Images of Fitness

Cinzia Massaro Clapp training biceps curls

As a physique competitor, or even as a trainer, we can often get disracted from the fundamental reason we began this pusuit of physical excellence.  Supplements, cardio, tanning, contest prep, posing suits, routines, photo shoots can all serve as distractions from the point of it all. 

Many of us started down this road in the same place — the gym.  For me it began some time around 1983, when I traded an old rifle to my uncle for a worn out set of concrete filled weights.  Once I felt the rush of blood to young muscles, I was hooked.  Soon after, I began acquiring issues of  Muscle and Fitness and it’s new sister publication Flex Magazine where I admired photos of Arnold, Frank, and Tom.  Being a teenage boy, of course, I more than admired Rachel and Cory.  I devoured the information about nutrition (eat carbs like nobody’s business was the word back then), and I read with keen interest the ads for Weider’s High Protein supplements, free form amino acids, and even liver powder (yuk)!  I even saved up one whole summer to purchase the Weider “Victory” supplement kit that included everything I needed to grow to epic proportions!

As soon as I turned 16 I joined the local Nautilus club, where I spent many a happy day skipping school in order to move around heavy stuff.  Few women were doing so back then — every once in a while a leotard and ankle warmer sporting babe would wander into the small free weight area and distract us “serious lifters” with her perfume.

My how the times have changed!  Our sisters have joined us in discovering the joy of losing ourselves in the world of iron, and we are all the better for it.  Sadly, though, they have also joined us in straying away from where we all began.  It gives me a tinge of regret each time I hear a fitness competitor procalim that she “doesn’t really train with weights anymore” but instead focuses on cardio, routine practice, and posing.  What a sad place to be — a world without iron.  Only those of us who have revelled in the sweet sound of plates rattling on a bar can understand what it means to miss it.  Being caught up in the complexity that is contest prep, it can be so easy to forget.

If you find your motivation waning.  If you’re wondering why you are doing what you do.  Get into the gym, the basement, the garage, or wherever you will find your old friends the iron plates.  Load them up on a bar and lose yourself in the timelessness of moving heavy stuff.  And remember next time everything seems out of whack, and you wonder where you are in life and how you got there — there is always iron!

One Response to “There is Always Iron”