Mike ‘Titan’ O’hearn: I’m All Natural!

Ok, where do we start…

The pearly white smile. The millions of dollars in his bank account, from years of TV work and photo shoots. The perfect mansion in the golden state of California. It’s no wonder Mike O’Hearn is seen smirking in all of his social media photos.

At 46, the 6’3″ Titan (as he likes to be called) is 262 pounds of perfectly shaped solid muscle, shredded down to an impressive body fat percentage of just six.

Yet for all of the gifts listed above, the rest of us mere mortals can always relieve ourselves in the fact that we know how he really got these muscles and what he does to maintain them, right? (Wink, wink.) Except Mike O’Hearn swears that he is and always has been natural!

When you hear it, the majority of us turn away in disbelief. Many actually take to message boards and spend hours arguing with each other on how it is or isn’t possible. It’s simple – most of us have our own ideas of what one man can have, and by any standard, O’Hearn has far too much, right? You just cannot be one of the most celebrated fitness models ever, with strength to match your aesthetics and fashion-model face—and longevity to top it all—yet still be natural. It just doesn’t add up, surely?

“I was 270 pounds as a 16-year-old,” O’Hearn says with a laugh. “I’ve been hearing ‘you’re on steroids’ my whole life. I was always the same weight,
really. What I learned how to do over the years was take the fat off while keeping my muscle.”

His classmate’s suspicions were just the beginning of it for O’Hearn. The rest of the world has been eager to knock him down a peg or two since the early 90’s, when he appeared on American Gladiators. In the hit show, many of O’Hearn’s cast members later admitted to the use of steroids, thus implicating him by association. But O’Hearn has maintained that he was natural, even though he was significantly bigger and stronger than his juiced-up colleagues.

When he went on to become the only member of the original cast to appear in the 2008 reboot—this time as Titan, and in even better shape—it made you scratch your head even more.

“Could I have set records with steroids? Yes. Would I be as good as I am now? No. Steroids age you. Your connective tissue breaks down. Over time, something will inevitably tear.”

Temptation wasn’t that hard to avoid, O’Hearn stated.

“When you get discovered by Joe Weider—he walks up to you at the Mr. Olympia and says, ‘I need you on the cover of my magazines,’ and you’re a just a 20 year old kid —I realized whatever I had been doing up to that point was good enough. Would I have been tempted if I didn’t find success? I hope I wouldn’t have, but then again, I never wanted to be a 300-pound Mr. Olympia. I wanted a pleasing physique. I think of my body as an art piece, and it’s my art piece.”

DODGING THE HATERS

The people of the world will just have to keep wondering. The only confirmed fact is that Mike O’Hearn has NEVER failed a drug test, and he’s taken nearly as many urine tests as he has selfies.

NBC also apparently test for everything, O’Hearn claims, alongside the drug tests he took for natural bodybuilding shows. They all turned up negative. Polgraph tests came back negative and apparently he has even passed lie detector tests! With all this being said, O’Hearn is a four-time Natual Mr. Universe and is an honoured member of the Natural Bodybuilding Hall of Fame.

Yet he is still pestered by haters, who jump in with sarcastic comments on nearly every social media post he uploads. Nature produces ‘genetic freaks’ every once in a while. But over the years we have been let down by so athletes who go from our hero’s to become frauds. This has left us constantly suspicious about these things and we don’t leave room for any genetic freaks in sports, certainly not in bodybuilding.

But what are your thoughts? Do you believe Mike O’Hearn is all-natural, or is he just a fraud who is somehow always one step ahead? Let us know in the comments below: