146: Robert Sikes: The Bodybuilder Who Ditched Carbs (And Won)

If you've spent any time in a gym, you've heard it: you need carbs to build muscle. It's gospel. Every bro coach and most personal trainers will tell you the same thing. The problem is it's not actually true. And my guest this week is living proof.

Robert Sikes is a pro natural bodybuilder who has been ketogenic for 11 years, eating fewer than 20 grams of carbs a day the entire time. No rice, no grains, no oatmeal, none of the stuff bodybuilders are supposed to live on. And he competes and wins on the world stage. In 2023 he got down to 3.9% body fat, making him the leanest man on earth at the time. He's also the founder of Keto Brick, a shelf-stable high-fat food he originally created for his own competition prep because nothing like it existed.

In this episode, we get into the carb and muscle myth, what 11 years of keto has actually done to his blood work, and the tradeoffs nobody on social media wants to talk about.

The argument for carbs usually comes down to insulin, which is a powerful anabolic agent. Everything grows in the presence of insulin, muscle included. But as Sikes lays out, you don't need excess insulin to build muscle. You need a caloric surplus, enough protein, enough training intensity, and enough recovery. The rest is just body fat you'll have to lose later, and the athletes chasing muscle through exogenous insulin often pay a steep price for it.

The same myth applies to testosterone. People assume Sikes must be running sky-high levels to look the way he does, but he isn't. He competes in natural federations that don't allow TRT, and his testosterone typically sits between 400 and 600. When he was at 3.9% body fat, it dropped to 87. That's not a level anyone would call healthy, but it proves you don't need elevated testosterone to build and hold muscle. I've experimented with TRT myself and walked away from it, and we get into why the negative feedback loop made it not worth it for either of us.

Where the conversation really opens up is the philosophical side. When do you intervene and when do you accept what nature gave you? We talk about genetics versus lifestyle, why he doesn't try to cheat death, and why an athlete's identity shouldn't be wrapped up in their physical abilities, because we're all biodegradable vessels of meat and bone that eventually deteriorate. His whole family eats this way too, including his kids, whose first real food was a beef knuckle bone rather than rice cereal.

About Robert Sikes:

Robert Sikes is a