Images of Derik Brady & Brooke Dragon     View Photo Portfolio Not a BBPics member? Join Now! Birthdate: August, 1992 Height: 6 2  Weight: 195 to 218 neck: 18, chest: 48.5, arms: 18, quads: 26.5, calves: 16.6   Email Derek: derikb@sbcglobal.net Email Brooke: brooke.dragon@uconn.edu     **NEW** YouTube Video:   click here! **NEW** YouTube Video:   click here!     Business Site: n/a
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My fitness journey started when I was a freshman in high school. Standing at 6’2” 160 lbs., I wasn’t the smallest, but I certainly wasn’t the biggest. I soon understood that to become better at the sports I loved, baseball and basketball, I needed to become bigger, stronger, and faster. To my luck, my family owned a gym that was less than a mile from my high school. When I didn’t have practice, I would spend my time in the weight room. Throughout high school I put on 15 lbs. and was recruited to play baseball for UCONN.

Although baseball did not work out at UCONN, the time I spent there did not go to waist. Since the team has there own weight lifting coach, all of our lifts, weights, and measurements where always being tracked. Every week I wanted to do better than the previous, and having a set-lifting schedule, I memorized the best I could the lifts and rational behind the different reps and set ranges. When I transferred at the end of my first semester, I could repeat the workouts almost verbatim on my own. In the one semester that I attended UCONN as a freshman I gained 10 lbs., sitting at a pretty lean 195 lbs.

To this point I never really had a special diet, nor did I ever really think about the food I was eating other than not to eat a bunch of crap. I was the Average Joe just having a protein shake and some creatine after a workout and really nothing extra. But when I transferred to WCSU, I took some nutrition classes and you could say that my mind was blown. I instantly had a fascination with food and what it actually does for the body. For a semester project, my goal was to gain 15 lbs. of lean body weight. Through what I learned, I was able to complete my goal, and actually expand to continue to gain lean body weight, while staying low body fat and high energy. I continued to take different nutrition classes and became more and more intrigued by different manipulations one can make to their diet to yield certain result. Today, I am sitting at around 215 lbs.

It worked out pretty well coming across the app Instagram about a year and a half ago. I started to post my progress and different helpful nutrition pictures for my followers. This also gives me motivation to continue because I can see how far I have already come. On one of my most recent pictures, there was a comment left by BBPics, and after looking into it further, I contacted John of BBpics.com and was able to schedule a photo-shoot. Being completely new to the Fitness Industry, John was very nice and helpful with any questions I had, and made the whole picture taking process easy and enjoyable. After the first shoot, he gave me some things that I could work on and talked about future shoots.

Fitness and nutrition are two of my main passions in life now and since I recently transferred back to UCONN as a nutrition and dietetic major, I hope to one day become a nutritionist to help people who struggle with their diets, and become an inspiration to people who also have a passion for fitness and nutrition, or are looking to start.