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.

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.

That matters for what is published here. The stage he stood on is history, but the lineups, the callouts, the judging, and the athletes coming up through them are a working weekend several times a 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 the BuildWithPros platform 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 platform is run by someone who lives the discipline it publishes. That is the same approach behind how women build muscle and lose fat.

The content and products are Shawn's: his videos, audiobooks, PDF guides, and writing, though some of it Shawn and Michael have shaped together along the way. 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 already know how to train and want better decisions, not more instruction. That means specific people, and it is worth naming them plainly.

Lifters with five or more years behind them. The point where the beginner curve is long gone, the obvious gains are banked, and progress starts depending on judgment rather than effort. Most of the catalog assumes that starting point.

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, peak week, show day, 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 and in the women's edition of the nutrition blueprint.

It is not for lifters still learning the compound movements. That foundation comes first, and no amount of advanced material substitutes for it.

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 also settles what BuildWithPros is not. It is not a training app, a weekly check-in service, or a replacement for a coach who has eyes on your physique. It sits above the daily programming a lifter already runs and answers the questions that programming cannot: 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. Keep the coach. Keep the app. This is the layer that decides what to point them at.