The Dedication and Discipline Behind a Young Athlete’s Pursuit of Excellence
By Stephen Hunt
During his three years at Frisco Lone Star High School, Tyler Strong gave his all to several athletic pursuits, playing football for a year and a half and running track all three years, competing in the 400 open, also known as the 400-meter dash, and 4 x 400-meter relay events. However, about four years ago, he decided to take up bodybuilding for one rather simple reason.
“I got into it because all throughout middle and high school, I was known as the tall, skinny kid. So, I got in the gym striving to get away from that, to build some self-confidence because I really did lack that throughout my primary school career,” Strong said. “For football (I had lifted weights some), but it was very standard… deadlift, bench press, and squat. Very heavy, do it again the next day but nothing to really improve my physique, and it was all very strength-based training.”
And as every serious bodybuilder is known to say, once someone makes a serious commitment to it and to competing and to sculpting their body into a true work of art, it becomes a complete lifestyle change, which has clearly been the case for Tyler.
For Strong, a typical day starts around 8:00 a.m. when he gets out of bed and has his first meal of the day, usually a smoothie or bowl of oatmeal. Per his training regimen, he consumes about 200 grams (seven ounces or .44 of a pound) per meal, and then it’s off to work as the assistant for Noel Deyzel, a bodybuilding content creator with almost six million Instagram followers.
After having an energy drink in the morning, as Strong only drinks RYSE fuels, a Prosper-based supplements company of which Deyzel is a co-owner, he has his first meal about 11 a.m., does some more work before having another meal around 2:00 p.m. before leaving work around 5:30 p.m. Then, he has a pre-workout meal, usually cream of rice or more oatmeal with some protein. As for his workout, he trains for about two hours almost every day except for the two off days built into each week.
Post-workout, he will head home and have dinner, his biggest meal of the day which currently consists of a pound and a half of ground beef with 400 grams of rice. Strong has been eating this way for just under a month now. After dinner, he will do some homework as he attends Collin College, spend time with friends and family, go to bed, and prepare to do the same the following day.
“It’s eat, sleep, repeat,” he said. “Everything that I put in my body, every weight that I lift, it all goes towards my physique. Whether it’s for gaining or losing weight, everything is calculated, and everything is done with a purpose. That’s one of the things that I enjoy most about it – there’s a reward for every sacrifice, and if there’s no sacrifice, there’s no reward. So, it keeps you very accountable towards your goals.”
Speaking of accountability, another aspect of bodybuilding that strongly appeals to Strong is the fact that measuring progress can be done quantitatively, much like he did during his days running track at Lone Star. “Every training session will get you closer to your goal, but it’s the numbers. In bodybuilding, it’s stepping on the scale and seeing that extra pound or five ounces. In track, it is that time. Every time your 400 time came down or your 40 time came down even by a tenth of a second, that’s a huge step in the right direction,” he said. “It’s just that gratification of getting one step closer to your goal sooner than you thought is what I love. It’s the solo sports where you get the recognition you deserve for the effort put into your training.”
Then there’s the strong, welcoming vibe that everyone in the bodybuilding community has for all who are part of it, whether they are seasoned professionals who have been doing it for decades or relative newcomers like Tyler; that’s another aspect of the sport he completely embraces. “Yeah, I would definitely say the [sense of] community [is incredible]. With social media recently, it’s taken a different path than it used to be, but I’d definitely say the community and everybody encouraging each other is one of my favorite things about it because nobody is really doing it alone,” he said.
The perception which many have of bodybuilding is that those who compete in it do so because they are complete narcissists who think they are at the center of the universe. Well, Strong begs to differ, maintaining that everyone he’s encountered in the bodybuilding community has been the opposite of completely self-absorbed.
“It’s actually one of my biggest fears, for people to think I’m conceited or full of myself because to be a bodybuilder, you almost have to become obsessed with your appearance, and if you’re not happy with your appearance, you almost know that nobody else will be,” he said. “Even if that’s not the case, most bodybuilders are very hard on themselves before anybody else. I think that’s something that people don’t understand – is that we hate ourselves too because we don’t like the way that we look. Some people take that the wrong way and mistake it for arrogance or being conceited.”
To date, Strong has competed in one event, a 2023 exhibition show in Amarillo, as part of the popular Summer Shredding series, but plans on his next event in the summer or fall of 2025. For anyone contemplating getting into bodybuilding, he has some simple advice to help establish a solid foundation going forward. “My greatest piece of advice is stay consistent, don’t take one day off,” he said. “Even if it is a rest day, do something that will get you closer to your goals and eat a lot. Eat as much as you can before you plan on going through a mock prep or a full prep for a show because once you start doing those mock preps and preps for shows, everything counts.”
A Solid Support System
Strong considers himself incredibly blessed to have the greatest built-in support system anyone could hope for in his family. Whether it’s his father, Eric, mother, Lennie, or younger sister, Maddie, who is a junior at Lone Star, he knows they are all in his corner. And he admits the bodybuilding bug has even spread to them.
“Yeah, my parents are my biggest support and my sister, she started going to the gym because of me. She saw what progress you can make in a period of time [and started going],” he said. “My dad, he just recently got into bodybuilding because of me. We’re all starting to work as a team of bodybuilders just building each other up. My mom cooks most of my meals. There’s no meal better than a mom-cooked meal, in my opinion. I swear they put something in them.”
Outside of his family, Strong also has another very strong supporter in Deyzel, a South African-born and well-known bodybuilder, who is also a YouTube and TikTok content creator known for his popular short fitness videos of two minutes or less. However, Deyzel doesn’t only appeal to those in bodybuilding circles; he also has universal appeal through his motivational messages on life, which anyone can apply to almost any situation.
Deyzel, who now calls the Dallas-Fort Worth area home, also happens to be Strong’s boss. They have also been friends for several years, a friendship which fittingly has its origins at the gym. “I met Noel two years ago in December at the gym. I’ve been going to Gold’s [Gym] in Little Elm since they opened, and that’s where I met him,” Strong recalled.
“I was there one day because I had seen my friends get pictures with him, so I went in one day late in the evening, saw him, and got a picture with him. I started talking to him a little bit and became friends with him because of his car, his Nissan GTR. He drove it to the gym, and I was like, ‘Wow,’ I had never seen one, so I talked to him a little bit about it.”
Strong is an admitted gearhead, a moniker given to anyone who loves cars, a trait he inherited from his father, who worked on cars while Tyler was growing up. He and Deyzel’s conversation about their mutual love of cars quickly shifted into bodybuilding, and after finishing his freshman year at The University of Kansas in May 2024, he returned home, accepting Deyzel’s offer to become his assistant.
“After we (Deyzel and I) talked about his car, I talked to him about bodybuilding, and he befriended me after that. He had a feeling; that’s the way he describes it to me,” Strong said. “Of course, I said yes (when he offered me the job); that’s every Noel fan’s dream job. I took the job and started working for him. Then, I got into editing and all these other things. In the meantime, he was also giving me tricks and helping me train, helping me get my eating right.”
And since he has been getting pointers from Deyzel about everything from proper nutrition to training to life in general, he has noticed a huge difference. “The past few years have been the most influential in my bodybuilding journey. I see the most change because he is a professional bodybuilder,” Strong said. “He’s been doing this for almost 20 years, so the things he said, I did, and they worked. I was there when he launched his app and was so excited because I knew that whoever got on that app was going to see a huge difference in their physique in a very short period of time because it’s exactly what he told me, and it worked. He put all those same tips and tricks into his app. I was excited to hear all of the success stories that came out of that.”
Strong admits that when people meet him and hear him say that he’s already been in bodybuilding for four years, they figure him to be 24 or 25 years old. However, he likes to see them a bit taken aback when he tells them he’s still all of 19. “I’ll be 20 in March. I used to walk to the gym, 20 minutes there and 20 minutes back. I would wake up at 5:30 every morning so I could go to the gym before school,” he said. That sort of dedication served him well on the football field and on the track, and now it’s also an asset for the young Frisco resident in bodybuilding.
Stephen Hunt is a Frisco-based freelance writer.
