It’s not just Belgian Blue cattle, Flex Wheeler, and a German toddler who have muscle-building myostatin-related mutations. Now a similar rare condition gives a toddler super strength in Michigan, and he’s eating his adoptive parents out of house and home:
Liam Hoekstra was hanging upside down by his feet when he performed an inverted sit-up, his shirt falling away to expose rippled abdominal muscles.It was a display of raw power one might expect to see from an Olympic gymnast.
Liam is 19 months old.
But this precocious, 22-pound boy with coffee-colored skin, curly hair and washboard abs is far from a typical toddler.
“He could do the iron cross when he was 5 months old,” said his adoptive mother, Dana Hoekstra of Roosevelt Park. She was referring to a difficult gymnastics move in which a male athlete suspends himself by his arms between two hanging rings, forming the shape of a cross.
“I would hold him up by his hands and he would lift himself into an iron cross. That’s when we were like, ‘Whoa, this is weird,’” Hoekstra said.
Liam has a rare genetic condition called myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy, or muscle enlargement. The condition promotes above-normal growth of the skeletal muscles; it doesn’t affect the heart and has no known negative side effects, according to experts.
Liam has the kind of physical attributes that bodybuilders and other athletes dream about: 40 percent more muscle mass than normal, jaw-dropping strength, breathtaking quickness, a speedy metabolism and almost no body fat.
In fitness buffs’ terms, the kid is ripped.
All this despite being born premature:
Liam was born four weeks early and had a small hole in his heart. He also had eczema, enlarged kidneys, was lactose intolerant and had severe stomach reflux that made him vomit several times each day, his mother said.No one knew then that the baby was among the few people known to have myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy.
Dana Hoekstra said her suspicion that Liam was physically different quickly intensified. Two days after he was born, Liam could stand up and support his weight if someone held his hands to provide balance, she said.
His heart and kidneys healed within a few months, but it took 18 months before he stopped throwing up daily.
Liam’s muscular thighs at 5 months of age gave him the appearance of a miniature Lance Armstrong. By 8 months, Liam was doing pull-ups and, a month later, climbing up and down stairs, his mother said.
What really amazed his parents was the way Liam fell.
“When he fell backward, he would land on his butt, but he never hit his head on the ground,” Dana Hoekstra said. “His stomach would tense up and he would catch himself before his head hit the ground. You could see his stomach muscles. He had a little six-pack.”