The Romano Factor

I Think We Overthunk It…

A scraggly old Brit named Alfred, Lord Tennyson once said, “’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” While such an attempt at drama wasn’t the high point of Tennyson’s career, he’s nevertheless the ninth most frequently quoted writer in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, probably because the utility of such a phrase can console the loss of a great many things. But not everything. Certainly not the lost brotherhood bred during an era when most, if not all, gym members were bodybuilders. I trained in those gyms in Venice, California, during that time, from the late ‘70s to the mid ‘90s, just as the gym movement began to boom. I watched “normal” people gradually infiltrate the ranks until they now outnumber my brothers 50:1. This societal juxtaposition has deteriorated to the shameful degree that today there exists a successful gym chain where bodybuilders are explicitly not welcome, and it’s not because they’d eat too much of the free pizza they serve.

Bodybuilding has worked itself into near mainstream oblivion by virtue of its extreme nature. If you own a gym today, you’re not catering to bodybuilders. They’re loud, sweaty, and disruptive, and they break shit. Not to mention they’re usually broke. First and foremost, a gym owner today wants to sell the majority of his memberships to people who will never come to the gym—less wear and tear, less maintenance, less utilities, and nothing gets broken. After that, the gym owner is looking for those upwardly mobile busy professionals with working credit cards upon which their monthly memberships will automatically go through, who come three times a week and get in and get out in less than an hour. With enough of these people as members, the gym will tolerate the scant few of us.

As a gym owner today, I have no choice but to accept this reality. Business is business, and no one is paying the bills on a 40,000-square-foot gym by catering to bodybuilders—the very people responsible for the gym movement to begin with.

On any given day, I can look over the cardio balcony onto the main floor and watch guys with racquetball player bodies and chubby girls resplendent in the tightest neon doing things with my equipment that, if filmed with an iPhone, could exclusively provide all the content ever needed for awkwardgymmoments.com. I contrast this—what this has become—with its progenitor and ask myself, is it really better that I have had those days when hardcore ruled and lost them to this, than not having had them at all? Is the loss I feel for those days when hardcore gyms were filled with bodybuilders worth the anguish I feel today when I see what’s going on in mine and 90 percent of the gyms out there?

I’m going to have to say that I’m leaning toward what made Lord Tennyson famous. But, not without this caveat and really the point of this whole rant: I was fortunate enough to get a long dose of reality and what amounts today to a treasure trove of knowledge from my time in that little sliver of beach in Venice. It has fueled my career for over 20 years. And now it’s gone. The era is lost to history, replaced with the watered-down, antiseptic version that has spread across the globe in the name of fitness. Today’s reality is all some people know, and it’s not the best environment to build serious muscle.

Chiseling out a hard body isn’t easy. If it were, everyone would have one. But, it’s more motivating to do it in a gym where everyone else is doing the same thing with hard work, consistency, and discipline—qualities that make all bodybuilders brothers. Such is not even a consciousness in the minds of the droves of people who get in our way when we’re trying to train at the chrome and glass health clubs. And what are they doing there anyway? What is that thing they’re trying to do with the Swiss ball and a dumbbell? What’s with all the crazy shit people do today in the gym in the name of working out?

Arnold did two exercises for chest: bench presses in varying degrees of incline and flyes. That’s it. There are bodybuilders today who do 15, but is anyone’s chest 15 times better than Arnold’s? Actually, chances are, the better the chest, the more basic the training. Today, sprinkled between the masses of normal people doing stupid things, too many of you are either looking for the easy way or monstrously complicating something quite simple. Either way, there’s too much thinking going on and not enough of just doing it. Some days, watching this happen gets to be a bit much.

So, is it better to have experienced the hardcore era than never having experienced it at all? Yes and no, but it would all be a lot easier to take if everyone would “just shut up and train.”