A Different Beat

Former drummer luke sandoe did it his way to become the 2016 british champ. Now he’s marching to columbus for the arnold classic.

- John Plummer

FOR THREE YEARS, the same question haunted Luke Sandoe. Could he diet? Nobody doubted that Sandoe had the potential to be the British champion. He had shown as a junior and intermediate that he had freaky muscle bellies and size aplenty. So, much was expected when he stepped up to the super-heavyweights in 2013 at the age of 24.

But then he seemed to be stuck in Groundhog Day for three years. Sandoe turned up at the British finals looking several weeks out and didn’t make the top six. The same thing happened in 2014. As Oscar Wilde might have said, to mess up once due to conditioning may be regarded as a misfortune, but to mess up twice looked like carelessness. When it happened a third time in 2015, it began to look like he couldn’t hack it. The whispers intensified. Could he diet?

What most people didn’t know was that Sandoe had been busting his backside following some of the strictest protocols imaginable. “I once ate nothing for six weeks except fish and vegetables and did two hours of cardio every day,” he recalls. “The only carbs I had were 30g of oats after training. It was absolutely awful. I stuck with it, but the harder I tried, the worse I seemed to look.”