EPTThe year was 1996 and I was 17. I was a year away from taking my A levels and I was a terrible student. But I do remember one lesson vividly. It was a PE (Physical Education) class and the teacher was taking us on a tour of the school gym.
"This is the bench press machine. If you want a bigger chest, you use the bench press machine. This is the leg press machine. if you want bigger quadriceps, you use the leg press machine."
Well that sounded easy enough. I am naturally skinny and at that time, weighed 50kg (110 pounds) on a good day and was about 1.77m (about 5"9' ) tall. I was so thin, in fact, that when I sat on the toilet seat I felt like my body was going to fold in half and slide right in. Hoping to buff up and get laid, I started going to the gym once a week.
Now I know this sounds dumb. Going to the gym once a week without a diet plan does not make a successful bodybuilding programme. But you have to remember, this was 1996, and this was a completely different world from the one we live in now.
In those days, the hottest company around was Amazon.com, so named because the Yahoo search engine sorted websites by alphabetical order. The closest thing to a text message was paging 07734 to a friend, which spelled "hELLO", unless your friend didn't turn his pager upside down, in which case it just spelled 07734. The domain name google.com had not been registered yet. Surfing the net was done with a dial up modem that made a funny noise when it connected. And download speeds were so slow you could surf the whole night and only see 8 women (16 if you were looking for lesbians). Even worse, the pictures loaded slowly from top to bottom, so you were never quite sure if you were looking at a shemale until you'd wasted 10 minutes.
In short, information was very, very hard to find. And science was not moving at anything like the speed it does now. Nowadays a trainer can post a programme online and in a couple of months, the whole world will be getting feedback from people who try it out. Not back then.
So I had no idea that shovelling junk down my throat was going to kill my physique. I was never going to get fat, so why did I care? I had no idea how important sleep was to the development of a good body. I didn't know that machines were useless for someone like me, and that I needed heavy dumbbells and barbells. I didn't know that there was such a thing as an ectomorph, or that I was one. And I didn't know that as a 17 year old, my testosterone levels were preparing to peak and this was the best time for me to start working out.
Had I known any of that, this story might have turned out very differently.
I remember my last day in the gym vividly. It was my 8th session or so. I was at the bench press machine when the school netball team walked in.
Now I don't like sweating, and I need a damned good reason to exercise. 8 good reasons with ponytails had just walked into the gym. "I'm going to impress these skinny girls," I said to myself. With the extra stimulation and my youthful testosterone coursing through my veins, I upped the weight on the bench press machine to a personal record breaking FIFTEEN kilogrammes (about 33 pounds).
Fwah, I felt like a man, I can tell you. I gritted my teeth and strained away at that bench press machine, feeling my chest expanding, sweat dripping out of every pore in my body.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the skinny netball girls load a barbell up with what looked like my bodyweight in plates and start doing calf raises.
Eh?
All around her her skinny friends were grabbing dangerous looking gym implements and running through warm ups with massive amounts of weight, and then going on to do their REAL exercises with even MORE weight. And they made it look so EASY.
I suddenly realised what I was - a skinny geek struggling to build up a nonexistent chest. And while making a fool of myself was painful enough, making a fool of myself in front of GIRLS was worse.
I grabbed my towel and slunk out the door. Though I bore no outward marks of the whole gym experience - no muscles or even definition - I knew that the mental scars would stay with me a long, long time.
13 years, in fact. 13 years.
EDIT: So I made it into the gym today... "gym" is not really the right word. It's really the Health and Fitness Room at the local community centre. I felt really awkward asking for the key, but I did it anyway and I was the only one in there.
Halfway through my workout this senior citizen who looked twice my size and twice my age came in and started hefting weights and it was a bit awkward, but I just smiled at him and did my thing after an initial failed conversation.
Him: Hey, I haven't seen you in a long time!
Me: Actually, you haven't seen me at all.
Him: Oh, your first time?
Me: yes.
Him: Exams over?
Me: I'm not a student.
*awkward silence*
At least I still have my youthful good looks.
It feels good to overcome my phobia. Hopefully this is the start of great things.
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