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In 2004, 19-year-old Ryan Ferguson spent his days locked in a Missouri jail doing curls with a five-gallon coffee jug until he couldn’t feel his arms. The scrawny, basketball-obsessed teenager had been charged in the murder of Columbia Tribune sports columnist Ken Heitholt, based almost entirely on the testimony of Ferguson’s former friend who had dreamed that the pair were somehow involved.
Ferguson was convicted despite no physical evidence against him and sentenced to forty years in maximum-security prison. For almost a decade he and his family fought for his innocence, until 2013 when his conviction was finally vacated. Ferguson’s true-life nightmare is chronicled in the documentary dream/killer, which screened last month at the Tribeca Film Festival.
In prison, getting ripped helped save Ferguson’s life and sanity. Earlier this year, the 30-year-old published Stronger, Faster, Smarter, a book that details the lessons he learned about body and mind during his ten years behind bars. He spoke to GQ about his experiences.
You often talk about how fitness was key to your survival in prison. When did you first realize that?
Within the first few days I remember speaking to my father and he told me, "Son, I can’t protect you. You’ve got to make yourself stronger, faster, and smarter if you want to survive in there.’ I took that to heart. I could see that I was in there by myself. I had no friends. Getting to the point where I could take care of myself, it was evident form the very beginning that it was going to be absolutely necessary. My whole goal wasn’t to be badass—it was to be in the position where I would be too much trouble. "If I mess with this guy, it’s not going to be worth my time."
There was no gym in the county jail where you were held during trial. How did you work out?
I would walk the length of the 50-foot cell and back and do 25 push-ups. I would do it for one hour, I would do it for two hours. I would get a minimum of 500 push-ups—regular, elevated, diamond push-ups. I would also do dips on a half-wall—kind of like you’re climbing over a fence.
Another day I would do pull-ups. They had a stairway and there was no backing to it. It was metal and it was grated—you couldn’t just grab the stairway. You had to take toilet paper and roll it up and put it over the grate so it wouldn’t hurt your hands. I would do five pull-ups then walk back and forth and then another five pull-ups.
They would bring in coffee at five o’clock in the morning in this round jug. It was quite large—it probably held four gallons, five gallons—and we would wrap the laundry bag through the handles and we would do curls with that.
You played a lot of basketball in prison. Why was that important?
Basketball helped me develop a lot of relationships. In prison, friendship is not "having friends.’ You’re not going in there to meet new people; you’re not there to hang out. You stay by yourself. The only places you really interact are on the card table or on the basketball court. Card tables cause fights—I stayed away from that.
The basketball game there is like street ball. There isn’t any order to it, really. You’ll have different courts—some with guys who can’t play at all, and then you’ll have the courts with the guys who can play. But even with them they’ve never really played organized ball. It’s really rough. You never call fouls unless you get really beat up. It’s almost like White Men Can’t Jump. I actually learned a lot from that movie. You go in and people think you don’t belong on that court; you belong on the other court. But you show them that you can play—block them out, screen them, shoot jump shots—do things that other people can’t do because they’ve never been around that organized environment. It was really good because I could get on the court, and I know that my game is going to impress them and they’re going to respect that.
What was the gym like in the maximum-security facility where you lived?
There was a fifteen- to twenty-foot area where they had all the weights. There were two or three cable machines. They had three Smith machines and generally only one was in working order. The Smith machines were the closest we could get to doing what I consider the good moves—squats, deadlifts, bench press. Then they had the leg extensions, the machine bench press—but you couldn’t change the motion or move the bench around. They have about twenty fid machines that people used. And they had a volleyball court. They had two treadmills; in the wintertime that wasn’t even close to enough.
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Is it true that inmates lift weights all the time? Is everybody jacked?
No, no. I used to wonder why guys wouldn’t use the time in there more. There are 300 people in the housing unit, you all go out to the ercise yard. You have fifty guys on the basketball court, fifty guys on the handball court, and a lot of times they’re just messing around. You’ll have a lot of guys who just want to sit there and smoke and talk to each other; they’re just waking around. They’re hustling; they’re selling cigarettes or drugs.
Then out of those 300, you have 100 guys in the gym. A lot them, they’re just talking, telling stories, and out of them who have forty or fifty who really want to get in shape, and they understand that health and fitness can take them somewhere. And out of those people the ones who actually work out the right way and educate themselves and see any gains is so few. It was a lot more when I was in there, because I was like, "Just do this, do these moves, forget that other stuff.’
So you became the de facto trainer at the prison gym. How did that happen?
Once I got to prison and I started getting in better shape than everyone else, people can really respect that. They see that. They know that you have the exact same tools as they have—I don’t have any more weights than you have. I don’t have any more recreation time than you have. I don’t have any more nutrition than you have. But somehow I’m achieving better results. People would start asking, "How do you do that?’ These guys, when you walk in they’re looking at you like prey, a year or two years later, they’re looking up to you. "How do I get there, man?’ They’re respecting you and they want your help. They want to hang out with you. That really helps survive prison.
I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. And not only did I read everything, I tried everything. I’d try it out on my workouts for a period of time to see if I had progress with it. And what’s interesting is I also had other people do it—workout partners, friends, whoever was into fitness. And we would all get different results.
A friend and I would go work out, we’d run, and we came back in and we drank a glass of chocolate milk and ate a peanut butter and honey sandwich for recovery. And after about three months of that and people seeing that we’re in better shape than everyone else, then two or three people started having chocolate milk and peanut butter and honey sandwiches. Six months later, twenty or thirty people would be coming in from their workouts and going to their rooms and grabbing chocolate milk and peanut butter and honey sandwiches. They could see gains. They had more energy. They would be getting more lean muscle mass.
Most PopularWhy did you decide to the write a book about fitness?
I was sitting my cell probably about eight months before I got let out. I didn’t know I was going to get let out at the time. I was just surviving and doing what I do. A lot of people kept asking how to get into shape. I was spending a lot of time on it. I decided I was going to write out a one-page fitness guide for them—you know, stay hydrated, eat at the right times, do these ercises, do the right kind of cardio. When I was done I realized I had three pages, and it was going to be harder to copy three pages. I realized I had a table of contents. I thought, "What can I do with this?’ I realized I had a lot say—a lot more than these few paragraphs. I could tie this with my own experiences. So I decided I was going to write this book. I told my dad, I told my girlfriend. Five months later, I had a finished product. The only time I had in my cell was 10:30 to 12 o’clock. I used that time to write.
Can you give me a sample workout?
I always start with a compound move two. Yesterday, for example, after a brief warm-up I did pull-ups and bent over rows. I did EMOMs (every minute on the minute) of pulls-ups—five pull-ups every minute for twentyminutes. I wanted to get more volume in yesterday—typically, I’d just do five sets. Then I did six sets of bent-over rows with an alternating grip, which is going to work your upper lats and lower lats. Then I did seated rows. In between sets I would do ten pushups, just to get contrast—push/pull. After that I did curls, and then a bit of cardio—rowing machine, 1,000 meters at a decent pace. And that was it.
And that’s similar to what you did in prison?
It’s pretty much identical to it. It hasn’t changed at all except for the rowing machine.
In prison, you gotta adapt. That’s the number one thing about working out, health and fitness, life in general. No excuses. In the prison gym, if I can’t get the Smith machine today and I can’t do my squats, that’s fine, I’ll do body weight squats, but I’ll do a hundred of them.
Everybody has excuses. I had no excuses. What were my excuses? I was in a cell block, I didn’t see weights for eighteen months—I was doing pull ups on the stairs, I was doing dips on my bed, I was doing push ups on the floor, I was doing sit ups, and I was running around a little cube, essentially. And I was able to develop a body that people who are considered some of the most violent in the nation don’t want to mess with.
