A Bodybuilder Is Born: Generations

I had dropped off my sixteen-year-old princess (except in this case I am not the king, other than maybe King Midas), Marisa, at the 5 o’clock Zumba class at our gym. Marisa was just days away from her first of what would probably be at least three senior proms. She was nearing the end of her sophomore year. As I knew she was bound to do, Marisa had grown bored with weight training and was on a Zumba kick. As far as I could tell, it was basically a type of Brazilian dance form of cardio involving a lot of ass-shaking and hip-grinding. I had never watched an actual class, but many times I had watched the infomercial as I did my cardio, mainly for the visual stimulation of the suggestive movements.

My other favorite thing to watch on the little monitor while doing my cardio on the Stepmill or the elliptical runner was something called the ‘Bollywood Workout,’ an exercise show in which a super-hot, curvy Indian woman dances suggestively for thirty minutes. I find it interesting to note that some of the most entertaining workout shows and infomercials involve the very same type of choreography you would normally only see at a strip club. Lest you judge me harshly as some kind of pervert, please understand that cardio is about as exciting to me as watching an oak tree grow. Without something to distract me from the mind-numbing repetitive boredom, I doubt I could even do it.

The Zumba class was an hour long, but because it was tough to accurately guess how the rush hour traffic going through the town center would be, I often erred on the side of being early. Zumba hadn’t let out yet, and I couldn’t help but notice my client/latest protégé Jared and his friend Hunter still working back at the far end of the gym. They had seemed to be well into it when I’d seen them an hour before, and clearly they still had a ways to go. Jared worked traps after back as he followed the same split as me, and they were still doing cable rows. Furrowing my brow despite the fact that my wife would schedule me for Botox if she saw the first sign of a wrinkle on my face, I ambled over.

I had just returned from a trip to Birmingham in the United Kingdom, where I had fulfilled a longtime desire to train at what I believe to be the world’s most hardcore iron dungeon, Temple Gym, with possibly the most hardcore bodybuilder of all time, six-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates.

Great Britain was pretty much what I expected. The people were polite, the dollars were called pounds, and the narrow city streets seemed to have a rotary about every thirty feet. There were also a lot of quirky slang terms, the most interesting of which to me was ‘fanny.’ If you think it’s the same as a butt, you’re close but no cigar. Let’s just say that only a woman would have one and it’s where we all came out of at birth, and leave it at that.

Temple Gym is underground with no windows, dimly lit, reeking of must and mold, and with the only air vent facing an alley lined with dumpsters, trash, and broken glass. It had the feeling of being someone’s very elaborate basement gym. I confess to feeling a distressing sense of claustrophobia in the place along with the nervous excitement of training in the very same isolated gym where Dorian transformed himself from an amateur to dominating the sport of bodybuilding for six years running and probably would have continued on for a few more years had his various injuries not forced him to retire.

This was the second time I had been privileged enough to train legs with a multiple Mr. Olympia champion. The first time had been with Ronnie Coleman at MetroFlex Gym in Arlington, Texas, which certainly holds the title of the most hardcore gym on our side of the Atlantic Ocean. That workout was with a group of five people, and took us nearly three hours to complete. In contrast, Dorian and I finished legs in roughly forty minutes. Quick, easy workout, you say? Not on your life! Warm-up sets were done for each exercise, but only one set was done to all-out failure and beyond, with forced reps and rest-pause extending the sets into hellish zones of pain. For three full days after the workout, my legs were so sore that I had to walk like a robot. If I bent my legs, the agony was too much to take. That pain was still lingering in my lower body as I addressed my two young charges.

“Marathon back session going on here, guys?” I asked. “What have you done so far?” Since I was smiling, Jared assumed I was pleased to see them putting so much work in. Actually, the fact that they even trained legs and back earned them extra points in my book. A lot of high school boys focus mainly on chest and arms, with a bit of shoulders added in occasionally if all the flat benches are taken.

“We did five sets of chin-ups, five sets of lat pulldowns, four sets of barbell rows, four sets of dumbbell rows, five sets of deadlifts, and we’re on cable rows now – four sets,” he informed me.

“Then we got traps,” added Hunter, a young hulk of few words.

“That’s a lot of exercises and sets,” I noted.

“A little more than what you usually have me do,” replied Jared. “But I wanted to hit back really hard. You told me my chest was getting ahead of it.”

I nodded, as I had indeed pointed that out to him a couple weeks before. Knowing that he wanted to compete sometime fairly soon, I tried to keep a close eye on his physique and let him know if I saw anything start to lag before the disparity got any more noticeable.

“Do you remember that guy Arthur Jones I’ve talked about before, the man who invented the Nautilus machines?” Jared looked up and to the right, struggling. I knew we had, but I also doubted the information had been retained.

“Anyway, Jones was one of the first people to challenge the established ideas about training frequency and volume, and Mike Mentzer expanded on his ideas later. The main gist was that you have to train hard enough to stimulate growth, and then you have to allow the body enough time to rest and recuperate for that growth to occur.”

“Okay,” Jared said, acknowledging that he was with me so far.

“When it came to training, Jones used to say that you can train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both. The greater your effort and intensity are, the less training you can do in a given workout. One way to think about it is sprinting versus jogging. You can jog for miles and miles, because the effort isn’t very intense. But most people, even athletes in excellent condition, can’t sprint all-out for more than a few hundred yards. If you apply this line of thinking to what we do here in the gym, what you’re doing right now in this back workout is not very effective. Because you are doing so many sets, there is no way you can be training very hard.”

“But we are,” piped in Hunter. “We’re training really hard!”

“You think you are, but really, you are pacing yourselves and holding back on all your sets because you know there’s still more and more left to do. If you were only allowed to warm up and then do just one set of each exercise and push that one set as far as you could, don’t you think that would be one hell of a set?” They each shrugged. “Well let me tell you, that’s how I did legs a few days ago over in England with the man who made that type of training famous throughout the 1990’s, and it was a bitch. When you know you only have one chance to annihilate a bodypart, you don’t hold back. You give it all you’ve got and more, and it works.”

“And that’s better for recovery too, right?” asked Jared.

“Exactly!” I pointed at him, pleased with his deductive abilities. “Hit the muscle hard and fast with every ounce of effort you can muster, and then slam a nice big 50/50 Plus™ shake so you can start recovering. Just FYI guys, on leg or back day I would double the serving size and toss in an extra scoop or two of Pro-Carb™ for good measure.”

“Okay, we can try that,” said Jared.

“Don’t get me wrong guys,” I said. “Volume training works too, and I wouldn’t train in that brief high-intensity style all the time. But I do want you to start thinking about how much you’re doing in the gym, and see if you can make your workouts more efficient rather than just dragging them out for hours for no good reason.”

I saw Marisa emerge from the Zumba class, sweaty like all the others pouring out from the aerobics room. As great as it was to work out with Dorian Yates and as much as Temple Gym had been an experience I could never forget, I couldn’t help but feel a bit more appreciation for the comforts of my own gym: things like fresh air, decent lighting, and soap to wash your hands with. And as nice as England had been, I still like a place where both men and women have fannies.