So You Think You Train Hard?

School was out for the summer. This meant that my nine-year-old son’s first question each morning was no longer, “Why do I have to go to school today?” but instead “What am I going to do today?” When I was his age, that question was only an interior thought. I never expected my put-upon parental units to worry about my daily activity schedule or making sure I was constantly entertained and amused. Each morning I would set off on my bike and often didn’t return until dusk. I probably put a couple hundred miles on that Huffy between June and September every year.

My son? His main ‘physical’ activity consisted of hours on the Nintendo Wii system. At least his right thumb and wrist were in great shape. And just to make sure he wasn’t missing out on the magic of childhood, I picked up a new game for him called Riding Around Town on Your Bike and Doing Kid Stuff. So far he’s at the level where you go down to the old swimming hole and catch frogs. If he makes it past that, he can play baseball in the sandlot with his virtual neighborhood friends and eventually get to the ice cream truck and spend all the coins he’s collected along the way. Good times!

My fifteen-year-old daughter had just started work for the first time, which was finally teaching her about real-world math. For example, if little spoiled teenage brat has to pay for her own 200-dollar True Religion jeans and 150-dollar Ed Hardy T-shirts, and only earns eight dollars an hour, how many hours does she need to work to buy new school clothes for the fall? Math was never my best subject, but thanks to my trusty calculator, I figured it out. She would need a summer roughly seventy months long to pull it off.

But enough about my two little angels. At the moment my focus was on my sixteen-year-old client Jared. He had ten weeks left before football practice started up, so I was training him four mornings a week with the goal of adding as much quality muscle as possible before he started those brutal three-hour practices under the blazing August sun in the stifling humidity of a Massachusetts summer. I had talked him into waiting to compete until next year, for a couple reasons. First of all, I didn’t think he was truly ready. Jared had a good build, but I knew that with another year he could look a lot more impressive. Secondly, he would be up against eighteen and nineteen-year-olds in a teenage class, and there is a big difference physically, for most young guys, between sixteen and nineteen. I wanted him to do well his first time out, and holding off one more year would increase his chances for success.

So here we were, putting Jared through the rigors of a tough leg workout. He had already done squats and stiff-leg deadlifts, and now he was on the new seated leg curl machine our gym had acquired in the spring. They had actually gotten rid of a lot of older machines (some of which I had liked a lot, dang it!) for a whole new line that had you rocking back and forth as you lifted and lowered the resistance. They struck me as being like an amusement park ride, and I often thought there should be a sign in front of each saying “you must be this tall to ride the leg extension” or whichever piece it was. Just as Jared was finishing his set, there was a thunderous roar and a clang of iron plates as Hardcore Hank finished a set of deadlifts as he always did, by letting the whole 495 pounds crash to the floor.

Hardcore Hank was by far the most annoying person at my gym. Though he wasn’t a bodybuilder, he personified all the worst traits that many people mistakenly associate with us. Hank was forever screaming and grunting during his sets, which typically featured way too much weight and horrendous form. His barbell curls, for example, looked like someone having a seizure, or being electrocuted, as he used hip thrusts and rocked his torso back and forth as if he were doing a clean and jerk. Hank did not believe in putting his weights away, and regularly left the leg press loaded up with plates and heavy dumbbells scattered all over the gym floor. You could tell by looking at him that he lifted weights, but he was no Jay Cutler. Yet he strutted around with a bad case of I.L.S, or Imaginary Lat Syndrome. Worst of all, he glared at the rest of us like he would kick your ass if you looked at him funny. How was it that he had never been kicked out of the gym for his antics? My theory was that he had to be in possession of some blackmail photos of the gym owner and a goat, or something along those lines. Otherwise, it boggled my mind as to how he had been allowed to terrorize our gym for so long. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m being sarcastic in calling him ‘Hardcore.” But this is a family magazine, and I can’t very well give him a more accurate name.

“Hank sure trains hard, doesn’t he?” Jared asked. I just stared at him, not sure if he was attempting sarcasm. He wasn’t. I had to take a breath and collect my thoughts before I replied, as I didn’t want to simply start insulting the man, much as it would please me to do so. “Well, I’m sure he thinks he trains hard, and obviously from the way he puts on a show at every workout he wants the rest of us to think he does – but no, I would not say Hank trains hard.” Jared was puzzled, and watched Hank as he prepared for his next act. He was dragging a milk crate over to the chin-up bar. Based on prior performances, I knew that he would use the chain belt to strap on a 45-pound plate and proceed to do chin-ups with roughly a four-inch range of motion, hollering all the while like a water buffalo giving birth to triplets.

“Training hard means different things to different people,” I began. “In terms of bodybuilding, it all boils down to working the target muscle as hard as possible. Working a muscle hard in most cases means keeping it under constant tension for the duration of the set. When someone slings weights around with momentum and gets other muscle groups involved, he or she isn’t really training hard. They just think they are. Unfortunately, others see this and mimic it, and the crappy form just keeps being perpetuated. It probably all goes back to some Cro Magnon man 50,000 years ago doing cheat curls with a mammoth tusk while the other dudes in the cave were watching.” That reference made me think of Jared’s buddy and occasional training partner Hunter, but I kept my mouth shut.

“I’ll tell you what hard training is,” I said. “I told you how a few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates put me through a biceps workout.”

“Yeah, I know, you told everybody about that,” he noted. I frowned. Perhaps I had been guilty of some gratuitous name-dropping when I came back from that experience.

“The point is, the whole workout only consisted of two work sets, one for concentration curls and one set of standing EZ-bar curls. Doesn’t sound like much, does it?” Jared shook his head.

“Nope, most guys in here do at least ten or fifteen sets for biceps.”

“Right. Joker over there,” I nodded toward Hank, “is in here for an hour doing biceps. He probably does twenty sets if not more. But I tell ya, Dorian had me working harder on just those two measly sets than knucklehead over there could ever comprehend. You see, the form had to be perfect, while at the same time the weight had to be as absolutely heavy as I could manage with maximum effort. He expected nothing less, and I sure as hell wouldn’t disappoint the guy – he was one of my idols in the sport. Training heavy with shit form isn’t so hard, and neither is using perfect form with easy weights. Training heavy with perfect form is a real bitch. My biceps were screaming in agony, and my whole body was shaking toward the end of those sets as I fought the negative. I felt like quitting after just a couple reps, but I didn’t. Honestly, I hadn’t trained that hard in a long time and I had clearly forgotten what truly hard training was all about. You can bet your ass I will never let you forget as long as you’re working with me. Do your set, and let me see you take it to absolute failure.”

Jared nodded. I sunk the pin a few holes down the weight stack and stepped back. He closed his eyes and went to work, grinding out the reps. At the end of each rep of seated leg curls, he paused and squeezed his hamstrings for dear life. He resisted every negative, getting a full stretch. By the tenth rep his face was beet red and he was breathing like a racehorse. But Jared gritted his teeth and squeezed out another rep and another, finally getting stuck halfway through rep number fourteen. I gave him just enough help to allow him to reach fifteen reps. When he got out of the machine and stood up, his legs were wobbly and fresh rivulets of sweat were cascading down his face.

“That’s hard training,” I said, clapping him on the back. Hank was doing yet another abortion of a set of weighted chins, and the whole gym was watching. Most of them probably just wanted to know who was making all the noise and why. The ‘who’ part was obvious, but the ‘why’ remained a mystery to anyone that didn’t know what an Attention Whore the guy is.

“That’s ego training,” I commented dismissively. “And it doesn’t do much at all for the muscles.” Jared’s eyebrows went up. “That guy is in his forties, but I guarantee you that if you stick with this and keep training hard, really hard, you’ll be bigger than him before you’re even out of your teens.” He smiled at that.

“But if I ever catch you walking with your lats popped out like you’re carrying imaginary suitcases, leaving your weights all over the place like an inconsiderate knucklehead, or being an a-hole in general, as God is my witness I will never help you again.”

“Fair enough,” Jared replied.

Just about everybody thinks they train hard, but most people don’t even know what that really means. I guess that’s a good thing. Because like I often say, if everyone had a great physique, there wouldn’t be a damn thing special about it.