70 MD musculardevelopment.com July 2019
From Texas To aFghanisTan
and Korea
If it hadn’t been for middle-school bullying, which is
practically our national sport, Logan Franklin might never
have started lifting weights. His family moved around a
lot and money was tight with both parents working and
going to college, so Logan was often both the new kid at
school and the one who the “cool kids” chose to pick on.
“I didn’t wear clothes from Hollister or Abercrombie Kids,
so they targeted me,” he says. Though he was athletic,
having played baseball since just before his fourth
birthday and later playing football, riding motocross and
fighting MMA, in eighth grade he was 100 pounds on a
good day. His father had lifted weights in years past,
and his older half-brother had trained and developed a
decent build. “I wanted to follow in their footsteps, and
I figured with a little size I would get noticed in a good
way instead of being looked down upon.” Dad wouldn’t
let him join a gym, but they had some basic equipment
at home including a bench, an EZ-curl bar, dumbbells
up to 60 pounds, and even a Bowflex machine. Young
Logan was beyond clueless and left to his own designs
made some dopey blunders. “For some reason I thought
you were supposed to train a body part, then take a day
off, then train another body part, rest a day, and so on.
It would take me almost two weeks to train the whole
body that way.” Progress was understandably slow. He
also had no concept of proper nutrition and continued to
subsist on nutritionally void junk food.
Franklin had not made the most of his academics in
high school. He slept a lot, failed classes, got into fights,
and got expelled several times. He never felt college
was an option. His goal was to become a firefighter for
the city of Houston. For that you needed either a college
degree, or two years in the military with an honorable
discharge. The choice was simple. “Both my parents
were in the service, my uncle was an Airborne Ranger,
and I grew up watching war movies and playing with air
guns, so enlisting in the Army just made sense.” This
was 2009, when we had over 150,000 troops in Iraq and
another 50,000 deployed in Afghanistan. It was there
that Logan would spend the next 13 months. Texas gets
hot, but he was not prepared for the 130-degree days in
Afghanistan. “The best way to describe it is to heat up
your oven, then stand right in front of it when you open
it— that’s the wind over there.” He was able to keep up
his training on base in a makeshift gym and got even
more serious about his training and eating later when
he was deployed to South Korea to personally guard a
four-star general in command of the entire peninsula. It
was there that Logan’s future would call to him. “I was
watching the livestream of the 2013 Olympia, and that
was the first year they had the Men’s Physique category.
It seemed like something I already looked like,” he says.FirsT show To Pro Card in 4 weeKs
Toward the very end of his enlistment, Logan had the
goal of becoming an inspirational figure in the fitness
industry, like the late Greg Plitt, famed fitness model and
former Army Ranger. Franklin was discharged in July of
2009 and booked himself a few photo shoots. It only
made sense to try his hand in competition, and he found
a local event scheduled for October 18. He did his own
diet, which was close to zero carbs, and won. Knowing
he would probably need some guidance to progress up