When the Bulk Is Not So Fun Anymore

malk

As a constitutionally lean person, I have to eat a lot if I want to gain more muscle. And, when I get that process started again, as I have recently, I always enjoy it for a little while. It’s fun to, say, hoover piles of burgers for health reasons, and witness the appalled facial expressions of those around you at mealtimes. The evening protein shake becomes a nice punctuating ritual. 

But there arrives a moment when the bulk is not as much fun anymore. You get a little tired of finding a place for milk in the fridge. You find yourself making quizzical faces at food, sort of skeptically staring at your meals. You start to feel like you are losing certain dimensions of your identity—once, recently, you were a seeker, a poet, a boulevardier, but soon, you will just be a thing that eats. A mouth with a purpose.

It is not quite the point when the bulk becomes difficult to tolerate. That comes a couple of months from now. That is when you start to feel like you are made of whey, like your sweat itself is high-protein. That is when it feels like you are a balloon near to popping, when it feels like even your moments of grace are ungainly, when it feels like you’re sort of letting yourself fall down the street. You are maybe a week or two away from stopping but you haven’t quite lifted the amount of metal you would like to. The cats have stopped being surprised at your blender use, now they just resent you for making the noise that registers, to their nervous systems, as the sound of an attacking predator. 

But I am not at that point yet. I am at the point where it’s slightly tiring now. My fiancee enjoys how I am looking but is somewhat disgusted by the means of achieving it. This is the point where I start wondering, why, a little bit.

It’s not as if my life requires more strength. What I need to lift in day-to-day life, I can, easily. I don’t dream of hand-to-hand combat. My life never before required the sending of shirtless selfies and it certainly won’t in the future. Do I need to be the most muscular person at Berkeley Bowl trying to figure out which organic apple befits my personality?

Of course, it feels good when the numbers go up week-on-week, or when the bar is struggling to ascend until you make an awful noise and discover, again, that grunting reduces gravity. Also, it feels nice when you can set aside your verbal profession, which is so squishy and inexact, for something as crisply definitive as metal that either does or doesn’t move. I sometimes wonder if everything I write is bullshit; you cannot bullshit a heavy deadlift.

And of course, there are other benefits. The uncomfortable truth I have discovered is, strong-looking people get different reactions. I’m not Really Big, or anything, or even Notably Big. I’m stronger than most people who don’t lift, but I’m weaker than the majority of people who lift seriously. I just look like a person who works out, whereas I used to be scrawny, or, at least, slender. And people really do accommodate your presence differently, past a certain point. Your gestures seem to move the air a little more. When you stand straighter, others do as well. When you express mercy and compassion, it hits a little differently. 

It was almost disappointing to me when I started encountering this difference when I began lifting a decade ago. As a pretentious young student of literature, what I valued most about myself was my supposed insight into the human soul, or, at least, my ability to play word games about it. And I wanted this to be how, primarily, others assessed my value. I also grew up on Team Nerd, forced there by the menacing of Team Jock. But there is a threshold you pass, a few months in, where you start notably possessing a torso, and if you’re even a little observant, you see what this does. It flips a switch in people who absolutely do not care about you on any other level. It’s a little intoxicating and super disorienting. 

But why keep going? The goalposts keep shifting. I think it has something to do with age. As a person with a babyface, I am going to look quite young until I don’t anymore, and that’s going to happen pretty suddenly, probably pretty soon. And the situation for older-looking men is as follows—one way you can remain attractive, which I’m interested in doing, is by being a little grizzled and scary. Like: a little bigger than you need to be, and maybe slightly more tattooed and stubbled than the average person in your demographic. 

Also, maybe it weighs on me, a little bit, that my great-uncle essentially committed suicide via inactivity. I don’t think about it that often. But I think it does something to your background calculations when you see one of the pillars of your family, one of the sanest, kindest people in your corner of the genome, essentially buried in himself. I do remember that my interest in physical fitness, which had been dormant for a couple of years, shot right up again after leaving the care facility where I saw him suffering. He could’ve easily had another decade. His frame could’ve been heftily strong, commandingly broad. Instead, he went out prematurely immobile, telling me that he couldn’t explain why he still felt the drive to live. 

I do mostly solitary work, at home, even though I’m a chatty person. Lifting gets me out of the house, which is nice. I’m getting to know the other lifters at my new gym, and we are developing our own local appreciative nod dialect. So I will keep going a little past this point where it’s not so fun anymore. I can’t control death, and it could happen anytime. But I can, perhaps, change the kind of entrance it’s going to make. I can be a slightly larger marionette as I am controlled by much larger forces.