loris bertolacci

I bulked up Matthew Lloyd. HA. ( Psss Joke!)

I have to take the blame for this. I was at Essendon in 1994 when he was drafted. He was so skinny then that they used him for the wind-sock.

I spoke to my consultant dieticians at the time. Nonna Tina ( my grandmother) and Mama Rosa ( my momma). Nonna had worked in Genoa in the 20’s as a cook and was famous for her cuisine and getting everyone except herself fat. Mama Rosa learn’t from Nonna and ate too much of Nonnas cooking.

Now they told me to give Matthew a high fat, high carbohydrate diet. I also consulted my cousins, the Angele Family ( Brunettis), and they gave me large supplies of cakes and biscuits.

I spoke to my dad George. He at the time had lost weight but was still 128 kgs ( from 155kgs) . He used to place bets on the Phone TAB at home whilst eating italian bread with butter and mortadella. About 13,000 calories a sitting.

Armed with all this advice I spoke to Matthew.

Not sure what he weighed then. I have the statisitics but geez this is IP maybe and so sorry. Can’t divulge!

We decided to pump weights day in and day out. Nonna and Mama cooked non stop. Dad kept eating mortadella samdwiches.

As Matthew was doing bench press I would pop a ravioli in ( or a ravilo?) . Now Ravioli are the ultimate protein/carbo pill. One Raviolo can be digested whilst exercising easily. So a bench press set doing 10 reps might take 40 seconds. One Raviolo every 10 seconds can be eaten. Thus this is 4 Ravioli. Simple. Now if you have extra cheese in your ravioli this is even better. So if you do 5 sets of 10 that is 20 Ravioli. Thats what I did with Matthew.

Straight after a set I would make him eat 4 of my nonnas rissoles. Again carbs and protein. ( Polpette in Italy). Thus after 5 sets he would have 20 Ravioli and 20 Polpette. Polpette can be thrown down and really might be the answer to Gels.

Because he was young I had to not allow vino. So we used CHINOTTO for hydration. Next was squats. Thus here I had to change to Chinotto and also biscotti to allow easier digestion because of the involvement of the core in squats. The biscotti had lots of milk an cream so lots of protein.

To vary the protein source I gave him 4 slices of Pizza Aussie style after squats. I couldnt totally take him away from his Aussie eating habits.

I stayed under ASADA guidelines but gave him 2 short blacks with 2 sugars in each for the last exercise , to get him going.

This was dumbell curls.

After each set I forced him to eat a mortadella sandwich. Now this is hard to digest but these curls were done sitting down, so he could digest inbetween sets.

So I really can’t say much more because I want to produce an E Book with my secrets that I experimented on Matty with.

I never used these methods again because they were not mainstream.

I think from now on young fella it is laps of the tan and diet coke for you.

Ciao and arriverderci.

PSSSSSS ( All a joke eh! From what I know Matthew was just as heavy in the late 90’s and 2000 if not heavier than now so I dont know what all the fuss is about)

Ciao Matteo!

August 8, 2007 - Posted by Loris Bertolacci | AFL