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<\/p>\nJust two years into his bodybuilding career, Sherkym Daniel is already building up quite a CV. He is a back-to-back national champion, and a double regional medallist. His sights are now set on winning gold for Saint Lucia. His accolades and ambition are all the more remarkable given that he barely knew the sport existed locally as recently as 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have been training for a while, but I only started bodybuilding from last year,\u201d he explained to St Lucia Times, ahead of the 2025 Central American and Caribbean (CAC) Bodybuilding & Fitness Championships.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI\u2019ve always been interested in being muscular, and I\u2019ve always had an appreciation for great bodybuilders of history like Frank Zane, Arnold [Schwarzenegger], and obviously Ronnie Coleman. And even the more recent legends in the sport, like Chris Bumstead, these guys. So, I\u2019ve always been training. I\u2019ve been training for eight years now.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd off and on, people would mention, \u2018Yo, you should do a bodybuilding competition.\u2019 But I wasn\u2019t even aware that Saint Lucia had bodybuilding competitions. I always heard that my grandfather was a bodybuilder, but generally, the promotion of bodybuilding in Saint Lucia is quite limited. My awareness of the sport here didn\u2019t really exist. So, a friend of mine actually did a bodybuilding show in 2023, and I was supposed to compete, but I fell ill.\u201d<\/p>\n
Notwithstanding his inability to compete at that juncture, the six-year police veteran experienced his first bodybuilding show as an audience member. But his appetite was whetted, and he was certain that he could compete with the athletes he was seeing. As he watched, he fielded queries from fellow spectators on why he wasn\u2019t on stage. A year later, in 2024, he was on stage and discovered instant success, but yet more surprises.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I started planning to compete. I prepared myself the best I knew at the time,\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd then I ended up competing in 2024, which I won, which was pretty cool. And then at that point I won and I went home, and I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d compete again until maybe [2025], because I wasn\u2019t even aware of the scope of bodybuilding in the region. So I got a call a few days later, saying, \u2018Yeah, you\u2019ve been selected to represent Saint Lucia in the CAC Championships in Guyana.\u2019 I\u2019m like, \u2018They have championships in Guyana? They have regional shows for bodybuilding in the Caribbean. I didn\u2019t even know that!\u2019 \u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Had he known better, Daniel is confident that he would have done even better than taking silver in the men\u2019s classic physique under 175 centimetres and bronze in bodybuilding 80 kilogrammes. A native of Cedar Heights, Vieux Fort, he had been coaching himself at Beyond Limits Gym. Dissatisfied with his debut outing, he began to learn more about training programmes, hypertrophy, biological science and sought professional coaching.<\/p>\n
In stepped Australian exercise physiologist, hypertrophy coach, and former bodybuilder Deklan McMichael, the founder of Hypertrophy Academy. An educator and coach in the fitness industry, McMichael has worked with hundreds of athletes and coaches around the world, helping them achieve their goals through evidence-based training and education. Daniel said he felt that that was the sort of edge he needed to get to the next level.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was told\u2026 that CAC either helps you fall in love with the sport or it breaks you,\u201d Daniel told St. Lucia Times. \u201cBecause of the level of competitors that usually appear at CAC, right? Because I mean you as a \u2018novice\u2019 when you get to CAC, you actually see people who have been competing for five plus years. So that\u2019s when you decide whether or not you want to put in the work to get to that level, or you say it\u2019s more of a hobby for me, I don\u2019t want to really compete.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I went to CAC, put my best foot forward, took second and third in two different categories. I felt I should have won one of the categories, but you know, I didn\u2019t win. And me, being someone who\u2019s very much spiteful in a way, like when I don\u2019t win something, I want to know why I didn\u2019t win it. And the answers I got, I was not pleased with the answers that I got. So I told myself, you know what, we\u2019re putting everything into learning about bodybuilding, about hypertrophy training, about getting bigger, getting stronger, and we\u2019re going to put our best foot forward in order to prepare for the following year, so that I could do even better. Not just do better, but dominate on stage, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cI don\u2019t want to just win. I want to show out, right? That\u2019s been my mentality coming into this upcoming show, right? So, I built a significant amount of muscle. I think I improved some of my weak points. I think I am going to bring even better conditioning, I\u2019m going to be much leaner than last year. And I\u2019m just going to be much more prepared for what the other competitors are going to bring on stage as an athlete, right? So many pros and so many other coaches backstage, they told me, \u2018Yeah, I feel like you should have won that. I feel like that was your win. I feel like they cheated you.\u2019 And I\u2019m not going to say that that is exactly the case, but that\u2019s how I felt as well. So it lit a fire under me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daniel began to learn about bodybuilding only after his grandfather, Victor Hines, died. Hines trained with the legendary Rick Wayne and perhaps Schwarzenegger as well back in the sixties. Like Daniel, Wayne was a police officer from the south of the island, before shooting to fame as a three-time Mr Universe and two-time Mr World. Daniel, who is now deeply immersed in the world of bodybuilding, is certain that he can approach that type of success.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not saying that I\u2019m going to be Mr Olympia one day,\u201d he demurred. \u201cBut I feel like, if I were to put in the work and the effort, and take my time to grow in this sport, that wouldn\u2019t be too far out of the reach for me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just two years into his bodybuilding career, Sherkym Daniel is already building up quite a CV. He is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51003,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[7120,4595,44077,565,134,44078,44079,111,139,69,44080,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-51002","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fitness","8":"tag-bodybuilder","9":"tag-bodybuilding","10":"tag-cac","11":"tag-fitness","12":"tag-health","13":"tag-lean-mean-bodybuilding-machine","14":"tag-mens-classic-physique","15":"tag-new-zealand","16":"tag-newzealand","17":"tag-nz","18":"tag-sherkym-daniel","19":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}