The body pneumatic

Part 2

by Stephen Heuser

Everything you know about bodybuilding is wrong. You think that bodybuilders are psychopaths, men who do something extreme and aggressive to make up for something missing inside. You think that bodybuilders are macho, monosyllabic steakheads. Or preening homoerotic icons. After a day in the auditorium, I'd concede that bodybuilding fans aren't immune from the steakhead charge, but the bodybuilders themselves can be kind of -- dare I say it? -- boring. They're square, and not just morphologically. They are dietary purists who like lifting weights. They do not, by and large, waste a lot of energy in the gym yelling at the machines and psyching themselves up in the mirror. Those guys have giant arms and skinny legs and work as bouncers at nightclubs. They just like being big. For bodybuilders, the quest is about more than big. It's about perfect.

Think of the competitive bodybuilder as a home handyman whose main project is himself. To fixate so totally on one's own body entails a certain removal from the society of other people, which leads O'Hearn to characterize what he does as "an arrogant sport."

But bodybuilding is vanity taken to such an extreme that it's no longer vain. O'Hearn, like other bodybuilders I've met, is disarmingly unselfconscious. He likes his triceps but worries about his calves. He dyes his hair blond. He has naturally low body fat. He worries about his posing. (This unselfconsciousness is one reason I believe him when he tells me he "trains natural" -- that is, without steroids or insulin or human growth hormone. At the top levels of the sport, no one trains natural, but at a regional amateur contest like the New Englands it's a mixed bag.)

O'Hearn can talk for an hour about his diet, which makes for a curious conversation, because his diet consists of two things: protein and carbohydrates. Until the weeks leading up to the New Englands, when he dropped the carbohydrates.

"Every morning I'd get up and cook all my meat," he says of his precontest routine. "Just plain chicken breasts on the grill, egg whites, maybe twice, three times a week a lean, lean cut of steak. Sweet potatoes for carbs, white rice, that was about it."

"I'd eat about the same breakfast every day -- oatmeal and 10 egg whites." Then, after breakfast, maybe six or seven more meals. "You eat as much protein as you can," he says. "Basically just fill your stomach. One chicken breast and a half a sweet potato, or maybe one chicken breast and some rice."

Show or no show, a competitive bodybuilder like O'Hearn will spend more time eating than he does working out. The weight-room wisdom of the moment is HIT -- "high-intensity training," a regimen in which short bursts of intense exertion are preferred to marathons in the gym. "I'm in there lifting weights for 40 minutes," he says. "Forty minutes, tops."

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Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.