About BuildWithPros

How BuildWithPros started

The shop did not start as a business plan. It started with a conversation.

Shawn Ray met Michael Mikkelsen from Denmark at the Arnold Sports Festival in Birmingham in 2022. What stood out immediately was not Michael's background in business. It was how he thought about the gym and the people in it.

The conversation moved quickly because both men were already thinking about the same things. Serious athletes getting pulled into constant change, gimmicks, and short timelines. The noise that rewards attention over consistency. They had both watched the same shift up close: how much more fragile the younger generation has become, coming up in a world of constant comparison, where the pressure arrives earlier and the standard they measure themselves against often is not even real.

Shawn Ray

Shawn Ray spent nearly two decades at the highest level of the sport, from his professional debut in 1987 to his final Mr. Olympia in 2001. Thirteen times on the Mr. Olympia stage, with twelve consecutive top-five finishes from 1990 to 2001. An IFBB Hall of Famer since 2007. Mr. Olympia runner-up in 1994 and 1996, and recipient of the Ben Weider Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. A career built through injuries, through industry changes, through everything the sport throws at you.

Shawn Ray started training in 1983 as a teenager and built his physique on the basics: a few movements, done well, for years, with no shortcuts and no secret formula. He competed through the 1990s Mr. Olympia era against the biggest men in the sport's history, fifty to sixty pounds of mass heavier than him, and held his place with balance, symmetry, proportion and detail.

That kind of time inside the sport builds a body of knowledge that goes far beyond training. It is the perspective that only comes from doing the work for that long, making the wrong calls, learning what actually holds up, and watching the difference between what looks good for a season and what carries someone through a career. That is the view he brings to BuildWithPros.

Shawn Ray today

The career ended in 2001. The involvement did not. Shawn Ray is Editor in Chief of Digital Muscle Media and writes for Muscular Development. He works as a consultant to the Mr. Olympia, serves as global master of ceremonies for IFBB and NPC competitions, and promotes professional Pro Am contests, including the Shawn Ray Pro Am Hawaiian Classic, the annual NPC and IFBB Pro League sanctioned championship he hosts in Honolulu. He is the author of The Shawn Ray Way and hosts the Where Are They Now interview series.

He also still trains with people in person. Training with Shawn Ray Day is a one on one day in the gym in Newport Beach or Venice Beach, California: a workout on the body part the guest chooses, a Q&A over lunch, photos and a signed photo to take home. The day is requested through a form on BuildWithPros and confirmed by Shawn directly.

That matters for what is published here. The stage he stood on is history, but the lineups, the callouts, the judging, the athletes coming up through them, and the guests he meets in the gym are a working part of every year. The material in this collection is not written from memory of a sport. It is written from inside a current one.

Michael Mikkelsen

Michael Mikkelsen has spent over forty years as a serious gym goer. Never a competitor, but always a student of the environment. Over those decades he watched how trends shifted, how the culture changed, and how the people inside it responded. He developed a deep interest in human behavior, specifically how the discipline and structure built inside a gym can transfer directly into every other area of life. Relationships. Family. Partnerships. Work. The systems that shape who you become over time.

He has also seen the darker side of that world. He lost two close friends to substances, people he never expected to lose that way. That experience gave him a lasting respect for what gym culture gets right when it stays grounded, and a clear view of what goes wrong when it chases shortcuts.

How BuildWithPros works

Together, Shawn Ray and Michael Mikkelsen established BuildWithPros to give that knowledge a home, and they remain the faces of it. Behind the scenes, the administration and day-to-day operation of both BuildWithPros and shawnrayofficial.com is handled by Betina Mikkelsen, Michael's wife. She brings a deep technical background to the infrastructure, the operations, and the commercial side, and she has trained and played sport all her life, so the shop is run by someone who lives the discipline it publishes. That is the same approach behind how women build muscle and lose fat.

The titles are Shawn's: his videos, audiobooks, PDF books, and writing, though some of it Shawn and Michael have shaped together along the way, and where a title is written by the BuildWithPros team it says so on the product page. His perspective is built from a career most athletes only read about.

The shop is where the practical work lives, organized into the Five Tracks: Training, Nutrition, Recovery, Mindset, and Competing.

Who BuildWithPros is for

The catalog is written for lifters who want the reasoning behind each decision, not more instruction. That covers specific people, and it is worth naming them plainly.

Lifters at every level, from the first structured year to the early pro level. Beginners who have never trained start with Start Strong, the audiobook written for the first year. Those already in the gym start with the goal setting and nutrition foundations, where several titles are written to be usable from the first month. Intermediate lifters, semi-pros and pros get the judgment material: when a stall needs a change and when it needs patience, when a diet needs adjusting instead of abandoning, and which decisions compound across a career. The method is the same at every level. What changes is how much training time there is to apply it to.

Serious natural bodybuilders who want pro-level structure. The margin for error is smaller without assistance, which makes structure matter more, not less. That is covered directly in how big you can get naturally.

Competitors, from a first show to a full season. The Competing Track covers the decision to compete, the cut, the principles of peak week, and the weeks after, from someone who ran that sequence thirteen times at the Mr. Olympia and now stands at shows as master of ceremonies and promoter.

Lifters over 35 and over 40. Recovery, hormones, joints, and sleep change what works, and several titles exist for that specific shift rather than treating it as a footnote.

Women training seriously. The principles do not run on a separate track, but some things are specific, and they are covered as their own subject in how women build muscle and lose fat, in the women's edition of the nutrition blueprint, and in the training blueprint for women. Every title written or tagged for women is gathered in the For Women collection.

Nothing in the catalog assumes access to a coach, a training partner who competes, or a gym where anyone else knows what a callout is. It is built to be worked through alone, because that is how most people train.

The guiding principle

The guiding principle of BuildWithPros comes directly from Shawn Ray:

"Knowledge is the difference between training and progress."

Anyone can train hard. Few know how to turn that work into progress that lasts. That gap is not closed by more effort or better motivation. It is closed by knowledge. The kind that comes from decades of doing the work, making the wrong calls, and learning what actually holds up over time.

That is what the titles are for: the reasoning behind each decision, written down once and kept for every season after. What phase to be in, when to push and when to hold, what a stalled week actually means, and which decisions this season will still matter in three years.

The standard the catalog is written to

Everything published here is held to a written standard: who the material is for, who it is not for, what is inside the catalog, and on what basis it is written. That standard is published in full rather than kept internal, so the material can be judged before it is bought. It covers what the catalog deliberately does not contain, and it names the two places where a written method reaches its limit.

The full version is on the BuildWithPros method page.