Hunter Moore is just like any other teen athlete. He loves to play sports, made the varsity team, and doesn’t mind throwing up a few gym selfies on his Instagram.
“It’s all genetics, bro,” he says laughingly while pumping his nearly 20-inch bicep. The genetics, in Moore’s case, is Dystonic Cerebral Palsy from a stroke he suffered as an infant that left him partially paralyzed on his left side.
In this case, the genetics are the obstacle to overcome, not the immutable advantage some athletes enjoy. Yet Moore was born into a military family, and so received an upbringing full of dictates to never give up, to prove them all wrong, and it drove Hunter to spend most of his childhood building a body that was capable of the rigors of athletics.
For 7 years he always made his schools’ soccer teams, and now plays as the long snapper for his junior varsity football team, while regularly posting pretty impressive weightlifting numbers that even a non-paralyzed person could feel safe bragging about.
Even though he can’t use his left arm for isolated lifts, he still tries to incorporate it as often as possible for the sake of symmetry—one of bodybuilding’s most important judging criteria. He’ll lock his left arm around a bar, and pry it away from where it usually sits tucked up into his armpit. Like this, he can do a squat or a deadlift.
By the time he competed last summer in the Professional Natural Bodybuilding Association, he was pressing 120 lbs. with one arm, and deadlifting 405. He took first place in his category in Dallas, Texas, and competed again in November in Las Vegas to win first place in the professional class for Men’s Disabled Standing.
In an interview, Moore described posing on stage as “one of the scariest things that I have ever attempted,” but the whistles and cheers he received were a tangible reward for an amount of hard work that the majority of people, disabled or not, cannot manage.
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“I will define myself and not let cerebral palsy or anyone else define me,” he told Joker Magazine, adding that he plans to go to university to study marine biology and hopes to also pursue motivational speaking.
CELEBRATE This Young Man’s Dedication To Overcoming The Odds…