How a Professional Gamer Made Time to Put On 70 Pounds of Muscle

Matt Siegfried’s gaming career started the way it did for most kids who grew up in the ‘90s: He got his hands on an original NES, repeatedly failed to beat level two of Super Mario Bros., and promptly declared that he was finished with gaming forever.

“I kept trying other hobbies, desperately searching for something I could devote my life to,” he says. “But I kept getting pulled back into video games.” Strategy games and first-person shooters, however, turned out to be a far more natural fit than those first, fumbling attempts at Mario, and by the mid-2000s, he was devoting most of his free time to Halo 2, Super Smash Bros., and World of Warcraft. “In the summer of 2006, I played World of Warcraft for 16 hours a day until school started again,” he says. “At the time, my parents perceived this as the most extreme laziness they had ever encountered.”

Siegfried, who also goes by the handle BLiTZ online, felt something bigger was coming, and his instincts proved correct: By 2007, he was ranked among the world’s top 20 gamers in Call of Duty 4. The following year, he earned an even bigger break, reaching number one in the world in Call of Duty: World at War. “I’ll never be able to describe the feeling of scrolling up through the full global player list of three million," he says, "and seeing my name, BLiTZ, all the way on top."

Not long after that, he went pro—attracting sponsors, and winning significant cash prizes and national tournaments, including the 2011 Twin Galaxies World Championship for Xbox and Playstation. “I started setting world records left and right,” he says, earning “countless” number one rankings in a litany of classics, everything from Pac-Man to Dance Central.

But for all his gaming accolades, Siegfried had started to feel restless, like his life was falling out of balance. A "skinny nerd with no athletic ability," as he puts it, he knew it was time to make room in his life for more than gaming. Armed with only some basic training advice from a friend—and barely enough upper body strength to lift a barbell—he set off for the gym, kicking off a remarkable, 70-pound muscle transformation that would make Master Chief proud.

We checked in with Siegfried in the middle of his latest challenge—visiting all 417 national parks—to find out how conquering his foes in the virtual world helped him level up in the weight room.

Was there a turning point in your gaming career when you realized that you needed to make a change to the way you were living in real life?
In 2011, my friend and gaming teammate messaged me a picture of himself. It blew my mind—he looked amazing. I barely recognized him. He said something like “Dude, trust me, you should do this too. It’s not that bad, I swear.” If I could trust him with the life of my video game characters, I figured he wasn’t totally full of shit. I realized I was putting things like health in the back seat in order to focus on my dream of being a champion, and I knew at some point I would want to rebalance my life a little bit, so my friend intervened at the perfect time: when my gaming success was better than ever and I felt ready for a new challenge.

What was it like going into the gym that first day?
Sure enough, I went in and tried to bench press 55 pounds, and was just barely able to do it five times and rack it before my wobbly arms nearly gave out and catapulted the bar into the girls next to me. I did a few more exercises and then I reported back to my friend. “All right, I did the workout. Now what?” I said. “Now take a rest day, and then go back and put another five pounds on whatever you did last time," they said. I was stunned. “You mean I just have to go lift some things, rest, and then go lift more things, and I’ll get stronger, and I’ll look better? Dude, it can’t be that easy.”

But it was, kinda?
I mean, sure, there ended up being more details to figure out down the road, but after I had spent years of my life dedicated to leveling up virtual characters and completing quests, this just felt like the real life version of it. And I only had to be in the gym for an hour or two, rather than grueling 16 hour sessions trying to rank up. No problem.

How did you stay motivated when you were struggling early on?
I was pulled by two opposite mindsets in the beginning. On the one hand, I truly believed I had no athleticism and thus wouldn’t expect any results worth being proud of. And yet, it just felt so weirdly similar to gaming. I thought back to realizing that my mind was my strength, back when I first defeated my dad one on one. I thought back to putting shooting games aside and confronting my weak genres. If I could figure all those things out, shouldn’t I be able to figure this gym thing out too eventually? I kind of just shrugged for the first year, not knowing what to expect, taking it one day at a time.

The “experience points” added up with every “quest” I completed, and I kept getting stronger. Fitness became a staple in my life to schedule around. My gaming time didn’t decrease, as I still had big goals ahead, so I just had to become even more organized with any work I had on the schedule. At that point, I was working on the staff side of Major League Gaming off and on, studying for my college classes. I say “more organized” but really most days it just felt like juggling a bunch of fiery swords with bombs strapped to them. But I did what I could to make it all work, and I was happy with the results all around.

Wait, you were cramming college classes into all this, too? How'd you manage that?
One semester, I totally convinced all my professors that I had a massive impending family emergency so they would give me the full list of homework and projects for the rest of the year instead of week-by -week like the rest of the class. I got it all done through some 30+ hour caffeine-binging all-nighters and then took the entire rest of the semester off to compete in games. Straight A’s, by the way—nailed it.

From that point on, I pretty much moved away from worrying about cash tournaments and pursuing sponsorship deals. I settled into a rhythm of striving toward gaming goals and fitness goals, which was honestly pretty tough to handle coming from such a tunnel-vision mindset before that. I just knew that I didn’t want to turn my gaming passion into a chore, desperately trying to practice games I was bored of just to make a buck. I stuck with my heart and never regretted it.

Is gaming still a full-time job for you? As in, do you live off your winnings?
When I finished college, I ended up pursuing work as a fitness coach, specializing in complete beginners coming from the gaming lifestyle I could so deeply relate to. This made sense, since gamers had been coming to me to ask advice for all the years prior anyways. I loved working with people who had never played a sport or been in a gym before because I knew that other trainers weren’t going to understand them like I could. And I also knew that I believed in them more than they believed in themselves, because I knew the secret: Gamers spend their whole lives accidentally building all the skills needed to excel in the fitness world.

I went down this road for a while and eventually started studying to coach the bigger issues of life too: how to cultivate a passionate life full of health, happiness, and success all around. I still love to coach nutrition or fitness stuff specifically, but I have a much bigger set of skills to work with if other issues come up. Ultimately I think I’m inevitably going to work toward speaking and writing as a bigger distribution for this stuff, but I love my one-on-one clients right now.

How do you balance your workouts with the time you devote to gaming?
As far as scheduling goes, I’ll usually try to get in a 60-90 minute workout four to six times per week. Nothing crazy. This year I’m going to focus on cardio so my schedule will probably get beefed up with some extra sessions. My gaming will vary wildly though, anywhere from 10 to 100 hours a week depending on what my goals are. I used to knock out 24-48 hour nonstop sessions while maintaining my fitness progress if I wanted to race for some crazy world records, but these days I’m in more of a “marathon” style of gaming rather than a sprint.

More from Tonic:

While the physical transformation is obvious, were there noticeable improvements to your mental health, as well?
Mental health is a big piece of the puzzle for me too, but only partially related to fitness. In the same way that my physical transformation felt necessary to fill a missing piece in my life, at some point I had to put that same effort into my mental health. I’m a big advocate of meditation now. Even five minutes in the morning is better than zero minutes. It’s just practical. I think a shift is happening where a lot of chaotic high-performers are realizing the benefit of strategically slowing down at certain periods of the day. I wouldn’t do something if it wasn’t directly giving me results to improve my life goals, and very few things are more crucial than a strong, stable mind.

Speaking of challenges, tell us a little about your latest one: visiting all 417 national parks.
Pretty much every day has been chaos. Wonderful, beautiful chaos. Some days the only exercise I have time for is hiking alongside wild alligators or coyotes in the dark with a flashlight. Some days I wake up at 2 am to squeeze in just one more chapter of a new game. Some days I’m just out exploring parks for 18 hours straight and stumble back to my laptop in time to pass out and wake up to drive a few hundred miles to the next park. Every day is a stressful nightmare and yet every day is also the most fulfilling and invigorating adventure ever. It’s weird, man. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done with my life so far, a perfect next chapter to this crazy vision I’ve been building toward since that first match I won against my dad.

Has your recent commitment to fitness affected any of your relationships with other people in the gaming community?

It’s been 100 percent positive all around. I’ve had some amazing messages from people who have been following my gaming journey for the last 3, 5, 10 years online, and as a result they’ve been able to watch my fitness transformation unfold. Knowing that people are watching keeps me even more motivated to keep showing them that I can do this, and if I can do it then they can do it too. I get sad when I see so much potential in someone and they can’t find the spark to ignite it. I put as much spare time as possible into nudging the discouraged gamers along until they start believing in themselves.

Since focusing more closely on fitness, you say you’ve gotten even better at video games. How do you think that real-world strength has translated online?
This is a weird topic, and one I was uncertain about for a while. There was a period of time where a lot of people were claiming that starting a workout program supercharged their reaction time , made their mind super sharp, and made them amazing gamers. I honestly never felt any of this stuff, and I didn’t really find any examples of this happening in others, either.

What I did feel, however, was an itch being scratched while my body was transforming. On workout days, it gave me the peace to focus on my gaming goals as hard as I could because I knew I did what I needed to in the gym. On rest days, I felt grateful to have extra time to put back into gaming since I didn’t have a workout on the schedule. My theory is that most gamers hit an age where real life starts punching them in the face. This sense of guilt—as well as very real concerns, like paying rent—ends up derailing the gaming progress that had been building up for them.

Fitness was a missing step to put me back at a balance in life. A lot of very promising gamers that surely should have surpassed me in talent ended up distressed by something off balance in their real life, and their gaming careers imploded every time. I no longer believe that physical health is optional, in the same way that mental health is not optional. Anyone aiming for success, in gaming or otherwise, has to take a look at every piece of the puzzle eventually.

What’s the biggest sacrifice you’ve had to make? Is there anything you miss about your former, more sedentary lifestyle when you weren’t making time to stay active?
Things were definitely more simple back then. There was less to think about, more time to completely funnel into my gaming progress, less caring about hours of sleep to be rested for the next workout or which meals I should eat to get better results. I honestly still miss that high school summer of 2006, when it was just eat, sleep, game every damn day. I couldn’t have spared one hour for a workout if I wanted to—every single minute was accounted for with my gaming team as we tried to stack up as many consecutive wins as possible.

What did you take from gaming that allowed you to build the discipline and motivation you needed in the gym? Not to sound cheesy, but do you think of fitness as just being like another type of game?
It does sound cheesy, right? But it’s so real. That’s the crazy thing. Fitness is literally just playing a game to level up your real life character. I kind of hate myself for typing those words out, but it’s truly how I feel—and have felt since day one.

When I was 12 years old, I used to wake up at 6 am every Saturday—and I was not a morning person—and run full speed to the computer so I could log onto a stupid game called Runescape and click trees to chop them into logs, and I’d get one experience point. If you did this millions and millions of times, which took months, you could cut down cooler trees, and get cooler logs. There wasn’t all that much you could do with these logs, but the tiny number on your profile page under woodcutting would get one point higher every so often. Yes, it’s as stupid as it sounds.

The point is that I wasn’t the only chump kid dumping my valuable hard-earned free time gathering a bunch of stupid logs and having a blast doing it every Saturday morning. We all wanted to level up, even on stupid categories that didn’t really give you anything. We loved the journey and the grind and the shared suffering knowing that our buddies were working on the same goals. It’s unbelievable to me how many people I see now who would gladly put in eight hours clicking virtual trees on a screen, and yet won’t go to the gym for 45 minutes and level up the character they live as.

The grind is in my DNA at this point. It's why I have a feeling I’ll skew even more toward extreme cardio goals like ultramarathons eventually.

Besides performing mindless tasks, how else has gaming given you an advantage?
Most games get pretty intense at the highest level, requiring you to be constantly testing and researching new strategies, optimizing your routes or ability rotations. Whether it’s Call of Duty or World of Warcraft or anything in between, you’re constantly learning and strategizing. Every time you enter a gym, you have a chance to learn how to work smarter, too. I’m very used to paying attention to small details and making adjustments. It feels the exact same to me as trying to perfect my route in a Sonic racing time trial as it does trying to make my barbell squat more efficient. The comparisons are almost endless. I truly believe every positive trait I have as a person was developed in the gaming world. And I feel all of them activated when I’m working on my fitness. I fully understand how bullshit that sounds to most people, but I’m going to become the living example of it, and show other gamers that there is a path.

What do you make of the trend toward ‘gamifying’ fitness? It feels like very few of the earliest attempts—stuff like Nintendo’s Wii Fit—have had much success.
I think it’s an amazing idea, but I’m really not sold on the execution. To me, Dance Dance Revolution is the best fitness game ever made because it doesn’t worry about fitness at all and just gives you a ridiculously fun and physically challenging game. You want to keep playing it because it’s awesome, not because they had a really advanced workout tracker built in somehow. So what's the future of gamified fitness?
I think it will be rooted in the same mindset—stat tracking—for a long time, until we’re in full blown virtual reality and augmented reality, which could have some pretty mind-blowing applications. I promise if there was a tracking app that could measure your fitness stats and show you leveling up with an experience bar, millions of gamers sign up for the gym tomorrow. But if it’s just within a Wii Fit or something, I’m not convinced it’ll catch with that crowd. Wii Fit had its success mostly because it got non-gamers hooked in. Whenever I talk to gamers who had amazing fitness transformations, it was always pretty traditional workouts—lifting weights, running, and so on. The gamify movement turns some gamers off if they feel like it’s “trying too hard” or forcing it. But there’s such immense potential in the concepts there that I know people will come and figure it all out. Not just for fitness, either. Everything in life is just a game, man. The sooner more people realize that, the sooner they can climb to way higher levels of success and happiness.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of Tonic delivered to your inbox weekly.