it’s never difficult for me.”
THE MUSCLE KID
Do you remember that kid who was always stronger, faster, and more muscular than everyone else his age? There’s a top dog in every class, and, in Sterling, Jay Cutler was that canine, even before he was lifting concrete with his brothers. By the time he got to high school, coaches wanted him to go out for track and field, but, having to work, he made time for only football, playing fullback and defensive end. “I didn’t really like football, to be honest. I was good, but I didn’t like that we lost as a team because someone screwed up.”
In bodybuilding there is no one else to screw up. Cutler remembers his introduction to the sport. It was, likely, the very first issue of FLEX magazine (April 1983). “My second oldest sister had a boyfriend who lived with us when I was 12, and he had bodybuilding magazines. I remember breezing through them, and Chris Dickerson was on the cover of one, and this was 1985 but it was an older magazine, because he’d just won the [Mr. Olympia] title. I still remember the Weider ads, and I also remember looking at Dickerson and saying, ‘This is what I want to look like.’”
JAY CUTLER’S CAR JACKING
There was only an old Universal weight machine at the high school, so, at 16, the future Mr. O joined the Worcester Gold’s Gym. He only went a few times, and he mostly just watched. It seemed he didn’t need to train to remain the strongest kid around. When members of the football team entered a powerlifting meet, Cutler won, though he didn’t actually know how to perform the lifts. He had been doing a sort of deadlifting, but while gripping bumpers.
“I used to pick up the back of cars at parties when I was teenager,” he recalls with a laugh. “Everyone would go outside and watch me pick up cars.” He occasionally picked up a bodybuilding magazine too, thumbing through it in a supermarket. Bob Paris’s Beyond Built was the first bodybuilding book he read, and he wanted a physique like the ultra-aesthetic Paris’s. All the while people asked him if he worked out, so he kept formulating the idea that bodybuilding could be something he’d excel at.
BIG BODYBUILDING DREAMS
Beaman Tavern and Restaurant wasn’t romantic, but that’s where Jay Cutler and his future wife, Kerry, dined on their first date in July 1990. He still remembers what they ate: lasagna (him) and fried chicken sandwich (her). It was the summer before their senior years, and they talked about post-graduation plans.
The 17-year-old who had barely even touched a barbell said, “I’m going to go college, but I want to start working out after we graduate next year. I’m going to be a professional bodybuilder.” Kerry could be forgiven if she spit out her sandwich and convulsed with laughter. Choosing pro bodybuilding as a career nearly a year away from your first real workout is akin to stating you’ve decided to be a cellist with the New York Philharmonic and next year you’re going to learn how to hold a bow. A lot of people dream big. Only a few make big dreams come true.
JAY CUTLER BODYBUILDER
On August 3, 1991, his 18th birthday, Jay Cutler joined the same Gold’s Gym he was temporarily a member of two years prior. This time, he went nearly every day. Within his first four months of training and while eating constantly (though not correctly), his weight soared from 190 to a smooth 240. Proficient at squatting from the get-go, his quads ballooned. “Right away I was noticed as one of the bigger guys in the gym,” he states.
The gym had a physique contest, and “the new kid” was encouraged to enter. Because it was obvious he’d easily win the teen division, he competed in the open class. He knew nothing about dieting, so he merely slashed calories, shedding muscle. Competing at a buttery 198, he placed second. “The next year when I was 19, I was guest-posing at the damn contest,” he quips. Meanwhile, another young Massachusetts bodybuilder, Derik Farnsworth (who also went on to be a pro bodybuilder), was telling people about the eighteen-year-old freak who just started training.
Nutritionist Chris Aceto heard the talk and saw the freak for himself in the spring of 1992. Thus began a bodybuilding relationship—advisor and advisee— that continued for more than a decade. Aceto wrote out a diet for Cutler and the teen tacked it to his refrigerator and never deviated from it, consuming the same meals at the same time daily. This is it:
JAY CUTLER BODYBUILDING DIET
Meal 1: 15-20 egg whites, oatmeal
Meal 2: steak, baked potato
Meal 3: Chicken breast, baked potato
Meal 4: chicken breast, 3 ounces of pasta
Meal 5: chicken breast, salad
Meal 6: 15-20 egg whites
“THIS KID’S GOT IT”
When Chris Aceto first met Jay Cutler, the trainer/nutritionist wasn’t blown away, but a couple months later the pupil drove to the teacher’s home in Maine. “He looked at me and he about shit,” Cutler remembers. “He couldn’t believe how much I’d grown. And I remember him telling me when he saw me, ‘You’re going to be Mr. Olympia one day.’ And he told everyone the same thing: ’This kid’s got it.’”
To qualify for the 1993 Teen Nationals, Cutler entered the Iron Bodies Invitational in Schenectady, New York. Not only did he easily win the teen overall, but he took home the men’s heavyweight trophy as well. Two weeks later, weighing 216 pounds (98 kg.), he won the heavy class at the Teen Nationals but lost the overall to light-heavyweight Branch Warren. (Though both had long pro careers, Cutler never lost to Warren again. In 2009, when Cutler won his third Mr. Olympia title, Branch Warren was second.) In blurry video footage of that teenage show, it’s easy to spot Cutler’s unpolished potential, especially his shoulder width and quad size.
A month afterwards, having expanded to 260 (118 kg.), bodybuilder Jay Cutler traveled to Southern California. Training at Gold’s Gym Venice attending the USA Championships, he garnered attention and was motivated still further to pursue his dream. When asked about the importance of DNA in his weighing 260 as a 5’9″ teen with only a year of training behind him, Cutler responds: “It’s funny today, because people talk about me not having the genetics of other guys, but, when I was 18, 19, 20, that’s all anyone ever talked about was my genetics. They always said how perfect my genetics were, and it always confused me, because I had the structure and I had the mental capability to train like a machine, but I had a lot of weak body parts in my eyes.”
He also had two stunningly strong body parts: his left and right legs. “I thought I was going to be another Paul DeMayo or Tom Platz,” Cutler says in reference to legends known foremost for their monster wheels. “I stopped training my legs for years to let my upper body catch up.”
“I PROGRESSED FASTER THAN ANYONE DID EVER”
During his early twenties, Jay Cutler received assistance from bodybuilder Bruce Vartanian, who trained with him, served as an unofficial business manager and employed him in an easy desk job at his heating and air conditioning company. Eventually, Vartanian built a 2000 square foot gym next to his house, stocked it with the equipment Cutler requested, and the future Mr. Olympia trained there during the late 1990s.
After the Teen Nationals, Cutler pursued bodybuilding with an obsessive passion. “I never cheated on my diet once. I wouldn’t even have ketchup. I wouldn’t have anything that didn’t make me a better bodybuilder. All I drank was water and coffee, no sodas, no sugars. I just ate 100% bodybuilding food, because Chris [Aceto] told me to. From Chris, I learned how to diet and train, and I feel I progressed faster than anyone did ever.”
“BODYBUILDING SUCCESS IS MOSTLY ABOUT EATING”
“We can talk all we want about training or genetics, but bodybuilding success is mostly about eating,” Cutler states. “People just don’t know how to eat. Everyone’s on this low-carb kick. People don’t eat enough carbs or protein or the right carbs and protein. Back in the day, I’d go to this farm in Spencer, Massachusetts, and I’d buy 140 pounds of chicken, and I’d buy a whole cow and have it ground down into ground beef with as little fat as possible. I’d probably end up with 200 pounds of beef. I would walk in and he’d have the cow hanging there, gutting it, and he’d say, ‘This is your cow. I’m getting it ready, so come back in a couple of days.’ And he’d package it all in one-pound bricks, and I had a huge freezer and I’d eat that meat for a month or two. I’d go down to a food stand and buy 30 dozen eggs at a time. Our whole refrigerator was full of water and eggs and chicken and beef, that’s all there was.”
JAY CUTLER’S BODYBUILDING RECORD BOOKS
He wrote down everything, not just every exercise, weight and rep, not just his bodyweight and notes on how he felt and looked, not just every single carb and gram of protein he ingested after carefully weighing each item, not just all of the 50 supplement pills he swallowed daily, not just the precise dose of every steroid injection, but he even duly noted things that make him laugh today. “I wrote down every time I took a shit,” he confesses. Cutler, who hasn’t kept a diary for years, admits that scatological level of detail was T.M.I.
BODYBUILDING PHENOM JAY CUTLER
Bodybuilder Jay Cutler managed his career with an equivalent level of precision. In August 1995, two years after he visited Southern California, he returned, this time to compete in the NPC Tournament of Champions. He had just turned 22, and he made the cross-country trek for a Cali contest because, in that pre-internet era when the Weider muscle magazines ruled, he knew he could generate much more publicity with an amateur win in the epicenter of bodybuilding than he could back east. He was right. He weighed 241 with a whole new level of thickness and refinements and two of the widest wheels in bodybuilding. Easily taking the contest’s overall title, he looked like the future. Just afterwards, the future walked into Joe Weider’s office, and “Uncle Joe” promptly offered him a contract.
“It was a pretty amazing feeling,” Cutler remembers, though to increase his value he didn’t sign until over a year later—after he had completed the rare feat of turning pro in his first pro-qualifier. From near the beginning, Jay Cutler has been a savvy businessman. He also stayed out of the 1995 Nationals, instead letting hype about the “Massachusetts Mass” build after he appeared on the cover of the May 1996 Muscle & Fitness, then the world’s leading bodybuilding magazine.
When, at 23, he stepped on stage at the 1996 Nationals, he once again revealed a physique that had made quantum leaps. At 247, his upper body had at last caught up to the high standards of his lower half, and he defeated six future pros in winning the heavyweight class. Though he was still a decade away from his ultimate goal of a Mr. Olympia victory, what should have seemed ludicrous when he said it in Beaman’s Tavern six years prior had come true: he was a professional bodybuilder.
Maybe it would be more inspirational if Jay Cutler was the skinniest, weakest kid and he slogged away for years to win a show. But then he almost certainly wouldn’t be a four-time Mr. Olympia today. He was always the kid with the muscle, no doubt accelerated by menial labor, and he was as successful during his brief amateur career as he was as a professional, when, incredibly, he went a decade (2002-11) and 25 consecutive pro shows without finishing lower than second! It came easier for him than it has for almost anyone before or since, but the farm boy from Sterling never took the easy route. His meticulously planned training and eating combined with a ready acceptance of working class toil made him grow up—and grow big—fast, and in the process, he turned his childhood dreams into his adult reality.
JAY CUTLER’S FIRST BODYBUILDING ROUTINE
First, a few observations about the following routine.
◼️ Jay Cutler has always been a volume trainer, and you can see that from Day 1: 20 sets for chest followed by 16 for triceps.
◼️ Note that he pre-exhausted triceps, doing two isolation exercises before two compound exercises.
◼️ On Day 2, we’d substitute seated leg curls (which begin with bent legs) for one of his two leg curl exercises (both of which begin with straight legs).
◼️ We like that he didn’t neglect calves, working them twice over the four days; he always had great lower legs.
◼️ On day 4, that’s a lot of sets (27) for upper back. During the 2000s, Cutler divided back into a width day (more pulldowns) and a thickness day (more rows).
◼️ We asked Jay Cutler to analyze his own bodybuilding routine, and he said he was correct to emphasize basic exercises and moderate reps. He said he should’ve added an exercise for rear delts as well as some abdominal and forearm work, and he thinks he probably over-trained his back.
DAY 1: CHEST, TRICEPS, CALVES
Barbell or Dumbbell Bench Press — 4 x 10 reps
Pec-deck Fly — 4 x 10 reps
Incline Dumbbell Press — 4 x 10 reps
Cable Crossover — 4 x 10 reps
Pushdown — 4 x 10 reps
Lying Triceps Extension — 4 x 10 reps
Machine Dip — 4 x 10 reps
Close-grip Bench Press — 4 x 10 reps
Standing Calf Raise — 4 x 10 reps
Seated Calf Raise — 4 x 10 reps
DAY 2: LEGS
Squat — 4 x 10 reps
Leg Press — 4 x 10 reps
Hack Squat — 4 x 10 reps
Leg Extension — 4 x 10 reps
Lying Leg Curl — 4 x 10 reps
Standing Leg Curl — 4 x 10 reps
Stiff-leg Deadlift — 4 x 10 reps
DAY 3: SHOULDERS, BICEPS, CALVES
Seated Behind-the-neck Press — 4 x 10 reps
Standing Side Lateral — 4 x 10 reps
Barbell Front Raise — 4 x 10 reps
Behind-the-back Shrug — 4 x 10 reps
Alternating Dumbbell Curl — 4 x 10 reps
Barbell Curl — 4 x 10 reps
Two-arm Cable Curl — 4 x 10 reps
Donkey Calf Raise — 4 x 10 reps
Seated Calf Raise — 4 x 10 reps
DAY 4: BACK
Front Pulldown — 4 x 10 reps
Behind-the-neck Pulldown — 4 x 10 reps
Close-grip Pulldown — 4 x 10 reps
Seated Cable Row — 4 x 10 reps
One-arm Dumbbell Row — 4 x 10 reps
Barbell Row — 4 x 10 reps
T-bar Row — 4 x 10 reps
Back Extension — 4 x 10 reps
For how another bodybuilding legend grew fast in his teen years, check out: Lee Priest, The Early Years: Advice and Full Workout
