Ron Bicep Curls
Old Man Winter is one miserable S.O.B, I tell ya. On the last weekend before Christmas the bitter New England skies had opened up and dumped well over a foot of snow on us, just when I thought I might be able to escape off to my vacation on a cruise ship without having to deal with backbreaking hours of shoveling. As a kid I used to go ballistic with joy whenever it snowed. That was years before I had to do anything but sled down hills on it and make snowmen. Now my reaction had drastically shifted from “Yippee!” to “Dammit!” whenever the forecast called for large quantities of snow.
As for the cruise, I had sworn an oath to myself that this would be the last time we spent a family vacation trapped on a big ship somewhere in the Caribbean. I desperately wanted to see other parts of the world, mainly Europe. With all due respect to the wonderful Caribbean islands, if you’ve seen a few of them, you’ve seen them all. Each features white sand, sparkling blue water, plenty of places to shop for jewelry and handbags (not my thing, due to that pesky Y chromosome), and nearly identical native residents with that ‘Hey Mon’ accent going on. At times I suspected the ship was just doing a big U-turn and taking us back to the same island over and over again and giving it a different name.
The island visits are pleasant enough, but where you spend most of your time is onboard the ship. If you’re like me, you can’t help but gravitate to the buffets. The way I see it, this is where I get my money back! If only it was all healthy food that I force-fed myself. Again and again I inevitably wander over to the vast display of desserts. Two things I typically return home with are sunburned flesh and ten fresh new pounds of bodyfat.
So here I was in the gym the day before Christmas, madly doing cardio in anticipation of the gluttony I knew I was powerless not to indulge in. If I could just burn a thousand calories today, that would put me in a slightly better position to handle the 300,000 calories of fat and sugar I would soon be eating courtesy of Carnival Cruise lines. It was sort of like setting up a single sandbag to protect your beach house from a tsunami. Billy ambled up to where I was, my favorite elliptical machine on the corner where I could keep an eye on nearly the whole gym. Billy was a tall guy in his early twenties, heavily tattooed and a chain smoker. He had good shoulders, decent arms, and not much else. Billy talked a mile a minute and I never knew exactly if this was due to ADD, some type of recreational drug use (he was always very fidgety), or what. He spent hours every day hanging around the gym socializing, very little time actually training, and was always asking me when we were going to work out together. My stock reply was, “I’m not ready yet – I need to be a lot bigger and stronger to hang with you, Billy.”
This was pure sarcasm, which he never seemed to catch. “You’re friggin’ huge bro, what are you talkin’ about?” Billy thought I was massively insecure, when in fact the whole time I was clowning him right to his face. Still, even if he wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box, he wasn’t a bad kid. I wouldn’t waste my time working out with him because I took my own training too seriously, but I didn’t mind answering a question here and there. The only problem with Billy was that he had serious issues with memory, so he tended to ask me the same few questions over and over again. It could get frustrating.
“I need you to write me up a routine or something,” he began. I rolled my eyes as a wave of déjà vu swept over me. I was pretty sure I had been on this exact machine hearing this before. He may have even had the same Affliction shirt on. I sighed and knew I had to play along. The last time I had reminded him that he had already asked me something before, he had gotten a panicked look like he was afraid he had multiple personalities that were going around soliciting training advice without his knowledge. And you know – I wasn’t so sure he didn’t, come to think of it.
“Well, what are you trying to do?” I asked. He knit his brows like this wasn’t a legitimate question.
“You know – get huge, get strong, get ripped, all that.” He smiled. “I want to be totally jacked.” Of course, how could I have not assumed as much? Billy was all over the place in every aspect of his life as far as I knew – going from job to job and girlfriend to girlfriend too fast to keep track of. It was no different with his training. He had no focus and no direction. I would see him start training chest, only to change his mind and do back instead. More often, he would quit whatever bodypart he started and work on his shoulders and arms. This easily explained his uneven physique and its missing bodyparts.
“You can’t do all those things at once,” I began. “Have you ever heard the phrase, jack of all trades, master of none?” He shook his head. All the old sayings were quickly vanishing from our society. “The human body doesn’t work like that. There are different ways to train if you’re aiming for more muscle size as opposed to increasing raw power. You eat totally differently if you’re trying to gain mass compared to when you’re trying to shed bodyfat and get super lean. Hell, you even eat different types of Parrillo bars!” That one went over his head, as I think the only bar that ever crossed his mind was the type you drank beers at.
“Tell me what your most important goal is right now, the one that’s more important than the others.” He pondered this for a moment. Billy was twitching and gnawing a fingernail – he had probably missed a cigarette break already in the brief time we had been talking. Even at six and seven bucks a pack, a lot of people out there still craved their smokes.
“Get huge,” he spat out. “Bigger chest, back, legs, get up to around 240.”
“See?” I said. “Now we’re getting somewhere. If you want to add mass in those areas, you need to start working them all with good basic compound movements every week for sets of 8-12 reps. You don’t worry about maxing out your bench or anything else like that, because that’s not helping you add size and bodyweight. You need to start eating a lot more good food a lot more often, too. But the main thing is that you need to stick to one goal and focus completely on it until you’ve made it happen. You can’t get distracted and try to do a bunch of other things at the same time. Do you know what I mean?” He nodded, but his eyes were flitting around. If this kid didn’t genuinely suffer from ADHD, or ADD or whatever it is they have all the children medicated for these days, I would be surprised.
“So will you write me up a routine?” he demanded.
“For what?” I countered, mainly to see if he had really been listening at all.
“For getting bigger, getting huge.” That’s what I had wanted to hear.
“Right now you’re what, about 215?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Give or take a couple pounds.”
“Okay, you need to set a more reasonable short-term goal – let’s say ten pounds of muscle, and give it a specific deadline. Let’s make it tax day, April 15th, which gives you almost four months to hit it. You’ll probably reach it a few weeks before that, and that’s fine. Better to under-promise and over-deliver.” I could see that phrase went over his head too.
CapTri Cooking
“You can work on strength some other time,” I told him. “As for getting ripped – apparently you never look in the mirror, Billy.” He was puzzled. “I doubt your bodyfat is anything higher than six or seven percent, and I’ve never seen you do cardio once.” I said this with just a hint of bitterness, since at the moment I was practically soaked in sweat.
I got his girlfriend’s email address, at least his girlfriend at the moment, as he did not own a computer. He would have his training and nutrition programs in a few hours. Whether or not he would stick with them remained to be seen. But I wanted to have faith in Billy. I had known a lot of young guys like him with plenty of energy and enthusiasm who only needed some direction to start accomplishing things. Focus can truly be a life-changing force.
Ron Harris is the author of Real Bodybuilding, available at www.ronharrismuscle.com
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