I'm Gonna Pump You Up
As a sophomore in high school, I had been a member of the YMCA since I was eight years old. Though I participated in many activities there, I never once used the weight room.
All the boys in the fifties fantasized about a muscle-bound body and transforming themselves into Charles Atlas from that ninety pound weakling they saw scorned in the back of comic books. I decided to turn the fantasy into reality in 1962. All because of one man who marched around the Y like Charles Atlas himself. I will call him Kong. He would be in the weight room many times a week huffing and puffing as he elevated kilos of iron into the atmosphere. He sported a bulbous chest and rolling hills of muscles along the lines of his svelte body.
Trying to be coy one day, I wandered into the weight room and asked Kong, “I know somebody who is thinking about lifting weights. What should he do?” I didn’t say who this somebody was, but it was probably obvious to him when he looked at my slender frame that I was referring to myself.
His counsel went like this, “Choose ten exercises to develop your chest, back, abs, shoulders, thighs, gluten, and calves. When you have done that, start by doing 3 sets of each exercise with each set containing ten repetitions.”
In case you don’t know what that means - as I didn’t - if you do a bench press to strengthen your chest muscles, for example, you would push the iron into the air ten times while lying on a bench. That would be one set. Do that same thing three times, and you have completed one exercise, or three sets.
The only other piece of sage advice Kong gave me that I recall was to start with VERY LIGHT weights.
Ten exercises was easy. I had watched Kong for some time. So I would merely mirror what I saw him do and emulate his workout by making my initial appearance in the weight room when no one else was there to begin my regimen of transforming out of my current state of a 120 pound weakling.
However, I made a slight adjustment to his guidance. I am a person who tends to reason from the lesser to the greater. If light weights are good; heavier ones are better because I was not wont to delay the anticipated results that he was suggesting by pumping flimsy iron. I was more interested in the fast track path of bulkier weights that would put me on the road to rapid transformation into one of the mighty men on the back cover of comic books who were touting that I could become a kick-ass Superman if I invested in a set of their miracle-working iron bars, plates, and dumbbells.
So one day I stepped into the Y weight room and took up the mantle.
The first thing I did was start on the shoulders. I went to the rack and hoisted a fifty pound barbell that I had seen Kong curl with one hand like it was a toothpick. I picked it up a few times.
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Fifty pounds seemed like a manageable place to start. Ten times of that, and I had thrown 500 pounds into the air. Two more sets, and I was up to 1500 pounds. Not bad. I was feeling tighter already. I was pretty sure the next day my classmates would be saying, “Wow, Dale you look incredible. Have you been lifting weights?” And I would nonchalantly, sort of sheepishly, come back with that Barney Fife humility , “Well . . . yeah, I’ve been tossing a few around.”
I was breathing heavier than normal, but that was to be expected.
Next I hit the chest with a bench press. I tested fifty pounds, and that felt like a feather. I might as well go home if I couldn't do that. So I went up to one hundred pounds. Ten of those was 1,000 pounds. Two more sets, and I had done 3,000 pounds. I was up to 4500 pounds in all.
A misty cloud of perspiration fogged my brow and scalp.
It was now time to carve the muscles in my biceps into rounded steel plates that would expand and tightly line the insides of my undershirt sleeves. This was where the evidence of weight-lifting was most patent. So I opted for thirty pound dumbbells in each hand. This was really beyond the envelope of my strength. So beyond the closed door of the weight room, It probably sounded like someone was being strangled and beaten to death in there. Through my grimacing red face and purple-veined neck, I was screaming and grunting as if a priest was exorcising a demon to get those sixty pounds up there. Most of the time I didn't. But I had exerted myself to exhaustion, and that was good. I looked in the mirror. Yep, definitely my arms were swollen now more than normal. It was working. Good sign. However, I was feeling a little dizzy. But I had added another 1800 pounds to the 4500. I did some quick calculating. Three exercises in and I had already carried the equivalent of a Civil War cannon to the fourth floor of Holmes High School.
My arms felt like Sequoia logs with a tingling numbness.
Now I was going to initiate the process of expanding my chest to shirt button-popping dimensions with an exercise I had seen Kong do at the Y. Fifty pounds had not seemed that heavy on the first exercise, but now I had to look at the stamp on the barbell several times to make sure it really was only fifty pounds I was using. I lifted that thing over my head and chest and lowered it down to the floor while lying on my back thirty times to increase the tonnage I was heaving skyward. The loose meat under my biceps was vibrating like I had hold of an electric fence as I many times nearly dropped fifty pounds of steel into my face. I was up to 7800 pounds now.
I moved on to squats. I went with seventy-five pounds on that one. By the time I had jacked up and down at the end of my third set, feeling had abandoned my legs. I was also greeted by the slight feeling of nausea and several unexpected exhausts of gas before I finished.
Bracing myself against the wall, I was teetering around the weight room like an alcoholic on legs that could have been pool noodles. They felt anesthetized and quivered slightly.
I continued on for five more exercises with three sets of ten repetitions each, and signs of physical decline in various forms followed. By the time I had competed my tenth exercise, I had pressed over 16,000 pounds, or over eight tons, that afternoon, probably more than all the weight I had lifted in the previous two years.
When the last weight crashed to the concrete floor and left a crack that expanded across the span of the weight room, I could hardly stand up no matter what I grabbed. Somehow I slinked to the locker room and crumbled to the wooden bench in front of my locker. The lock was about the height of my eyes. With the key on an elastic band around my right wrist, I took my left hand and put it under my right arm so as to lift it - trembling - up to the lock. I barely got it open. I don’t know how I got to the shower, but I do remember lying spread eagle naked on the floor of the shower over the drain while the water washed over me and flooded the shower room. I don’t know how I got dressed because even my drawers seemed heavier than those fifty pound barbells.
I started my workout in the afternoon, and although I only lived about six blocks away, it took me nearly all night to stagger home. As I dragged myself past the downtown stores, many times I laid out like a corpse in storefront entrances on Pike Street trying to recover. One woman thought I was dead.
Completely devoid of strength, I crawled into bed on my hands and knees. I was welded to the mattress in the morning.
I never entered a weight room and lifted another ounce for many years after that. Approaching Planet Fitness today with only a muscle-toning session in mind, I recall the DAY I boosted weight tantamount to four female Asian elephants with my two bare hands. I also recall the DAYS after that when it took the same two bare hands to lift a fork.
All the boys in the fifties fantasized about a muscle-bound body and transforming themselves into Charles Atlas from that ninety pound weakling they saw scorned in the back of comic books. I decided to turn the fantasy into reality in 1962. All because of one man who marched around the Y like Charles Atlas himself. I will call him Kong. He would be in the weight room many times a week huffing and puffing as he elevated kilos of iron into the atmosphere. He sported a bulbous chest and rolling hills of muscles along the lines of his svelte body.
Trying to be coy one day, I wandered into the weight room and asked Kong, “I know somebody who is thinking about lifting weights. What should he do?” I didn’t say who this somebody was, but it was probably obvious to him when he looked at my slender frame that I was referring to myself.
His counsel went like this, “Choose ten exercises to develop your chest, back, abs, shoulders, thighs, gluten, and calves. When you have done that, start by doing 3 sets of each exercise with each set containing ten repetitions.”
In case you don’t know what that means - as I didn’t - if you do a bench press to strengthen your chest muscles, for example, you would push the iron into the air ten times while lying on a bench. That would be one set. Do that same thing three times, and you have completed one exercise, or three sets.
The only other piece of sage advice Kong gave me that I recall was to start with VERY LIGHT weights.
Ten exercises was easy. I had watched Kong for some time. So I would merely mirror what I saw him do and emulate his workout by making my initial appearance in the weight room when no one else was there to begin my regimen of transforming out of my current state of a 120 pound weakling.
However, I made a slight adjustment to his guidance. I am a person who tends to reason from the lesser to the greater. If light weights are good; heavier ones are better because I was not wont to delay the anticipated results that he was suggesting by pumping flimsy iron. I was more interested in the fast track path of bulkier weights that would put me on the road to rapid transformation into one of the mighty men on the back cover of comic books who were touting that I could become a kick-ass Superman if I invested in a set of their miracle-working iron bars, plates, and dumbbells.
So one day I stepped into the Y weight room and took up the mantle.
The first thing I did was start on the shoulders. I went to the rack and hoisted a fifty pound barbell that I had seen Kong curl with one hand like it was a toothpick. I picked it up a few times.
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Fifty pounds seemed like a manageable place to start. Ten times of that, and I had thrown 500 pounds into the air. Two more sets, and I was up to 1500 pounds. Not bad. I was feeling tighter already. I was pretty sure the next day my classmates would be saying, “Wow, Dale you look incredible. Have you been lifting weights?” And I would nonchalantly, sort of sheepishly, come back with that Barney Fife humility , “Well . . . yeah, I’ve been tossing a few around.”
I was breathing heavier than normal, but that was to be expected.
Next I hit the chest with a bench press. I tested fifty pounds, and that felt like a feather. I might as well go home if I couldn't do that. So I went up to one hundred pounds. Ten of those was 1,000 pounds. Two more sets, and I had done 3,000 pounds. I was up to 4500 pounds in all.
A misty cloud of perspiration fogged my brow and scalp.
It was now time to carve the muscles in my biceps into rounded steel plates that would expand and tightly line the insides of my undershirt sleeves. This was where the evidence of weight-lifting was most patent. So I opted for thirty pound dumbbells in each hand. This was really beyond the envelope of my strength. So beyond the closed door of the weight room, It probably sounded like someone was being strangled and beaten to death in there. Through my grimacing red face and purple-veined neck, I was screaming and grunting as if a priest was exorcising a demon to get those sixty pounds up there. Most of the time I didn't. But I had exerted myself to exhaustion, and that was good. I looked in the mirror. Yep, definitely my arms were swollen now more than normal. It was working. Good sign. However, I was feeling a little dizzy. But I had added another 1800 pounds to the 4500. I did some quick calculating. Three exercises in and I had already carried the equivalent of a Civil War cannon to the fourth floor of Holmes High School.
My arms felt like Sequoia logs with a tingling numbness.
Now I was going to initiate the process of expanding my chest to shirt button-popping dimensions with an exercise I had seen Kong do at the Y. Fifty pounds had not seemed that heavy on the first exercise, but now I had to look at the stamp on the barbell several times to make sure it really was only fifty pounds I was using. I lifted that thing over my head and chest and lowered it down to the floor while lying on my back thirty times to increase the tonnage I was heaving skyward. The loose meat under my biceps was vibrating like I had hold of an electric fence as I many times nearly dropped fifty pounds of steel into my face. I was up to 7800 pounds now.
I moved on to squats. I went with seventy-five pounds on that one. By the time I had jacked up and down at the end of my third set, feeling had abandoned my legs. I was also greeted by the slight feeling of nausea and several unexpected exhausts of gas before I finished.
Bracing myself against the wall, I was teetering around the weight room like an alcoholic on legs that could have been pool noodles. They felt anesthetized and quivered slightly.
I continued on for five more exercises with three sets of ten repetitions each, and signs of physical decline in various forms followed. By the time I had competed my tenth exercise, I had pressed over 16,000 pounds, or over eight tons, that afternoon, probably more than all the weight I had lifted in the previous two years.
When the last weight crashed to the concrete floor and left a crack that expanded across the span of the weight room, I could hardly stand up no matter what I grabbed. Somehow I slinked to the locker room and crumbled to the wooden bench in front of my locker. The lock was about the height of my eyes. With the key on an elastic band around my right wrist, I took my left hand and put it under my right arm so as to lift it - trembling - up to the lock. I barely got it open. I don’t know how I got to the shower, but I do remember lying spread eagle naked on the floor of the shower over the drain while the water washed over me and flooded the shower room. I don’t know how I got dressed because even my drawers seemed heavier than those fifty pound barbells.
I started my workout in the afternoon, and although I only lived about six blocks away, it took me nearly all night to stagger home. As I dragged myself past the downtown stores, many times I laid out like a corpse in storefront entrances on Pike Street trying to recover. One woman thought I was dead.
Completely devoid of strength, I crawled into bed on my hands and knees. I was welded to the mattress in the morning.
I never entered a weight room and lifted another ounce for many years after that. Approaching Planet Fitness today with only a muscle-toning session in mind, I recall the DAY I boosted weight tantamount to four female Asian elephants with my two bare hands. I also recall the DAYS after that when it took the same two bare hands to lift a fork.