An entire Army family — a soldier, his wife and stepdaughter — are headed to the top international bodybuilding championships in San Diego in a few weeks, each with a shot at earning a top title.
For Chief Warrant Officer 2 Truman Ward, it's been a long journey, in more ways than one.
Five years ago, just after a big promotion, Ward found himself at a new duty station and in the deepest of funks.
"I'd just PCS'ed from Fort Irwin, California, to Anchorage, Alaska, and it was about negative 20 degrees out. I had never been in an environment like that," recalls the New Mexico native. "I didn't know anyone, and, because I was a brand-new warrant officer, the circle of people I could pal around with had just gotten substantially smaller. So, I got depressed. It was really bad."
A fitness junkie since his high school days, he turned to the only healthy outlet he knew.
"I started going to a gym off post, and I was blown away by how many people were into bodybuilding," he says. It wasn't long before he was invited to check out a local competition.
"It was amazing. The dedication — from the workouts to the diets to the showmanship — it all just floored me. Some people had prepared for months and even years just to perform for just seven minutes on stage. I fell in love with it."
He had dabbled a little in bodybuilding earlier in his military career, but this was a new level.
"I found out quickly that I didn't know nearly as much as I thought I did about working out, proper form, proper diet," he says.
A self-described "chow hall hound" for most of his 21-year career, changing his diet from three meals a day to seven smaller, but lean and protein-packed, meals made the biggest difference.
"I could be in the gym for weeks on end and not lose any weight at all if I wasn't eating correctly. But the very week I started focusing on the proper grams of carbs, protein and some fat for my specific body type, I was seeing results within days," Ward says. "A whole new world opened up for me."
A few weeks later, he entered his first competition. He won not only his class but the overall title of "Mr. Anchorage" as well.
"I was hooked."
Family unit
Around the same time, he fell in love on another front as well.
LaRita Laktonen encouraged him from the beginning. She was a local Alaskan girl who grew up in a village on a remote island, where she hunted and fished with her family to survive, and had no electricity or running water for much of her early childhood. She went on to play basketball in college, where she earned a degree in kinesiology.
"Her genetic makeup is from another planet," Ward says. "She can just walk past some weights and get a six pack."
Soon, she caught the competitive bodybuilding bug as well.
Now married, and raising Laktonen's 8-year-old daughter, Ravenna, together, the power family has become a competitive dynamo, racking up a string of top wins at regional bodybuilding championships both in Alaska and Texas, where Truman, a maintenance officer, is assigned to Fort Bliss.
And now the whole family is competing.
Ward says weightlifting, however, is strictly off limits for his stepdaughter.
"Not one single weight, nothing," Ward says. "Working out and lifting weights for an 8-year-old — we believe — is bad for the plates in their young bones."
Instead, Ravenna tones through daily dance practices "and we monitor what she eats. And this is easy because she hates fried foods, saturated fat, cake — what kid hates cake? — and anything heavy in cheese and oil."
Going pro
Most recently, the family took top spots in their first national competition in Las Vegas on Sept. 27, earning their pro cards with the International Natural Bodybuilding Association.
And those wins qualify all three to compete in the upcoming Natural Olympia XVII World Championships, dubbed "the pinnacle of natural sports," slated for Nov. 6-9 in San Diego.
Ward says he expects to leave San Diego with the title of "Mr. Olympia."
"The reason I've won every time is because I am afraid of losing. I'm not assuming I will win. I am afraid I will lose. So I do one more rep in the gym than I think the other guys are doing. I will do one more mile on the treadmill than other guys. I will do one more lunge, one more squat, five more situps than I imagine my competition is doing — because I am afraid I won't win."
But as the family prepares for the big event, Ward says he knows he's already a winner as a husband and stepdad.
"It's a pretty cool family bonding experience," he says. "I think there's definitely worse things families can do together."
Which way to muscle beach? It’s not through the chow hall
If you’re wondering how Chief Warrant Officer 2 Truman Ward built his body, he says it’s the result of eating right and a pretty basic — yet grueling — workout routine.
Meal plan
"The best advice I got when I first started was to eat more," Ward says — and to eat cleaner, replacing chow hall meals with home-cooked fare.
"For guys like me, I have to constantly take in protein to turn into muscle mass," he says. "Plus, I did not realize how crucial it was, if you really want to sharpen up, lose weight and get defined, that you cannot be afraid of carbs. They just have to be complex carbs."
His seven-meal-a-day fueling plan starts every morning with a homemade protein shake with one cup of steel-cut oats ("Not instant!" he'll tell you over and over again until he's sure you've heard him) and a scoop of whey protein powder.
He likes Dymatize Iso 100 mixed with "a little bit of cinnamon, water and ice. That's it. No bananas, fruit or sugar or any other
crap."
Spaced about two hours apart, his next three meals each feature an 8-ounce cut of lean meat, usually 99 percent fat-free turkey, chicken breast or tilapia, a cup of rice, and "as much veggies as I can stomach, but usually a bunch of something green and leafy like spinach."
For his fifth meal, it's back to the protein shake. The sixth meal is a repeat of the meat, rice and veggies.
Before bed, he caps the day off with 10 to 15 scrambled egg whites with just a dash of hot sauce. "You don't want too much, because of the high sodium."
The result, he says, is a body fat percentage that's usually around 7 percent but can drop to 3 percent for competitions.
Workout
At the gym, every lifting exercise comes down to what he calls "a heavy set and then a drop set."
For the first set, "I can't do more than 11 reps. By the eighth rep I'm struggling, and by the 11th I'm screaming."
For the second set, "I drop the weight down so that I'm doing about 20 to 25 reps. But again, by that last rep, I've got tears coming out of my eyes."
He usually works out twice a day, six days a week, with mornings reserved for cardio or unit PT.
Lifting comes after work, with each day focused on one zone of the body. The week starts on Monday with legs, then chest on Tuesday, his back on Wednesday, followed by shoulders and traps on Thursday, then legs and abs on Friday and, finally, Saturdays spent honing the chain of muscles along the rib cage.
"Those are serratus muscles, or what I call the 'rocky' muscles, that run from under your arm pits," Ward says.
Some people get them more naturally than others, but he says he has to work at them regularly.
To do that, he does a heavy and drop set of dumbbell overhead pulls and then two sets of a modified triceps pull-down.
He describes the overhead pulls like this: Start by lying on a bench "with one dumbbell held above the chest with both hands like you're doing a diamond pushup. Then slowly lower the dumbbell behind your head, pause, and then push the weight back up over your chest."
For the pull-downs, instead of standing in front of the machine, he gets on his knees so his arms are overhead and his torso is elongated.
"The movement is basically the same as the overhead pulls, but now you're sitting up instead of lying down."
His arms get no special treatment. "I don't usually target the arms specifically — they just seem to come along on their own with everything else," he says.
Rest
Sunday are always a rest day.
"Muscle fibers expand, then fray a little like rope or hair whenever you've worked them hard enough. The fraying is that burning sensation you get in the gym," he says.
"The next day you're sore. That's the mending process. They can't fully mend unless you let them rest long enough so they build a little bit thicker," he says.
"The only time you build muscle fibers — not expand the muscle, not define the muscle, not pump a lot of blood into the muscle so you think you're creating muscle, but are actually building solid, new muscle — is when you are asleep and resting," he says.
"So, really, you only really build muscle on your rest day. You have to have a rest day. It's imperative."
