The Hero's Body Read Online Free Page A

barbells bending across their backs as if they were rubber—at elite bastions of brawn that were more dungeon than gym: cracked mirrors, leaky pipes, buckets for puking, heavy-metal music that rattled your bones. No place for the hausfrau or noodle-limbed executive. Realms of self-torture where the 150-pound dumbbells never needed dusting.
    When I joined Tony in his basement that first day, he’d just begun bodybuilding again after a four-year hiatus, one occasioned by the demands of children, but also by the burnout that came from years of harsh training. To train as he did Monday through Friday, and to do it without the accelerant of steroids, after nine-hour days of acarpenter’s toil, the hauling of lumber and pounding of nails, up and down a ladder with hundred-pound stacks of shingles at a noontime hot enough to make tar run, all while he was trying to preserve calories so that his muscles could repair, so that he had enough fuel for another racking session at the gym that day—seven years of that will wipe a man out.
    Once my uncle understood that I was committed to bodybuilding, once he realized that I wasn’t going to go away—it was summer now and I had little else to do—he accepted me as his partner. We trained together every weekday from three thirty to five o’clock, ninety iron-handed minutes, and he taught me the draconian habits he’d learned at those Jersey gyms in the ’80s. Uncles provide boys an avenue of freedom that fathers never can, a welcome into the saltier, slightly more pernicious arenas of adulthood.
    As the middle brother, Tony was quieter than my father, less antic, and compared to my uncle Nicky, he was not as daring. Nicky once rode his two-stroke Rickman dirt bike down the hallway of Manville High School—I’m told it sounded like the apocalypse. It often works out that way: while the oldest brother gets all the independence and the youngest brother gets all the attention, the middle brother, strained between the two, retreats inward. Not strafed by divorce and debt and three kids to manage alone, he was more available than my father.
    Five days a week he and I performed an enactment of that old initiation rite, everywhere in myth and fact, of the grown male escorting the adolescent into manhood by way of challenging tasks. This is what our routine looked like, a three-day cycle:
    Monday: Chest and triceps. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)
    Tuesday: Back and biceps. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)
    Wednesday: Shoulders and legs. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)
    Thursday: Chest and triceps. (Three sets, lighter weight, higher reps.)
    Friday: Back and biceps. (Three sets, lighter weight, higher reps.)
    Monday: Shoulders and legs. (Four sets, heavy weight, low reps.)
    It took several weeks for me to learn the myriad exercises for each body part, how to train properly, heavy enough without getting hurt. My uncle was more patient than I’d thought possible. During straight-bar bicep curls: “You gotta widen your grip on the bar. Too narrow like that and all the pressure’s on your forearms. You gotta feel it in your bis: squeeze your bis at the top of the rep. Don’t swing the bar, either. Bend your knees half an inch, arch your back.”
    During squats: “Don’t go down so far or you won’t be able to get back up. You want your hamstrings about parallel with the floor, maybe just an inch deeper. Don’t lean forward, either, or you’ll fall over. Stay straight up and down. Keep your head up or you’ll fall forward. Keep the bar across your shoulders, not on the back of your neck.”
    During bench presses: “That grip is too wide. You see the grooves here in the bar? Line up your grip in those grooves. Too wide like that and you’re not working the center of your chest, you’re working your armpits. You want muscular armpits?”
    During dead lifts: “You heave the bar from