“A Pound of Flesh…”

Many of the folks that know me or have exchanged comments with me on the forum boards know that I think highly of Kai Greene.  I can relate to some aspects of his background, and anybody that can win a major professional bodybuilding championship while living in housing projects-like conditions is worthy of respect (if not, awe).  Like Ronnie’s historic victory in his first Olympia while working full time as a police officer, and Troy’s recent first-time professional victory at the age of 42, Kai’s triumph at the Arnold Classic was the pinnacle of long journey.  The following excerpts of Kai ruminations on training and survival were transcribed from his video blog series at the Muscular Development magazine website:

When people manage to rise from abject poverty or a tough family situation, observers always want to know how they did it.  What is the secret?  Well, there is no one way to over come adversity.  But as Kai demonstrates, having the ability and the courage to stand away from the crowd and follow your own path is critical.  He also shows our tremendous capacity to endure hard work when we are passionate about our undertaking.

This is the perspective of a realist.  He is not minimizing that life is hard and that work is the only way to higher ground, nor is he wistfully hoping for a life where work becomes a relic of the past.  He is embracing what life is…he is putting one boot in front of the other and getting down to work.  Most people from the Rust Belt can appreciate this type of work ethic, but Kai goes a step further and embraces what many people simply tolerate.

I can appreciate Kai’s mini-tirade about young guys reaching for too much too soon.  Really, this comment is about the need to first master fundamentals.  Again, how many poeple do you know that have talked for days about starting a clothing line when they have no training in fashion, or owning a business when they have never taken the time to learn how to read a spreadsheet?  Fundamentals.  It all brings Ronnie’s quote to mind, “Everybody wanna’ be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody wanna’ lift no heavy ass weights!”  You can go over the wall, under the wall, or through the wall, but there are no short cuts.  None.  We all have to do the work that lies in front of us.

(Part 2 will be posted in May)

Okay, this is the thing.  When I was shoving pizza down my throat with impunity, when I struggled to walk up two flights of stairs, when I searched the mall high and low for pants with an expandable waist – I was a bodybuilder.  At least mentally, if not by deed.   I know…how can you call yourself a bodybuilder when you don’t go to the gym and it takes the Hubble telescope to find one of your abs?  Well, I think that adverse situations subjugate, but do not kill, our persona.  For example, an artist that is forced to be a corporate shill to pay the bills is still an artist.  A poet that must work in advertising to get by is still a poet.  The essence of who we are persists even when our behavior and situation suggest otherwise.  The key is finding the strength or resources to honor that which burns brightest within us.  I had lots of reasons to not lift weights: a perceived lack of time, challenging life circumstances, the ironclad lock of perfectionism, blah, blah, blah…  The bottom line is that I never lost my desire to challenge myself, to exert my will over my body, to crush my own weaknesses.  True, I lost my way…but I never lost sight of what I desired for myself. 

Passion is a fleeting thing.  Millions of people are trapped in dead end jobs and lifeless marriages.  It is very easy to stumble through life and not really be moved by anything.  When you find something that gets you out of bed, that calls you to action, that is woven into the very fiber of your being – then you cannot let it go.  You must pursue it.  You literally have no other choice if you wish to remain remotely sane.  This is what it means to love art, poetry, or even the clang of heavy iron in a dank and musty gym.  I…am…a…bodybuilder.  There, I’ve said it.  Phil Heath and Victor Martinez are not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I am back in the gym, and that’s fine.  This is not about what anybody else thinks…this is about what I have to do.  Like the artist that finally quits the cubicle life and returns to the studio, like the poet that finally submits work for publication, I am going back where I belong – the gym.

It’s easy to take our good fortune for granted.  For instance, I have trained in some of the best gyms in the country such as Powerhouse Gym #1 in Highland Park, MI and other well-equipped gyms in Arizona, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington, DC.  It’s easy to forget that this journey started with a set of plastic-encased concrete weights from K-Mart.  Armed with little money, but a good dose of street sense, I organized a weight lifting group in my neighborhood by allowing friends to workout in my garage if they agreed to pool their cheap weights with mine.  With the help of my middle school friends, I turned my 95 lb weight set into a 235 lb weight set once the club was up and running.  I liberated the ends of an old floor lamp and used the remaining pole as a curling bar.  We had a 100-rep curling contests in 100 degree weather (I believe that Coca Cola was our workout drink of choice).  In the dead of winter, I donned two sweatshirts with long johns and worked out next to a kerosene heater in the backyard.  We were resourceful and determined young men.

Where you train says a lot about your personality.  Some choose to train in swanky health clubs with the drone of dance music and a multitude of "personalized" services at their disposal.  Others choose to toil away at some dank basement gym like Temple Gym in Birmingham, UK or Metroflex Gym in Texas. And this is perfectly fine…after all…bodybuilding is flexible enough for people to strive for a large variety of goals.  But once you choose to train in a gym that falls more on the hardcore side of the spectrum, then you have to decide how to handle your ego.  For those that remain on the fence regarding their commitment to the bodybuilding lifestyle, the ego - in an effort to protect itself - can compel you to stay at home and not train.  Lest you risk the embarrassment of being seen as a neophyte among your less anthropometrically-challenged brethren.  On the other hand, a raging ego can cause you to push and grunt yourself through inappropriate poundages while trying to keep up with the local gym hero or the gang of chemically-enhanced guys that hang out by the triple digit dumbbells.  Like many things in life, moderation is the key.  A certain amount of ego is required to have pride in your appearance, to develop an iron clad work ethic, to give a damn about how you spend your days.  But too much ego is also a sure road to injury.  How much is too much?  In general, you can tell if the ego has gone overboard when it begins to stop you from reaching your goals.

I have learned to let go.  Many of my younger gym years where spent hot on the heels of the "500 lb Squat Club."  While I have come close, I never did gain entry into the club.  I exhibited a fair amount of strength during the movement, but my bones were always beset by pain and I can’t say that I obtained superior results regarding muscle mass for all of my efforts in the power rack.  It was only after many years had passed that I had enough knowledge about biomechanics, and enough appreciation for my less than perfect knee and ankle joints, that I understood that the squat just was not the ideal lower body exercise for me.  In retrospect, it should have been obvious.  I have a congenital defect in my right wrist that limits my motion, so I gave up on the bench press and Olympic lifts a long time ago.  Discovering heavy dumbbells (since they allow for less restricted motion) was a great boon to my training - I made tremendous progress once I left the bench press behind for good.  But for some reason, leaving the squat behind didn’t seem right.  I had a healthy disdain for guys that worked only on muscle groups that look good in a t-shirt.  Great leg development was a sign of an athlete that was not afraid of hard work and delayed gratification.  And if you want great leg development, then you have to squat, right.  Well, uhm, no.  You don’t.  Being in the "500 Club" would be nice, but it really isn’t my primary goal.  I have never competed in a powerlifting contest and I have no intention on doing so.  It’s easy to say "just shut up, and squat" when your body type is ideal for the movement (proper torso to lower body proportion, length of the femur relative to the tibia, etc.).  But for me, squats are a recipe for an over developed ass and knee caps that feel like they’re about to shoot across the gym like a Wayne Gretzky slap shot.  So, on leg day I have found ways to train both my ego and my vastus lateralis.  At the risk of looking like a complete idiot at the gym, I am learning to master the balance required to do lunges.  And I have also begun to explore the utility of unilateral leg presses.  Finally, I think that the person who invented the Hack Squat machine should receive some type of special Nobel prize from a committee of erudite, but well muscled, sport scientists.

Just when I began to question the sanity of my revamped leg program, I found myself working out next to a kid in a leg press machine with about six or seven plates on each side (roughly the amount that I train with), but his legs could not have been any bigger than the legs of my 18-month old son.  And how should I describe the form that he was using to lift all of this weight?  Microreps?  Mini extensions?  Nanocontractions?  All I could do was smile to myself, finish my set of leg presses, and move on to the 45 lb dumbbells for another attempt at lunges.  I’m not setting any records in the gym, but my lower body is starting to look like it belongs to a guy unafraid to work hard and check the ego at the door.

Every success is a cautionary tale.  Those who are successful believe that their good fortune is a result of their hard work or their determination.  Perhaps.  But the fact is that hard work and determination are often necessary, but insufficient, elements of high achievement.  After all, hard work taxed by limited knowledge doesn’t go very far.  And oftentimes we find ways to succeed not because of our behavior, but despite our behavior (see the work of Marshall Goldsmith for more on this topic).  This was certainly the case for me as a young bodybuilder.

Despite a less than methodical approach to my training and a typical teenage diet, I found success as a young competitor.  Winning a competition confers the aura of competence, but the fact was that I was chronically overtraining, my caloric intake was way too low, and any conditioning that I displayed was the product of a teenage metabolism in overdrive.  I survived these mistakes because my genes provided me with a fairly aesthetic physique and I was lucky to face competitors with weaknesses that were a little more glaring than my own.  It was true that I trained with due diligence - I always trained hard.  But the childhood excitement that compelled me to train after sitting in class all day and going to track practice did not provide me a viable strategy to continue training seriously while handling the demands of getting my degrees, raising a family, and paying the mortgage.

Days became months, months became years, years became decades.  Once I committed myself to academic work I never again functioned as a serious athlete.  I trained in fits and starts, but I could never establish the consistency to really make progress.  There was always something else looming in the background that had a higher priority than my workouts.  My horizons were broadening, but so was my waistline.  My priorities shifted from school work to work projects to childcare responsibilities.  In many ways, I still identified with the persona of the athlete, but my physique (and general health) was a mere shadow of my former self.  It would be easy to say that everything changed once I turned 40 years old, but that’s not completely accurate.  The idea of getting back into the gym first hit me 18 months earlier when I saw the first picture of myself that could objectively be described as "fat."  I didn’t act immediately.  It took time for embarrassment to transform into self-loathing, and later, into palpable anger.

Carl Rogers once described his vision of self-concept within the context of "congruence."  He conveyed this idea as three overlapping diagrams comprised of the real self, the perceived self, and ideal self.  Incongruence exists when one’s self-concept and behavior fail to match.  In my case, the "fat" photo revealed the distance between my perceived self and my real self.  I had been overweight for a long time…only after seeing the photo did I start to come to terms with my condition.  About a month after my 40th birthday I saw the obvious: the work projects and family obligations can’t get done if I’m dead.  I returned to the gym 11 weeks ago not as a competitor, but as a responsible adult and parent.  The height of irresponsibility is to abdicate one’s health.  I won’t do it.  Not anymore.  I realize that what made me a successful young athlete will not make me a successful masters-level athlete.  I can’t rely on the vigor of youth, copious amounts of time, and dumb luck this time around.  The battle this time will require uncommon clarity - and a hard dose of honesty that only a photo can provide.