by Lisa Ferrari
Cornflower blue-eyed smart ass. “I’m telling you.”
“Very good.”
“That’s not very much, is it?”
“Depends. Weight is relative.”
“To what?”
“To each individual person. To me, no, 95 is nothing. I was doing that when I was fifteen years old. But for most people, it’s a decent amount of weight. Most people who don’t really train, I mean. And, sorry, but especially women. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sexist. Believe me, I’m not. But I’m telling you from experience that most women can’t do 95 pounds. After a few months they can. But not on their first day. When was the last time you trained chest?”
“Um, never.”
“Never? You’ve never trained chest before?”
“No.”
“Dumbbell press?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“Cables?”
“Like cable TV?”
“No, cable crossovers.”
“No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You do a lot of push-ups?”
“No. I mean, I did P90X for a while, a couple years ago, and it had a lot of pushups, but that was a long time ago.” I leave out the part where I didn’t finish the 90 days.
“Wow. I’m impressed. How’s your chest feel?”
“I dunno. Fine, I guess.”
“Front delts feel okay?”
“What’re those?”
“Here.” He raises one of my arms and presses the fingers of my other hand against the front of my shoulder. There’s a strip of muscle about an inch wide. “Feel that? That’s your deltoid. Anterior deltoid, anyway. Anterior means front. They invariably get recruited during pressing movements. But they’re relatively small muscles compared to the pectorals. Go like this.”
He places my fingertips against my chest above my breast.
“Feel that? That’s your pectoralis major.”
He moves my fingers up. His hand is so close to my breast. And those blue eyes.
“Now resist my hand again.”
I wonder how I could resist anything, despite how incredibly intimidating he is. But he does seem sweet.
“Feel that?” Kellan asks.
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s your upper pec.”
“Is there a lower pec?”
“There is a lower pec. Very good.”
“How do I feel it?”
“It’s under your breast tissue so you may not be able to feel it. Here.” He flexes his chest. Wow.
“See? Upper, middle, and lower.” He grabs my hand and places it on his chest. “Push.”
“It’s hard as a rock.” Wow. My bag-of-sand vagina gets a little less sandy.
“My pecs are fairly big because I’ve made them a focal point of my training. They’re not as good as Arnold or Serge Nubret back in the day, but they’re getting there. But hey, we’re talking too much. Less talk, more action. It’s your set.”
“How much should I do?”
“95 was pretty easy. How about 115?”
I study the black, rubber-coated weight plates again. I’ve seen them a thousand times while wandering around the gym from machine to machine, always afraid to actually pick them up and use them. “How come there’s no 15-pound plate?”
“You just combine a 10 and a 5.”
“Okay, so, last time, I did two 25s, so this time I need two 35s?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“I’m telling you. Smart ass.”
Kellan laughs heartily. He has a nice laugh. Almost as nice as those eyes. Lord, those eyes.
We each slide a 35-pound plate on the bar and I lie down on the bench, place my hands on the bar, feeling the smooth ring in the knurl the way Kellan showed me. I pull my shoulders back, plant my feet, take a deep breath, and try not to think about what’s going to happen if this is way, way, WAY too heavy for me and I drop it on my chest and Kellan has to rescue me.
I pick it up, lower it, and press it back up. It’s kinda heavy. I do it six, seven, eight, nine times. On ten, I struggle a bit at the very end.
“Perfect!” Kellan calls out. “Keep going, two more!”
Eleven is hard.
Twelve is harder. I stall about three-quarters of the way up.
“Go, Claire, go!” Kellan shouts. “Push push push push push push, all you, all you, all you!”
I keep pushing, and eventually drive it all the way up and rack it. I sit up, breathing heavily.
“I did it.”
“Yeah, you did. That was awesome. That was a perfect set. You died right at the end.”
“That’s good?”
“Very good. You always want to push until your muscles are giving out on the last few reps. Pushing hard on the last few is where hypertrophy comes from.”
“Hyper what?”
“Hypertrophy. Some people say HYPER-trophy, even though that’s wrong. I pronounce it high-PER-truhfee. But tomato, tomotto, you know?”
“How do you say it?”
“The second way. High-PER-truhfee.”
“Hypertrophy,” I repeat. “And what does it mean?”
“You tell me.”
Smart ass. I pull out my phone and speak into it. Google Voice says muscle hypertrophy involves an increase in the size of skeletal muscle. Cool.
“It’s the fancy word for when your muscles grow,” says Kellan. “So, how many sets do you want to do?”
“How many sets should I do?”
“How sore do you want to be? Generally, the scientific literature has found that hypertrophy comes from three to four sets of ten to twelve reps. But there are people who have gotten swole by doing more and by doing less. A lot of guys believe in training what’s called high volume, because that’s what builds muscle maturity. I tend to be one of those guys. I love working out and training hard and getting a pump and getting that pain in my muscles that lets me know I worked them correctly. It’s almost like a pinch sensation deep within the muscle when it’s flexed.”
“Well, this is my first chest workout in like pretty much ever. So I have no frame of reference. So I can’t really say.”
“I understand. You’re right. One of the first times I trained with a professional trainer was years ago and we went into the gym to do back and bi’s–”
“What’s that?”
“Back and biceps. See, those are synergistic muscles. The biceps contract when you do a rowing motion that also recruits the lats and the rear delts and the traps and the spinal erectors. So a lot of guys like to train back and biceps on the same day. That’s also called a pull workout because you’re pulling. The corollary being a push workout during which you work your chest and triceps. Triceps are naturally recruited while doing bench press for example, which is a pushing motion. So not only will your chest be sore in the next few days, your triceps will, too. And your shoulders. And probably your intercostals.”
“What are those?”
Kellan raises his shirt, showing his insane, sexy abs. He flexes the diagonal finger-like muscles running along his ribs.
“I want those.”
“Eat super clean and train your ass off. You’ve already got them. You just can’t see them.”
“So what happened with the trainer guy?”
“Oh yeah. We went into the gym to work out together. He wasn’t only training me, we worked out together so I could see how he trained. And he was in shape and he looked good. But we started with pull-ups, which I hadn’t done in probably two years, not since I’d done them in P.E. as a sophomore. So I could only do about three pull-ups–”
“Three? That’s it?”
“Yeah. So, he stands under me and puts his hands on my waist and helps me to pull myself up. This was before there were assisted pull-up machines like the one over there.”
Kellan points to a machine I have never used and, frankly, didn’t even know was there.
“So we did three or four sets and
my biceps were fried. I don’t remember what we did for the rest of the workout but I remember I couldn’t straighten my arms. They were literally bent at the elbow. And it hurt to straighten them, so I tried to fight through it and stretch them out but there was only so much I could do.
“So, the next day, I wake up in the morning and get out of bed and I’m like this.” Kellan bends his arms at 45-degree angles. “I was walking around like C3-PO from Star Wars, you know? And I was scared to death that I was going to have a bunch of scar tissue and they were going to stay that way permanently.”
“What happened?”
“It took about ten days before they finally healed and loosened up and went back to normal. But it taught me an invaluable lesson about training. First, always, always, always warm up. Never, ever, ever work a cold muscle. Go home tonight and put a rubber band in the freezer for an hour and then take it out and stretch it. See what happens. That’s your muscle tissue when you don’t take the time to warm up. The other thing is, it takes about five to ten minutes for your body to shunt blood away from your core and out to your extremities in order to begin doing work. Dorian Yates used to do one set of 16 reps to warm up prior to each set. Or was it 25? I can’t remember. Anyway, he taught me that you warm up your whole body, get a light sweat going, and then for each specific exercise you do, actually do a set with light weight so that you work the joints, tendons, ligaments, and muscles through their full range of motion while performing the same motion you’re going to do under load. I didn’t just lie down and bench 405 pounds a minute ago, did I? No, I started with about half of that, which I did for reps, to make sure everything was warm and felt good. Plus we did a little cardio together and I did abs before that so I knew I was warm. But it’s always easier to take ten minutes to warm up than it is to take ten days, or ten weeks, to heal from an injury. Ask someone who has actually torn a muscle what it felt like, how much the surgery cost, what their hospital bills were, and how many months they were out of the gym, and if you still don’t want to warm up, you’re either hard-headed and stubborn and arrogant because you think it won’t happen to you or you’re just stupid.”
“Have you ever had any injuries?”
“Oh yeah. Nothing major. Nothing that required surgery. I’ve never torn a bicep and had to have an orthopedic surgeon go in and drill a hole in my humerus to reattach the inner head of the bicep to the bone like Jay Cutler did. But I’ve strained my back a few times, twice bad enough that I was bedridden for about four days and I had to roll out of bed and crawl to the bathroom. That sucked. I’ve tweaked my shoulders a few times. Little stuff like that. Mostly you just find a way to train around the injury. You give the muscle or joint a few days off, ice it, let it rest, sleep well, eat a lot of pineapple, and take a lot of ibuprofen, but not too much because that can mess up your liver.”
“What does pineapple do?”
“Pineapple is a diuretic, which means it pulls water out of you, but it also contains a lot of bromelain, which is a natural anti-inflammatory. It’s like nature’s ibuprofen. Fighting inflammation is one of the key aspects not just of bodybuilding and fitness but to life in general. Sugar, for example, causes inflammation. Not to mention collagen breakdown, wrinkles, and a bunch of other stuff you damn near need to be a microbiologist to understand. But that’s why I don’t eat sugar.”
“You don’t eat sugar?”
“Nope.”
“Never?”
“Well, I can’t say never. I mean, every now and then I’ll eat pizza. I friggin love pizza. There’s sugar in the sauce, most likely, and there was sugar in the dough that fed the yeast and made the bread rise. I’ll drink on occasion and alcohol acts like sugar in your body. On days like that, I do everything I can to counteract the sugar.”
“Like what?”
“Lots of stuff. Let’s finish our set and we can talk about that another time because I can’t cover it all in five minutes. And there’s no point in telling you if you won’t be able to understand it thoroughly so you can make it your own. I’ll walk you through it so you can write it all down so you can have it for your reference. That way you can study it and hang it on your fridge and your bathroom mirror and put it under your pillow and keep a copy on your phone so it’s always there for your reference. Plus you need to buy a few things like cinnamon and green tea and ALA. Real quick though, do you ever get that hypoglycemia feeling when you haven’t eaten for a while, like you’re hungry but it’s not just your stomach growling? It’s like your whole body is affected and you feel like crap? Like kinda nauseous, like you want to throw up, and kind of sleepy and lethargic and just… shitty?”
“Yes! All the time.”
“Okay. Yeah, we need to fix that. Don’t worry, I know exactly how to fix that. It used to happen to me all the time, too. It basically comes down to keeping your blood sugar level stable by not pounding a lot of crap, like sugar and empty carbs.”
Kellan guides me through one more set, then over to the dumbbells where we do a few sets of flys. I lie on my back with the dumbbells pointed toward the ceiling, then open my arms to the sides and then bring them back together. He explains how this activates more muscle fibers and it’s a good idea to mix them in with pressing movements.
Finally he says that’s enough because he doesn’t want me to be a complete invalid tomorrow and the next day.
ON OUR WAY out the front door, the front desk guy is overly friendly to Kellan, calling him Mr. Kearns several times. They shake hands in a cool bro sort of way, like they know each other.
OUT IN THE parking lot, we stop beside a white Mercedes.
I ask, “Do you know that guy at the front desk?”
“Not really. A little bit. Why?”
“He just seemed really eager to please you.”
“That’s just Jimmy. He works the night shift. He goes to Sierra College, studies exercise physiology like I did. So we talk about that sometimes.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“UC Davis. You?”
The whole time we’re talking, I’m totally freaking out over his huge muscles and perfect body. The veins in his forearms. If he ever wanted to be a heroin addict, he’d have no problem finding a vein.
And his chest….
It’s . . . perfect.
His stringy red tank top can only be considered clothing in the academic sense. I can see his nipples….
“Claire?”
“Huh?”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“Oh. Um, UOP.”
“UOP is nice,” he says. “Expensive. But nice.”
“Tell me about it. I’ve still got the student loans in deferment to prove it.”
“What was your major?”
I sigh. Heavily. “English Lit. I was pre-med all through high school and my first year of college, but I always had a love of books and writing. So ultimately I switched, while simultaneously pissing off my parents.”
“So, do you like the all the classics like Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy?”
“Honestly? Not really. I’m kinda weird that way. I grew up reading Stephen King. I was reading The Shining instead of Little Women, even though pretty much everyone in the English Department at my school declared him a hack.”
“What’s your favorite book?”
“Um, probably The Stand. It’s one of them, anyway. I’ve always been more into contemporary American writers, even genre writers. I’m just a dork that way.”
“Did you read Twilight?”
“Of course. A few times, actually. Initially, I read it mostly for market research, so I could see what all the fuss was about. But I very quickly fell in love with Edward and Bella and desperately wanted them to be together.”
“So you’re definitely Team Edward?”
“Definitely. Jacob was a nice guy and I felt bad for him because he was so in love with Bella but she wasn’t in love with him. But, after a while, it’s like, dude, get over it. There’s plenty of fish
in the sea. New Moon pissed me off.”
“Why?”
“Because Edward wasn’t it. He left because he thought it would keep Bella safe. Next thing you know, she’s riding dirt bikes with Jacob. Jacob, Jacob, Jacob.”
Kellan chuckles.
“Have you read it?” I ask.
“No.”
“Have you seen the movies?”
“No.”
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Are they any good?”
“Well, everyone talked all kinds of crap about that series but it was good enough to get picked up, published, and adapted to film. Same with Fifty Shades. I read that Salman Rushdie said Fifty Shades made Twilight look like War and Peace.”
“And that’s funny because War and Peace is considered great literature, right?”
“Right. Tolstoy. One of the greats. I have The Death of Ivan Ilyich but I’ve never read it. Never read War and Peace, either. But I do have a copy of that, too. Got it at the library for a quarter.”
“Wasn’t War and Peace mandatory reading for an English Lit degree?”
“You would think. To be honest, I didn’t read a lot of the stuff that was assigned to me. I tried, but those damn Norton anthologies were four inches thick, printed on that super-thin onion skin paper they print Bibles on. You know how many times I almost tore entire pages out of those books?”
“Because you were pissed that you had to read it?”
“No, because I was simply turning the page and the paper ripped. I still have them, though. I couldn’t throw them away. Mostly I keep them on my shelf hoping I look impressive for owning them and supposedly having read them. I can’t believe I’m telling you this. But that’s my big confession: I didn’t like English Literature. I had a lot more fun reading Harry Potter than Henry James.”
“Isn’t Harry Potter for kids?”
“Not really. Maybe the first book because Harry was pretty young. But there are seven books that follow him all the way to when he’s pretty much an adult. You didn’t read it?”
“No.”
“Did you see the movies?”
“No. I think I saw part of the first one where a big guy with a beard gave a fat kid in pajamas a pig tail.”
This makes me laugh. “That was Hagrid. Good ol’ Hagrid.”