"Mr. Natural" is a pen name for a well-known bodybuilding journalist. He's known for his anti-steroid stance, and he's gotten on quite a few soapboxes in the past to rail against bodybuilding drugs. However, he fell from grace.

Poetry in Motion The Testosterone Exercise of the Month   Think of bodybuilding as a language, and think of the exercises we do in the gym as words in that language. Trouble is, most of us have "vocabularies" smaller than that of Koko the gorilla, who recently was featured on a very popular AOL chat. (Koko was asked if he liked to talk to people, to which thousands and thousands of web surfers the world-over heard the answer, "Fine nipple." Huh ...

Q: I take a few weeks off from training several times each year, and I am concerned about whether this is counter productive.

As athletes, our workouts take precedence over just about anything. We may occasionally cut class or call in sick for work, but miss a workout? Not on your life. Likewise, we're so very, very careful about how we eat.

Too often, training programs seem to be put together with all the forethought of a Congressional campaign. In other words, very little forethought is generally involved.