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I am 6' 2", 235 pounds, and have 18 1/2 inch arms. Ninety-five percent of amateur weightlifters would probably trade for those numbers, and I get my share of compliments. Unlike many of my peers, I am also a lifetime natural. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it means that I have never taken any illegal bodybuilding drug-no steroids, no growth hormone, etc. I don't say all of that to brag. I think (know, actually) that I'm fat at this weight, and I'm not so mass-obsessed to diet down and sacrifice some muscle to get lean. There is still a lot of hard work left to be done in order for me to achieve my ideal look, but a lot of hard work is an integral part of shaping your physique. At least it should be. Shortcuts are all the rage in gyms across America. I'll confirm what a lot of you probably already know. Steroid use is rampant in the twenty-first century.
About three years ago I watched a kid, probably straight out of high school, begin working out in my gym. He was unassuming, shuffling around the gym looking lost sometimes. I only really noticed him because I couldn't help noticing his pretty girlfriend who came to the gym with him. I'll call him Johnny Juice, or just John for short. John's girlfriend didn't stick around long. Whether they broke up or she decided to stop coming, I don't know. John lifted weights the way most people begin weightlifting, mimicking other people in the gym. I would catch him looking at me and my routines. It's not the worst strategy, but it's anything but foolproof. Ready for a shock? Many, if not most of the behemoths at the gym don't really know what they're doing.
After a few months of minimal changes to his physique I noticed a few things about John that led me to keep my eye on him. For starters, he began wearing heavy sweatshirts to the gym. It didn't seem to matter what the weather was like outside, or that the temperature inside never required a sweatshirt. What was he trying to hide? It also seemed that his face was becoming bloated. Another change that followed both of those things was that John would come into the gym and perform 135 pound biceps curls for reps with a barbell. One hundred and thirty-five pounds on that particular exercise seems to be the magic number for a lot of weightlifters because they get to put a big forty-five pound plate on each side and it looks cool. He had been nowhere near that weight just a few weeks prior. Obviously, John was juicing.
For weeks, this exercise was the only one that I saw him do in the gym. John was growing, but he had no idea what he was doing. The funny thing was, although he was gaining overall mass and obviously wanted big arms, his arms weren't growing nearly as quickly as I'm sure he hoped. He was over-training them so much that even steroids couldn't compensate. I overheard him say how he was trying to get them to grow, and, as the owner of one of the bigger sets of guns in the gym, I still caught John looking my way for whatever secrets he could glean.
The changes in John weren't just physical. As he grew, he began to walk tall, and not with his head down like he used to. He socialized with his high school peers more, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that they socialized with him more. I saw him at some nightclubs I used to go to, and would see him in the pictures they put online with his best tough guy look. He seemed to always be at the gym, immersing himself in the bodybuilding lifestyle. He was, for better or worse, a changed man.
I present John's story, because it is in every way typical of both the young neophyte weightlifter, and the young neophyte weightlifter who ends up taking it to extreme. Almost ten years ago I was very similar. I was fresh out of college with high aspirations and all the drive in the world. I had worked out a little in college, but it's only fair to say I dabbled in it in college. One night, sitting in my dorm room with shorts on I noticed my thighs spread oddly across the chair and came to the shocking realization that I was getting fat. Gee-whiz. I wonder it was the rib sandwiches in the fridge, or the bottle of vodka in the closet? In addition, I had always looked toward a future with diabetes and heart disease, since both of these things run in my family. Suddenly, it dawned on me: I could.take care of myself.
In the beginning I made as many mistakes as any young weightlifter would. I over-trained like crazy, sometimes putting in two, two-hour session days, and worked out at least five days a week. Sometimes I would come home from the gym and collapse on the couch. I thought all my hard work would pay off. It didn't, really. I grew some, but not nearly as much as I wanted. I kept looking in the bodybuilding magazine and wondering when am I going to be like them. I knew about steroids back then, but I had no idea the extent of what those professional bodybuilders did to look the way they did.
Here's where my story veers away from John's. I'm an idealist, and I like being able to do things the right way. Nobody ever offered me steroids (surprisingly), and I never sought them out. Instead, I began researching fitness, reading article after article on the subject. I did the same thing with nutrition and discovered that my diet was atrocious. I began seeing real gains, and grew excited. Although it would take me decades to be an IFBB pro, that was okay. Along the way, I discovered that these bodybuilding professionals were neither natural or healthy, and the idea of me becoming one, or looking like one faded quickly. I was natural. I was healthy. I looked good. I was happy.
The sad thing is that John and those like him don't even give themselves a chance. Trial and error is a part of bodybuilding, just as it is a part of many things in life. This trial and error is there to be learned from and to make you a better individual. It has been about a year now, and, although John has expanded his repertoire beyond just biceps curls, he still can't put a decent routine together. It's not a surprise; the steroids always compensate for what he doesn't know. Imagine if someone could give you an injection of a serum that allowed you to play Chopin on the piano, although you can't read music and you've barely touched the instrument before. Sure, the serum would allow you to play, but you wouldn't really know Chopin, and you would lack the nuance of a pianist who struggled for years to excel at his playing. This is the fate of most steroid users, who look the part, but have no idea what it really takes to get there.
Sadder still, these young men are essentially drug addicts. Not only does their size lie in a bottle of Deca Durabolin, or Winstrol, but, for the vast majority of them, so does their self-esteem. Getting young men to go off steroids is more than asking them to relinquish their cherished muscle mass, but their self-worth too. Further trapping them is that they don't know how to make significant gains naturally, or the gains that they think they need simply cannot be attained naturally. Parents who want to confront their children about steroid use should remember this. It is always about more than just size. Two years ago I had a bout of sleep apnea brought on by a wayward desire to gain as much weight as possible, by taking in as many calories as possible. My doctor recommended I lose weight, and I complied. In fact, I more than complied, dropping my weight down to 214, which I hadn't seen in years. "You got small," I heard over and over again. It was a little annoying, but nothing more than that. Besides, my sleep apnea was gone, so I was relieved. If my self-esteem was tied to being a big guy I would've felt two feet tall. As it was, I knew I could get big again with a couple of months of hard work and I did, although I was better, leaner.
There are times when I wonder, as I'm sure a lot of natural bodybuilders do, what would I look like if I did do steroids? I look up at the poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the gym and think that I could be that big. Then I think back to the time I was sitting on that chair in my dorm room, staring at my fat thighs and wondering how many years I could get in before the diabetes hit. What I always remind myself is that health was, is, and should always be the first priority for me, regardless of how I look. I also think how lucky I am that my self-esteem doesn't rest in vial after vial of synthetic hormones. Regardless of how big my arms are, I can still be happy.
© Reese Kemp 2006
Reese Kemp is a certified personal trainer and writer from Long Island, New York. More health and fitness articles can be found on his Long Island Personal Trainer Web site.
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