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Adventures In Bodybuilding

Of all the creatures that inhabit this infinitely amusing globe, only the human animal and his allies grow flabbier than intended by nature's original design. You can look in vain for an obese ocelot or a portly puma. Squirrels and monkeys put circus acrobats to shame. A deer never has to diet. A walrus is chubby because chubbiness promotes its long-term survival, not because it knocks off entire Family-Size bags of Doritos at one sitting. No, the only creatures that grow unnaturally soft and plump are the ones that have made a habit of hanging around humans. That's a pretty damning indictment of our species, you have to admit. Our corn-stuffed hogs, corpulent cats and pot-bellied beagles have US to thank for their unwieldy girths.

Something went haywire in the human fitness program long before the invention of the remote-control switch. It probably started back in the Neolithic, around the time the first crude towns appeared on the landscape. Instead of hunting wild elk or growing cabbages by the sweat of our brow, some of us decided we'd earn our next meal through a form of chicanery known as trading. It quickly became a way of life. We'd buy low, sell high, and let the clueless proletarians do the labor while we reclined on our costly sofas and ate roasted peacock stuffed with sparrows and sausages. These days the majority of us urbanized humans live by our minds, and we've developed convenient inventions to facilitate the further deterioration of our bodies. We get around in cars, sit at desks, stare motionless into our computer screens for hours at a stretch. Is it any wonder we also had to invent SlimFast?

Because the urbanized human is inclined to spread at the waist and grow feeble in the limbs, we're the only species that has to engage in conscious bodybuilding. A moose develops its admirable physique simply by acting like a moose. But we need to train and cultivate our bodies like bonsai trees. Because this cultivation requires some discipline and expense, bodybuilding has emerged as a socially desirable yuppie pastime. The fine art of weightlifting has been around for ages, of course. But until recently it was widely dismissed as a creative outlet for narcissistic lummoxes who wished to look like anatomical drawings with the skin stripped away, revealing ghastly mountain ranges of bulging sinews from head to heels. By contrast, the new yuppie bodybuilders wear metal-rimmed glasses and drink bottled spring water. No doubt they flash their cell phones and make stock transactions while they grunt on those electronic stair-steppers at the club.

I'm proud to say I haven't set foot in a bona fide fitness club for over twenty years. But recently my enlightened apartment complex opened its own fitness center to all tenants 'free' of charge. (I put 'free' in quotation marks because they also raised our rent by roughly 10 percent). I figured that as long as I was paying for the free gym room, I might as well use it. So one rainy day last week I finally mastered the secret combination lock, stepped inside and switched on the lights. There, spread out before me, stood such an array of costly equipment that the average fitness fanatic would have blubbered like an art historian first glimpsing the Parthenon. My eyes beheld a rowing machine, an exercise bike, not one but TWO treadmills, the obligatory stair-stepper, a shelf full of dumbbells segregated by weight, and the piece-de-resistance: a shimmering nautilus -- the ultimate muscle-building apparatus -- full of amazingly intricate levers and pulleys and adjustable benches and neat stacks of hefty weights waiting to be hoisted into the air. I have to confess that I hadn't expected this kind of epic grandeur from my apartment complex; I could almost forgive the recent rent hike.

First I stretched out my legs on the rowing machine and pretended to glide over an imaginary river; it was nowhere as scenic as the real thing, especially since the contraption faced into the corner of the room. Next I tried the stair-stepper. I struggled to push down on the strangely resistant steps for several minutes before I realized that the apparatus had to be turned ON. Now lit up like a pinball machine, it exhorted me to choose one of twelve neatly diagrammed climbing patterns, all of which offered minor variations on the basic up-down theme, with hillocks of resistance at different intervals. I set my exercise for five minutes and, according to the machine's electronic readout, managed to climb the equivalent of a twenty-two story building. Not bad for a middle-aged cynic whose health record has been blighted by mildly elevated cholesterol and chronic snoring.

Now it was on to the treadmill, that dreaded scourge of the arterially impaired, known for its tendency to induce sudden cardiac mishaps during medical stress tests. Despite my cholesterol and snoring issues, I was a hearty enough specimen with no history of premature coronary disease in the family, so I stepped onto the treadmill and went for a walk. I adjusted the speed from a sluggish 3.2 to a moderately brisk 3.6 miles per hour, then, as I gained confidence, ran it up to a reckless velocity of 4.0 mph with a harrowing 4 percent gradient. I chugged along like an Energizer badger for half an hour, finally shutting off the machine after having logged a grand total of 1.85 miles. When I stepped off, it felt as if the floor was still rolling under me; I tottered over to the nautilus and started reading the directions posted on the wall as soon as they stopped moving.

The nautilus! What a wonder of fitness engineering, what a veritable jungle-gym for muscle mavens and slack-limbed aspirants to that status! I scanned the directions for the twenty or so weight-training exercises that could be performed thereupon, noting with amused interest the different muscle groups that would benefit from each exercise. Biceps, triceps, quadriceps... pectorals and deltoids... the trapezius, soleus and hamstrings... the latissimus dorsi, which sounds as if it belongs somewhere in the Roman Catholic mass... the adductor magnus, surely a position of prominence during the Roman Empire... and of course, the all-important gluteus maximus. I'm sure that rigorous bodybuilders know all their muscles by name, but I'm barely on speaking terms with mine. I stepped up to the nautilus, sat myself on a seat, and began to pull. Up, down, up, down, breathe in, breathe out... this wasn't such torture. Then, by about the twelfth repetition, I could feel my overmatched muscles lodge a protest. I strained to complete a few more pulls, then sat back and let the weights drop. I could feel the pain, but would there be a gain?

I had survived my first close encounter with bodybuilding and felt moderately proud of myself. I looked forward to watching my malnourished muscles grow like hot-house tomatoes. I had to wonder, though, if my cynical insights would suffer in direct proportion to the muscle bulk I was attempting to create. You don't see many philosophers and essayists with well-defined bulges on their bodily topography. If you think about it, why should we desire a more impressive set of sinews than we require in our daily routines? If all I need to do with my arms is turn on a computer monitor and maneuver a mouse, why would I want cast-iron biceps? My current body is up to the task. Give me a monitor -- ANY monitor -- and I'll flip that switch like the cyberwarrior that I am. I'm adequately adapted to my particular environment; anything more in the muscle department would be mere showmanship. Look at horses: they don't need rippling muscles to thrive and attract suitable mates. Even with those flimsy legs of theirs, they can run rings around the best of us. What would be the point of a porcupine developing its pecs? You don't see dogs bulking up to impress their peers, do you? On second thought, maybe I'd better stop now before someone starts teaching pit bulls how to pump iron.

© 2000 by Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by permission of the publisher. 

Profile of a Cynic...

Bayan, who claims to be a "kinder, gentler cynic," currently lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His weekly column, "Some Cynical Guy," is published and syndicated by Upbeat Online. 

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