There once was a young man who's father liked to work out. Every Monday morning before work, his dad would leave the house at 6:30 heading for the gym to "pump away the flab" as he would say. At the age of 55, his physique was indeed remarkable. Maybe it was the training for the two NCAA rowing championships he had won at the ages of twenty-one and twenty-two. His back was especially powerful. Maybe it was the new testosterone boosting "miracle" shakes he drank twice a day that he swore by. "Makes me feel like I'm twenty-five again," he would proclaim to anyone who would listen.
Most people didn't, but his son did. His son practically worshipped his father. Intense, ambitious, gregarious - his father was everything that he wanted to be and more. A quiet, skinny, somewhat awkward boy of 17, he drank up his dad's unending verbal celebration of the "brilliant sport of body building." He drank, too, whatever new shakes and supplements his Dad would order on Amazon. Muscle milk, NO-Xplode, even Testo-Boost. His father always a man's man would slap his son on the back and proclaim him "a chip off the old block", words his son sucked up even more greedily than the shakes. No matter that his acne was much worse now or that he often felt jittery and moody. He was going to be like his Dad. With his new license, every afternoon after school, he would drop by the Gold's Gym to "work on his game." Mostly benching.
Benching in his mind was the ultimate test of a man's physique. Probably because his dad was always drooling over the explosive chests of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ronnie Coleman, and the rest. "Takes a real man to get away with 'boobs' like that," his father would laugh. For some reason his father, despite his physical prowess and perfect meso-ectomorph body type, was a hard-gainer when it came to his pecs. His back had always been exploding with muscle but for whatever reason his chest had always been small. As a result, he would hit the bench pretty much every other day and the result, tight packed muscle set between his massive shoulders was indeed impressive. His son wanted a chest like that and his father fanned the flame. "Hit the bench today, son?" he would ask. "Sure thing, Dad. 10 sets. Pyramid. 6 at max." "Well done, kid. The ladies won't be able to handle those boobs."
The gains came fast at first, once he learned not to over do it that is. By the age of 18 his chest was tight and ripped. He had to start doing more shoulder exercises too to keep up with his chest development. By 19, he was pushing 200 pounds. A fact that his dad would proclaim even more loudly than his praise for the newest version of Testo-Boost. Every time he inspected his progress in the mirror, the son had eyes only for his pecs. And maybe his abs a little bit. He liked the fact that his shoulders now hunched forward. It accentuated the lines when he flexed. By 20, he could beat all of his friends. 240 pounds was not too shabby. By 21, he wore as a badge of honor the fact that he couldn't stand up straight. By 22, he threw a disc in his middle back during a particularly intense workout.
His father, now 60, drove the college junior to the emergency room, an expression of deepest concern on his face the whole way. He insisted too on coming back with his son into the x-ray room. After the x-rays, the attending resident was shocked by the boy's hunched skeletal structure. Shaking his head, he scrawled, "Massively over-developed pectoralis and anterior deltoids," on the clipboard in blue ink before running off to help with four car accident victims. The x-ray tech a quiet, athletic fellow who had played NCAA soccer, paused for a few seconds after dropping off the developed x-rays watching the dad and son. As he eyed the dad's tight "Gold's Gym" T-shirt and massive back, a small smirk crept onto his face. Whipping out a blue pen, he wrote on the clipboard in a passable imitation of the resident's scrawl, "Way to go, Dad."
