Consistency and Tacos Helped This Chef Pack on 40 Pounds of Muscle
Darnell Ferguson is the creator, owner, and mastermind behind SuperChefs, a noted Louisville, Kentucky restaurant specializing in breakfast and brunch. When the pandemic hit and he was out of work, he gave himself a challenge. If you know anything about Ferguson, which you may from his appearances on the Rachael Ray Show, Beat Bobby Flay, and Guy Fieri’s “Tournament of Champions,” you know that Ferguson does not shy away from a challenge.
This time, he decided that he wanted to be a different person by the time Covid subsided and he and his staff were able to get back to work. He’d been working on his inner game for years—in his past, he’d lived out of his car and also lived in jail. He now teaches kids and communities how cooking can be a positive and creative outlet. With the pandemic pause, he says, “I used that time to work on myself in a lot of different ways—mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I felt like I was a powerful person, but my physical appearance didn’t match it. I was super skinny—like 158 pounds. I didn’t want people to think ‘is this somebody who is just okay in life or is this somebody who’s really trying in life?’ I want my presence to be felt by people.” By the end of a year, he’d packed on about 40 pounds of muscle, weighing in about 200 now. “I’m like the poster child for skinny guys,” he says. Here’s how he did it:
Pick up consistency, not weights.
Ferguson had never lifted weights, and worked online with a friend who is a trainer to get started. “I couldn’t find any weights and thought ‘it’s gonna take me forever to get anywhere because I don’t have them,” he says. “My trainer told me ‘you don’t need weights. You need consistency.’ People think going to the gym is the hard part. Actually, wanting to go to the gym is the hard part.”
Ferguson realized that his situation was exactly the same situation he’d been in—and gotten through—many times before. “The key to success in everything is using what you have and not worrying about what you don’t have,” he says. Without weights or a gym, they worked together to maximize body weight and positioning to get the most from each exercise. “It wasn’t all about how much you can push. It’s, ‘are you doing it correctly?’”
Eat to support your training.
Ferguson is around food all day, but ironically, rarely ate. It’s not unusual for chefs to eat one meal and then not eat anything for the next 12 hours or more, he says. “Food is a piece of art to me. Sometimes I don’t even think about eating it.” To build muscle, he needed calories, and at first, “I was consuming 5,000 calories a day,” he explains (today, it’s more like 3,500). “I needed a whole lot of protein,” he says. “And I had to eat at least three meals a day.”
What that looks like:
Breakfast: 8-ounce filet mignon with two to three eggs, hash browns, and ketchup and hot sauce.
Lunch: “It’s the funniest thing ever: A 6-inch Subway sandwich with a lot of vegetables and a thin piece of meat. It’s light in my stomach and I can eat it and go straight to the gym,” he says.
Post-workout: “Usually a shake; I want to get some protein back into my body,” he says.
Dinner: Tacos al pastor, made by his wife. “I eat three of them and they’re full of meat.”
Stay challenged.
Being that Ferguson always rallies for a challenge, he and his friends create consistency challenges, or have months where they’ll do the same exercises but add two reps to every set for a few days every week for a month. His mantra is to mix things up (“you’ve got to keep changing and becoming a new person”), be consistent, and be efficient by doing supersets. “You don’t need to be in the gym for two hours,” he says.
Embrace the hard thing.
“My name is SuperChef, but my motto for everything is, ‘it ain’t easy being super.’ If you want to be great, you have to know the amount of discomfort that comes with it. The physical part is easy. The mental part breaks you down.” Fitness and food, he says, correlate to life. “That’s why I enjoy it. Because it’s that fight when you’re trying to get that last rep and you don’t want to do it, but you know that the only way to get where you’re going is to do it, and you just say OK, I’ve got to do this. I want to reach my potential.”
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