The Hero's Body Read Online Free Page B

the ground up. Never start with your back or you’ll wrench your spine out of place. Start the lift in your feet, your legs, and then unfold with your back, but always an arched back. Head up at the mirror, always head up. A smooth motion, never jerky.”
    Near the start of our training together, during a bout of seated dumbbell curls—“Twist your wrist inward at the top of the rep so the bi squeezes ”—I performed the first set easily enough with twenty-five-pound weights. When it was time for my second set, I grabbedthe twenty-five-pounders again, and Tony said, “What are you doing?”
    We looked at one another in the mirror; he was behind me with a bottle, half water, half orange juice. I said, “My second set.”
    â€œYou just did ten reps no problem with those puny things. You could’ve done twelve. You wanna grow or not? Get the thirty-pounders.”
    And I made the mistake of saying, “These twenty-five-pounders feel pretty good, though.”
    â€œThey feel pretty good, huh? We ain’t down here to feel pretty good. We’re down here to feel pain. And if you can do ten to twelve reps in any exercise, then the weight ain’t high enough. And if the weight ain’t high enough, you ain’t ever gonna grow. The aim is six to eight reps. So grab the thirty-pound dumbbells, and if you can do ten reps with those, then grab the thirty-five-pounders. Quit pussyfootin’ around.”
    Each week mirrors reflected the wizardly transformation: the rounding of my deltoids and pectorals, the filling of my biceps, the pronounced horseshoe of my triceps, a thickening and broadening of my back, trapezius muscles bumping up from both sides at the base of my neck, quadriceps sweeping out from my waist in two directions, hamstrings and calf muscles beginning to protrude. Muscle pounds sticking, strength increasing within my very grip, the graduation from thirty-pound dumbbells to forty-pounders to fifty-pounders, sliding more plates (“wheels” was our name for the largest, the forty-five-pounders) onto the bench press, the shoulder press, squats, straight-bar and preacher-bar curls, spitting and moaning, grunting and goading one another with come on and three more and push it out . It was a partnership of inspiriting pain.
    Thursdays and Fridays were often slightly less intense because, if we’d trained heavy enough Monday through Wednesday, each body part would be too sore to be blitzed again. That soreness was thegoal. It meant we’d been barbarian enough, meant the deep, slow-twitch muscle fibers had been properly damaged during exercise, a kind of controlled demolition by the expansion and contraction that happen while weightlifting. Soreness is a signal that you’re growing, because that’s how a muscle adds mass: during the reparation process, the amino-acid rebuilding of torn tissue. When I woke each morning and wasn’t in pain from the previous day’s workout, I berated myself until three thirty when it was time to try again, much more savagely this time, a cussing ninety minutes of severity that erased the backslash between pleasure and pain.
    You don’t get strong and big while bodybuilding; you get strong and big while resting from bodybuilding. The more you rest and eat, the more you grow. With a gutful of egg protein, I fell instantly asleep each night before eighty thirty, and my slumber was so consummate, so weighted, I’d wake in the exact position in which I’d blacked out. No pill, no bottle, no smoke or aerobic intercourse has ever allotted me the immovable slumber that occurred after a session of hellward training. I’ve been missing that subterranean sleep for twenty years.
    What happened to me in the fluorescent corner of that basement was a literal empowering, a structural overhaul. All that summer, those initial results, the evolution I witnessed, manifest in my every step, each time I moved, a