The body pneumatic

Part 3

by Stephen Heuser

What happens when you're in the gym is you break down muscle. What happens when you're eating chicken, or drinking protein shakes, or sleeping 10 hours a night, is you rebuild the muscle, a little bigger than before. One day you're a rangy 16-year-old hockey player who likes working out. Five thousand chickens later, you've got a personal-training business with your girlfriend, a food budget of $200 a week, and shoulders that roll out of your tank top like cannonballs.

Officially speaking, pure size -- mass, to use the term of art -- is not what wins competitions like the New Englands. What's supposed to win is aesthetics, or "symmetry," as bodybuilders like to call it. Are the calves roughly as big as the biceps? Does the back taper in an extreme Y? But what the audience buys tickets for is mass (preferably "freaky mass") and shredding. Shredding is the visibility of muscle under the skin, the clarity with which each muscle, and even each fiber bundle of each muscle, asserts itself. As one bodybuilder put it to me, "You want to see a heartbeat through your skin."

Arnold Schwarzenegger, with his broad, smooth pectoral muscles, would lose to O'Hearn in a regional amateur contest like this one. A modern bodybuilder who knows what he's doing will diet to the point where his pectoral muscles show the fanlike ridges of a scallop shell.

The work required to inflate the muscles to this point, and then to shrink the skin like parchment around the muscles, is what keeps the ranks of competitive bodybuilders small.

"We have roughly 4000 members here," says Richie Maynard, a gym manager in Revere who serves as O'Hearn's unofficial training adviser. "Probably 10 or 20 have competed at bodybuilding. There's a lot of guys who look like they could compete, a lot of guys who look big in the gym atmosphere, but to go that extra step . . . there's a lot of discipline and sacrifice, and a lot of people don't have that. Some people belong in a best-chest contest in a barroom, and they should stay there.

"Anybody can get big. Anybody. To be able to compete on that level, it takes a little more of the discipline."

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