I Was a Teenage Gym Rat- Part 1

The following is an excerpt of a rough draft of a book I was working on Called 'I was a teenage gym rat'. It was just a bunch of stories I started to compile about my early days in lifting. I kind of shelved the book after a while but I was sort of thinking of finishing it. Here is a small sample of it. 

By the time I was in 9th grade a few other guys in my grade were also dabbling in their own rudimentary basement gyms. We would sit in studyhall at school and plan out our workouts and we would all take turns lifting at each others houses. We would do legs and deadlifts at my house because I had a good bar, we would do arms at my buddy John’s house because had a preacher curl bench and a homemade pulley system for doing triceps pushdowns, I would also go over to my cousin Dave’s house for workouts with him. Lifting with other kids my age is what I loved best though, I always thought that being strong was MY thing and I would be damned if any kid my age was going to out-lift me in any lift. Our cellar dwellar training became a very competitive and ball busting affair, honor was at stake and feelings were often hurt. The first time I ever benched 200lbs was because this one dick that was lifting with us was trying to rattle me by singing that song, “Dreamer . . . you such a little dreamer” by Super Tramp three inches from my face as I was preparing to bench. I just thought there is no fucking way on God’s green earth am I NOT going to lift this weight. At that early age I already knew that I had a gift, the gift of strength and I wanted more and more, I wanted to be the strongest man in the world. And to this day I still get pissed off when I hear that Super Tramp song, as a matter of fact, FUCK SUPERTRAMP!

Stevey P at 11 years old

Looking back on those days I just remember the workouts being very intense, we had read Arnold’s Education of a Bodybuilder and seen Arnold train in Pumping Iron and he seemed like he put his all into every set so that’s what we did too. The best workouts I had when I first started out were the ones with my cousin David though. David was pathetically skinny growing up and was a target for wise guys and neighborhood bullies so for him being big was self protection. Soon the gym became both of our escapes, David needed to be big to stay alive I just wanted to be big to fulfill some sort of destiny I thought I had. Soon our whole lives were now all about the pursuit of hugeness. Not abs, not cuts, just pure unadulterated size and lots of it.

My cousin Dave was always an innovator in the gym and every time we got together to train he would always have an exercise for us to try, or a subtle variation of an exercise or a different set and rep scheme etc. When I would visit his basement gym to workout with him we used to listen to his Elvis Costello cassettes as our training music, even now when I hear those songs I can picture us in the basement joyously flogging away on our prepubescent muscles. One day I showed up at his house and he was all excited about something, we walked down into the basement and he reveals to me that the night before the local PBS channel had shown Pumping Iron and since this was in the days before VHS recording he placed his Greg Brady tape recorder, pushed record and play at the same time and recorded just the audio of the movie so we could listen to it while we trained. That's right, we used to fucking train listening to Arnold and Lou ferrigno's dad, does it get any stupider than that? But just hearing Arnold’s voice as he talked about his muscles really made us push harder and harder. I eventually duped his tape to listen to at my house while I trained there without Dave.

By that time a lot of the other guys I trained with had got bored with lifting weights and I did most of my training alone or with my cousin Dave. I started buying up every muscle magazine I could find in stores and read them all over and over. Dave and I talked about nothing but getting big and having muscles. I can vividly recall that there wasn’t even a question or a doubt that we would be big some day. We were doing everything that Arnold did, we started young, trained hard as hell and never missed a workout for any reason. The question wasn’t IF we were going to be these big muscular monsters, it was just a matter of doing what we were already doing and just watch it unfold. The Arnold attitude to training intensity that we adopted even went as far as this, I was at David’s house doing a chest workout with him one night, my dad had driven me there and was upstairs with my aunt and uncle and the phone rang. A little while later my father called to me and said that was my mom on the phone and that we had to leave because my grandfather had just died. I didn’t hesitate to tell him that we had a few more sets and that I couldn’t leave until we were done. David looked at me and puffed out his chest, nodded at me with great approval at my dedication and Arnold-like dedication. That plan screeched to an abrupt halt when father informed me that if I didn’t get myself up the steps that instant he was going to put his foot up my ass. I then scurried up the steps like a little bitch in a very un-Arnold like fashion.

My uncle Fred, who was Dave’s father was a lifelong lifter since he was young too. He was going to a gym at the time that was called “The Broomall Nautilus”. The club boasted the first full Nautilus circuit in the area and back in 1980 that was kind of a big deal. Like a lot of health clubs did back then they also had a basement dungeon weightroom where all the animals could make noise and not bother the gentle folk upstairs using machines and doing cardio. Every now and then Uncle Fred would bring Dave and I with him to the gym and we would go nuts in that basement. We weren’t just relegated to the rickety, mostly homemade equipment in our basements, we had actual gym equipment to go nuts on. I remember not giving a crap about the fancy Nautilus machines upstairs because I had never seen a picture of Arnold using them.

Dave and I used to have a ball down in that basement and then one day we saw a guy who was unlike anything we ever saw before. He called himself “Big Jim”. Looking back I would say he was probably 5'10” and around 210lbs so we wouldn't be so impressed today if we ran into him I'm sure. He was loud, he was obnoxious, he was the big gun in his own little kingdom of that smelly weightroom and the other guys hung on his every word. One day we witnessed him warming up with some dumbbell pressing and then it was GO TIME! He grabbed a pair of 80lb dumbbells, sat on the bench with the bells on his legs and before he kicked them up and laid back to bench press them he bellowed, “HEY ALL YOU FUCKERS, TAKE A LOOK AT THIS, IT’S MIND BLOWING TIME!” Then proceeded to flop onto his back and bang out around eight tough reps. Ok, when I was fourteen years old this was an unreal feat of strength to me, hell the biggest dumbbell I could even make in my basement was half that weight. I had never even seen dumbbells that big before that day. Even the bodybuilders in the magazines back then were never photographed lifting that heavy. Of course looking back on it now that very minor feat of strength wasn’t exactly mind blowing, but the fact that he made such a spectacle of it was.

 We also witnessed Big Jim doing some squirly biceps exercise one day that I guess he invented. After his set one of his cronies asked him if it was any good and if he should do it too. Big Jim’s response was, “Fuck no it was stupid and pointless but you know everyone is going to be doing them them because they saw BIG JIM do it!” Back then I couldn’t believe what a huge douchebag this guy was and how could anyone stand this arrogant moron. But years later I had come to learn that this was only his gym persona and it was all an act to entertain his buddies and partially shock innocent onlookers (Like Dave and I). The reason I know that is because EVERY gym I have ever been in had their own BIG JIM. The big mouth guy who always had to be the center of attention. Hell, where do you think I got it from? I do that same kind of shit all the time to keep the mood light and keep everyone on their toes.

Dave and I today