Meanderings ~ Not all who wander are lost: Rock-tober 27, 2021

One day way back at good ol' LBHS, Mike flagged me down as I was cruising the hallways. He was pretty jazzed about something. "Hey, Wayne!" Then nodding towards another buddy beside him, he held up a piece of paper. "G.W. and I are starting this killer arm workout! You gotta join us!"

While my gym rat street cred has waxed and waned over the decades, Mike has been a consistently faithful member of the brotherhood of the iron plate. He was always finding and tweaking workouts, and this time he'd roped in G.W. on this particular quest to achieve well-defined, "cut" arm muscles.

I looked at Mike's hand-scribbled transcription. The circuit it laid out was no joke. It listed half a dozen stations with no preset reps - you did each exercise to exhaustion. The kicker was your last rep was a slow negative. For example, in a standing barbell curl, you lift the weight from your waist to your chest. A slow negative of this entails you lowering the bar in a slow, controlled manner from your chest to your waist. My eyes widened. "Holy crap!"

Mike and G.W. were high-fiving each other. Apparently, they took my outburst as excitement rather than apprehension. Ah, well. Fortune favors the bold, so the three of us met at the CB base gym that evening. One by one we went through each station in that hellacious circuit

bicep curl
tricep curl
dips
dumbbell flys
flexed arm hang
lat pulldown

Again, each exercise was done to exhaustion and terminated in a slow negative rep. After we each completed 3 circuits, we were utterly wiped and could barely move. G.W. summed up our mood, "Man, what's wrong with us? Are we really this weak?" With true teenage male piss and vinegar, it only steeled our resolve to master this workout. Our commitment was solidified and with a grim determination, we soldiered on, 3 times a week, 3 circuits each. In turn, we both cheered and goaded each other on - "C'mon, punk! One more rep! Quit your bellyaching and slow it down on that negative!"

Eventually, we realized we weren't dragging ass by the end of that dreaded 3rd circuit, and we were starting to see results. The training never got "easy", but the common goal and shared difficulty transformed these routines from kvetching sessions to a workshop of camaraderie. Whenever we hit a wall, we took a moment to find our inner beast and then turned up the boombox with the workout tunes.

About a month and a half in, Mike is over at my place. "Hey, Wayne, I think I made a mistake." He'd recently reread the original magazine article detailing our thrice-weekly gauntlet. The original directions as outlined in Mike's workout rag stipulated only a single run through the entire circuit. Training to exhaustion had to be done carefully or else you risked injury. Doing it 3 times in a row was apparently ill-advised despite the results.

Years later, I was at Auburn answering my new red head of a girlfriend's questions about what happens during a Navy PRT (Physical Readiness Test). I explained that apart from a timed run, "You've got 2 minutes each to crank out as many situps and pushups as you can." I continued, "There's also proctors standing over you to make sure you maintained proper form throughout the tests." She smirked and got a glint in her eye.

"So what's proper form for a pushup look like?" Doofus that I was, I started demonstrating and explaining the proper mechanics. She looked on, "Hmm. Can you do one-handed pushups?" I stopped and sat up.

"Those aren't part of the PRT..."

"Yeah, but can you?" Her tone and raised eyebrow suggested a challenge. I shrugged and started cranking out one-handed pushups and alternating between hands with relative ease. She grinned, "Wow. I think I'm dating a hunk."

It took about 6 years, but it seems that Mike's jacked-up training circuit helped me get the girl.