Daryl Boyington laughs, maybe a bit self-consciously, when asked what prompted him to take up weightlifting and powerlifting.

“Well, I don’t know if you want to call it small man’s syndrome or whatever, but I think I knew I was never really going to be really tall, so I figured why not develop my body another way?” Boyington explained.

The Milford native and Hampden resident may not be blessed with the height he wanted, but the 5-foot-5, 180-pound Boyington certainly makes up for his vertical stature with his physique.

He’s also no slouch in competitive powerlifting, something he first became involved with back in 1984 as a 19-year-old high school senior.

He didn’t do much to speak of in that competition, but that didn’t keep him from working out regularly, which the manufacturing engineer at Lemforder Corporation has been doing since he first picked up some weights in 1980.

“I started working out in high school,” Boyington said. “I always used to train in the gym all the time to gain muscle mass and be healthy.

“I guess that’s the point of some of this is the priority for me has always been to be in shape and healthy and this was a way to do that, with the competition being more like a bonus.”

More like a big bonus.

Last July, Boyington broke the bench press record at an American Powerlifting Association competition in Newport with a mark of 390 pounds in the 165-pound weight class of the Masters (ages 40-45) division. The old record was 385.

“My niece kind of opened the door for that. I hadn’t trained specifically for a competition in years, but she got into it and wanted to do her first competition last February,” Boyington said. “I was just going to be a spectator, and then at the last minute, I figured I’d start training and do it, too.”

His 24-year-old niece has since switched to fitness competitions, but Boyington was hooked the second time around.

“I came to really like [lifting] because it was an outlet and it gave me such a good feeling of well-being about myself, but the competition has become a real bonus,” he said.

More like a big bonus, as the success didn’t stop there.

This year, Boyington won the all-around competition and bench press in his weight class and division at the American Powerlifting Federation national championship meet in Saco on May 12 and qualified to compete at the APF Worlds in Lake George, N.Y., in early November.

Boyington benched 365 pounds, squatted 450 pounds, and dead-lifted 402 to win the all-around title. That won him two gold medals and a best bench award. Not bad for someone competing in his first national-caliber meet.

If it was a Napoleon complex that got Boyington into weightlifting in the first place, it may have been another male malady that led him to get back into competitive powerlifting 14 years after his first competition.

“Yeah, I guess it was a mid-life crisis kind of thing,” the 41-year-old Boyington said with a chuckle. “I had just turned 40 and was starting to feel like I was getting old, so I guess I wanted to see if I felt old too.”

Now he’s looking ahead to November and competing against people who will be stronger – naturally, artificially, or both – at the APF Worlds.

“At this point, I guess I’m more excited about it than anything else,” he said.

Boyington says although he does not use performance-enhancing drugs or agents, some of his Worlds competitors will be as the APF does not forbid them and doesn’t utilize drug testing.

“At worlds, there will be people there who are far stronger than I am,” he said. “I could also be competing against people who are taking performance-enhancing agents, but I’m doing this anyway because I’d rather be the underdog, and the competition is all that much better.”

Right now, Boyington is following his regular training regimen, which runs 90 minutes to two hours three to four days a week, usually just before closing time at Union Street Athletics, when it’s quieter and the distractions are fewer.

But once he gets three months away from Worlds, that will change.

“My worst event is dead lift so I’m trying to focus more on lower back development for that and bought some new equipment to do that, but I’ll still train two hours a day for four days a week,” said Boyington. “The amount of time I put in will be about the same, but my training will change too.”