BEING THE AUTHENTIC YOU
I became actively
involved in weight training and body building at about the age of 16, a skinny
kid with a great deal of enthusiasm but not a great deal of knowledge. I was being
trained by an enthusiast who saw a great future in me, but who also had a limited
knowledge of training techniques and systems. At about the same time a young
man from Austria was emerging onto the bodybuilding scene, the same age as me,
and a proverbial young giant.
Arnold himself. The one with the
unpronounceable name, Schwarzenegger. Every magazine carried his training
programmes, his eating plans, his photographs and his measurements. I had
discovered, I thought, my guru, my purpose, my calling. We began.
I pushed, pulled and pumped
in every direction. I supersetted, tri setted,
drop setted and extra setted. There was not a muscle overlooked. Every maximus,
every minimus, every major, every minor, every ceps bulked, stretched and
defined. Four hours of every day was devoted to pumping iron, the rest devoted to
eating, drinking and supplementing anything that did not bite back.
And then finally it
happened.
After 18 months
living the Schwarzie way I stood before the mirror, not the gigantic, rippling
bull mastiff of the magazines, but a skinny, trembling greyhound, so highly
strung that I jumped at the sound of my
own breathing and
you could play
a violin symphony
on my nerves. I said hello to my
first nervous breakdown, not something I welcomed or expected.
It took a number of months on various drugs before
I was back to normal mentally and before I had any desire for any form of physical
exercise. I was overworked, burnt out, messed
up and going under.
Not the result I had worked
so hard to achieve, so what had gone wrong?
If only I had known it
then, this was the first example of what was meant by me being ME. You see I had
made the cardinal error of wanting to be somebody else, without giving any
thought to what I was created, or capable of, being.
Revelation moment -
Arnold was different to me. His body type,
metabolism, mind and emotions were suited to the type of workouts and diet he was
promoting. And, as I learned later, he was,
sadly, taking steroids. But for me, it was just too much. I was different, and if I had only realized
it then I may have saved myself years of trouble, anguish, and more nervous
disorders.
The sad thing is that
I was not that unusual. Many people, especially young people, spend time, money
and a great deal of effort literally trying to become someone else. Instead of having
role models, mentors and others that we can look up to and learn from we try to
BE something we are not.
Whether it be Arnies,
Barbies, Kens, Toms, Charlizes or Bill Gates, it’s still the same futile
exercise. It makes so much more sense for each of us to put that effort into being
the best ‘ME’ we were created to be.
Four decades and much
learning later I have become, to some extent, the envy of my, shall we say,
much rounder, colleagues.
At last the balance
is there. I am me.
