Pumping Iron

Bodybuilding is an art. Like Arnold says, a painter can look at a subject and decide, oh he needs more rounded shoulders, take some paint and add it to the canvas. A bodybuilder can decide he needs more rounded shoulders and goes to the gym and eats and rests in order to physically build those shoulders.

Legit, it was cool to see someone talk about bodybuilding in that way because I do have this morbid, almost body horror fascination with this process. We use our bodies, and then intake nutrition to feed and give energy to the bodies, and then we rest to recover from the activities. All this fundamentally changes our bodies, there is a real, physical difference.

For example, I make breakfast, I’m chopping cilantro, and suddenly I cut my index fingertip the fuck off. I used my body. Then blah blah, I take care of the immediate aftermath. But then I eat food, which my body processes and uses to deliver more oxygen to that area, to make immune cells to stave off any incoming infection. I sleep and in deep sleep, my body regenerates the area around my fingertip to rebuild the skin, nail, and nerve cells in that area.

Of course our bodies change in general without any activity at all, even breathing or living, by virtue of time and the decay that follows cellular life cycles. But with bodybuilding, the thing that you’re trying to change isn’t your skin or bone density, but the superficial muscles that push against the inside of your skin, visible in its entirety to the eye. It’s like carving a statue, you are about symmetry, size, proportion. Needless to say, you have to be severely mentally ill of some sort to be any kind of good in this sport. And you can see that in Pumping Iron.

The first scenes are of Arnold taking lessons with a ballet dancer on how to best show off his musculature and hold the attention of an eager audience. He then directly talks to the camera about how the feeling of getting a good pump is akin to having sex with a woman and coming. He clearly has a desire to be a dominating figure in this industry. He’s charming, cool, magnetic, and inspiring. Of course, bodybuilding would blow up after all that attention he garnered, dudes want to be big and huge and charming, cool, magnetic and inspiring like Arnold. I mean, after watching this, same, to be honest.

But the later competition and mind games between the athletes didn’t really keep my attention. I was mostly looking at this amazing quality of vascular and pumped muscles on screen, paired with these guttural and animalistic grunts from pushing, pushing, pushing half reps until failure, pushing and failing again. No regard for their joints, or long term health whatsoever. It’s honestly seriously fabulous, and I think they should all do as many anabolic steroids as they want. I keep having this desire of wanting to explore every nook and cranny of a the cadaver of a bodybuilder in his prime. What’s the state of their muscles before they atrophy, how extensive is the facial network, how mobile or lubricated are their joints, what’s the state of their poor, how hard did their heart have to work to pump so much blood into their system. How athletic are they? Can they stand on one foot with their eyes closed? Can they touch their toes?

A big part of my fascination I think also comes from the visual pleasure of seeing clearly defined shapes in the human body, for drawing. What a gift this movie is to both provide that footage, but also the chain reaction of its reception inevitably kicking off fitness culture and bodybuilding and shaping. A momentum that produced endless research which currently manifests in hot women giving themselves sciatica by doing 20 heavy reps on Bulgarian split squats for a BBL butt, and alpha men spamming a 225 bench through shoulder pain and weak rotator cuffs.

We all need hobbies. As a visual creature in a lookism culture, it’s like having another way to observe and experience the world and its people. It’s fun to notice someone’s triceps as they pick up something heavy from the ground, someone’s low-insert gastrocnemius muscles straining in front of me we both ascend the subway stairs.

God-willing I will never want to nor be able to achieve a less than 25% body fat or eat more than 130g of protein every day, but I’m glad to share in the rewards of others pursuing that.