Just two years into his bodybuilding career, Sherkym Daniel is already building up quite a CV. He is a back-to-back national champion, and a double regional medallist. His sights are now set on winning gold for Saint Lucia. His accolades and ambition are all the more remarkable given that he barely knew the sport existed locally as recently as 2023.
“I have been training for a while, but I only started bodybuilding from last year,” he explained to St Lucia Times, ahead of the 2025 Central American and Caribbean (CAC) Bodybuilding & Fitness Championships.
“I’ve always been interested in being muscular, and I’ve always had an appreciation for great bodybuilders of history like Frank Zane, Arnold [Schwarzenegger], and obviously Ronnie Coleman. And even the more recent legends in the sport, like Chris Bumstead, these guys. So, I’ve always been training. I’ve been training for eight years now.
“And off and on, people would mention, ‘Yo, you should do a bodybuilding competition.’ But I wasn’t even aware that Saint Lucia had bodybuilding competitions. I always heard that my grandfather was a bodybuilder, but generally, the promotion of bodybuilding in Saint Lucia is quite limited. My awareness of the sport here didn’t really exist. So, a friend of mine actually did a bodybuilding show in 2023, and I was supposed to compete, but I fell ill.”
Notwithstanding his inability to compete at that juncture, the six-year police veteran experienced his first bodybuilding show as an audience member. But his appetite was whetted, and he was certain that he could compete with the athletes he was seeing. As he watched, he fielded queries from fellow spectators on why he wasn’t on stage. A year later, in 2024, he was on stage and discovered instant success, but yet more surprises.
“So I started planning to compete. I prepared myself the best I knew at the time,” he recalled. “And then I ended up competing in 2024, which I won, which was pretty cool. And then at that point I won and I went home, and I didn’t think I’d compete again until maybe [2025], because I wasn’t even aware of the scope of bodybuilding in the region. So I got a call a few days later, saying, ‘Yeah, you’ve been selected to represent Saint Lucia in the CAC Championships in Guyana.’ I’m like, ‘They have championships in Guyana? They have regional shows for bodybuilding in the Caribbean. I didn’t even know that!’ ”
Had he known better, Daniel is confident that he would have done even better than taking silver in the men’s classic physique under 175 centimetres and bronze in bodybuilding 80 kilogrammes. A native of Cedar Heights, Vieux Fort, he had been coaching himself at Beyond Limits Gym. Dissatisfied with his debut outing, he began to learn more about training programmes, hypertrophy, biological science and sought professional coaching.
In stepped Australian exercise physiologist, hypertrophy coach, and former bodybuilder Deklan McMichael, the founder of Hypertrophy Academy. An educator and coach in the fitness industry, McMichael has worked with hundreds of athletes and coaches around the world, helping them achieve their goals through evidence-based training and education. Daniel said he felt that that was the sort of edge he needed to get to the next level.
“I was told… that CAC either helps you fall in love with the sport or it breaks you,” Daniel told St. Lucia Times. “Because of the level of competitors that usually appear at CAC, right? Because I mean you as a ‘novice’ when you get to CAC, you actually see people who have been competing for five plus years. So that’s when you decide whether or not you want to put in the work to get to that level, or you say it’s more of a hobby for me, I don’t want to really compete.”
“So I went to CAC, put my best foot forward, took second and third in two different categories. I felt I should have won one of the categories, but you know, I didn’t win. And me, being someone who’s very much spiteful in a way, like when I don’t win something, I want to know why I didn’t win it. And the answers I got, I was not pleased with the answers that I got. So I told myself, you know what, we’re putting everything into learning about bodybuilding, about hypertrophy training, about getting bigger, getting stronger, and we’re going to put our best foot forward in order to prepare for the following year, so that I could do even better. Not just do better, but dominate on stage, right?”
“I don’t want to just win. I want to show out, right? That’s been my mentality coming into this upcoming show, right? So, I built a significant amount of muscle. I think I improved some of my weak points. I think I am going to bring even better conditioning, I’m going to be much leaner than last year. And I’m just going to be much more prepared for what the other competitors are going to bring on stage as an athlete, right? So many pros and so many other coaches backstage, they told me, ‘Yeah, I feel like you should have won that. I feel like that was your win. I feel like they cheated you.’ And I’m not going to say that that is exactly the case, but that’s how I felt as well. So it lit a fire under me.”
Daniel began to learn about bodybuilding only after his grandfather, Victor Hines, died. Hines trained with the legendary Rick Wayne and perhaps Schwarzenegger as well back in the sixties. Like Daniel, Wayne was a police officer from the south of the island, before shooting to fame as a three-time Mr Universe and two-time Mr World. Daniel, who is now deeply immersed in the world of bodybuilding, is certain that he can approach that type of success.
“I’m not saying that I’m going to be Mr Olympia one day,” he demurred. “But I feel like, if I were to put in the work and the effort, and take my time to grow in this sport, that wouldn’t be too far out of the reach for me.”
