A Dallas Dad Traded Six Drinks a Night for Four Weekly Workouts — and Built 16.5-Inch Arms

Jarod West, a 47-year-old dad from the Dallas area, weighed 203 pounds at 5-foot-9 a year before his transformation and says weight wasn't even his biggest problem. He'd spent a few years in what he calls a "dark place" of severe depression and crippling anxiety, drinking up to six alcoholic drinks a night and, by his own account, failing as a husband, father, employee, and friend — his routine reduced to work, couch, drink, and TV.

In late 2023 he looked in the mirror and didn't like what he saw, and in December 2023 he went to the gym for the first time — a move that left his wife visibly shocked. He researched a workout split online and built one around his schedule that he still follows: chest and biceps on Fridays, legs on Saturdays, back on Sundays, shoulders and triceps on Mondays. He started weak, with just two exercises per body part taken to failure, adding weight week over week or month over month.

As his lifting progressed, his drinking fell off on its own — he now has roughly as many drinks in a month as he used to have in a single night — and he cut his carb intake to about 50-75 grams a day, eating mostly grilled meats and vegetables once he did. A year in, his two exercises per muscle group had grown to six or seven, done for four sets of 8-10 reps each, and he'd added two to three CrossFit sessions a week on top of the split, which he credits with leaning him out further.

The combined result was a 30-pound weight loss and a visibly transformed physique, including 16.5-inch arms he's aiming to grow to 18 inches in 2025. His arm routine runs four sets of 8-10 reps per move with 90 seconds of rest, increasing the weight once he can hit 10 reps across all four sets on a given exercise; it includes alternating standing or incline dumbbell curls, EZ-bar or machine preacher curls, cable rope hammer curls supersetted with close-grip chin-ups to failure, standing dumbbell hammer curls, high cable curls, and both overhead and single-arm cable triceps extensions.

West says the physical changes rank only third in importance to him — first is his mental health, then general fitness. "My stress, my anxiety, my worry levels, they're probably lower than they've ever been," he says, crediting the routine with restoring date nights with his wife and a closer relationship with his 15-year-old daughter.