The Testosterone Principles

Pad see ew wit pok

The waiter sees the blank look on my face so he repeats it, this time a little louder.

Pad see ew wit pok!

I'm still clueless. Russell Brand listening to a lecture on the Higgs Boson. Who'd have thought asking what the daily special was would be so problematical?

Then he points to the menu, emphatically tapping on a grainy little picture with his index figure. Suddenly, I see it. Pad See Ew is a Thai noodle dish! And it's with "pok," which I presume is pork, even though it's spelled pok on the menu.

I'm momentarily tempted to ask him if the dish is really a moldy green color, because it sure looks like that in the faded picture.

I tell him that it sounds good, and my lunch companion, a lawyer named Kyle, orders the same thing. The waiter walks briskly back to the kitchen with our orders, no doubt cursing the day he left Thailand.

Kyle and I are in the middle of talking about a litany of current events including Osama Bin Laden's comeuppance and how Superman, in his latest comic book, renounced his U.S. citizenship, when Doogan walks into the restaurant and takes a seat across the room. Doogan's a guy from my gym that I've sort of known for years. I say "sort of" because I don't even know his first name; I just know him as Doogan.

We've rarely spoken because he's usually busy doing his workout and I'm usually doing mine and you sort of know by the look in our eyes that we're the kind of guys who feel like puncturing the liver of anyone foolish enough to talk to us in the gym.

Doogan pretty much has the best physique of anybody in town. Hell, he could play Superman, and not the marginally muscled, Kryptonite-in-their-shorts Supermen we're used to seeing in movies, but the Superman we'd see if you or I were doing the casting.

Doogan certainly couldn't go on a professional stage today and beat anybody because he'd look small compared to the current cast of walking steroid repositories, but he surely could have kicked Zane, Dickerson, and Columbo's asses back in the day, and that's without even doing any contest dieting.

To be honest, I've never actually seen Doogan without a shirt on, but you can just tell. He usually works out in cut-off sleeves, revealing deltoid caps the size of small pumpkins with deep ridges that, come to think of it, are also reminiscent of pumpkins, but without the little triangle-cutout eyes and the tasty seeds, of course.

The biceps and forearms are almost equally gourd-ish and when he gets a sweat on and his shirt gets a little clingy, you can easily detect enormously pronounced abdominal ridges, as well as a thick, porterhouse-steak slab of a chest.

I nod towards Doogan and tell Kyle, "That guy's got the best build of anybody I know."

Kyle puts down his Thai tea, turns briefly to look over his shoulder to give Doogan the once over, and then says, "He's skinny."

I'm AC/DC thunderstruck. Kyle might as well have told me that he gets take out food from Hooters.

How can anybody, especially a guy like Kyle for whom working out means doing the Mr. Miyagi wax-on and wax-off to his Prius, think that Doogan's skinny?

But as I sit there with my cattle-that-just-got-zapped-in the-skull-with-a-bolt-pistol look on my face, I start to think that maybe he does look kind of normal – almost mortal – with his street clothes on.

Kyle notices my state of dumbfoundity and says, "I thought you weightlifter types all worship size über alles." As he says this, he clenches his teeth and scrunches down his shoulders in a mock "most muscular pose."

But I don't bother to explain my thoughts to Kyle. For one, he wouldn't understand, and secondly, he probably wouldn't give a damn. Besides, a really hot blonde in a wispy little frock came in and sent my heart all aflutter and my brain all asplatter.

I thought about it later, though, after my loins and my pad see ew inflamed stomach stopped percolating.

A Euclidian Fantasy

Here's the deal. When judging a build, the casual eye, the untrained eye, looks for convex curves in a body. By that I mean people look for roundness of muscle bellies, which is an almost universal characteristic of muscular mo-fos.

But what truly defines a great body, an evolved body, is concave curves.

To make it simple, convex is curved or rounded outward, while concave is hollowed or rounded inward.

Working out with weights obviously gives you convex curves, while constant refinement and adherence to a healthy diet gives you concave curves. Together, they make a body that reminds you of great sculpture, where light and shadow mingle together in a pleasing display. Together they make a body that looks like it ought to be dressed in Spandex and out fighting crime.

But a person who's purely or largely convex is pretty much a fat bastard who should wear anything but Spandex and instead of fighting crime is waiting for lunchtime.

I'll give you an example of how it applies to even non-bodybuilder types, in this case, a hot babe. You know that Victoria's Secret model, Candice Swanepoel? The one that's so hot that when the underwear catalog arrives in the mail, you squirrel it away to the bathroom with your pants already half-ways down to the floor and in your shuffling urgency you stub your toe on the commode and almost lose your hard-on?

Yeah, that's the one.

Anyhow, what puts her head and shoulders above all the other VS models is not only her delectable convex curves – which we worship as tits and ass – but also the concave curves.

And I'm not just talking about the obvious concave curve, which is her phenomenally wasp-like waist; I'm also talking about all the subtle concave curves in her arms, shoulders, abdomen, thighs, etc. She's truly a marvel of engineering. A Euclidian fantasy. But with clothes on (the horror!), she probably looks a little waifish.

The same is of course true for athletic male physiques. Physiques that are a blend of convex and concave are usually admired, while purely convex (blobby) ones aren't.

I Don't Want Him, You Can Have Him, He's Too Fat For Me, Hey!

I know most of you guys know all this either instinctually or intellectually, but from what I see, a lot of you sure don't live it. All I see, year after year in the gym, is the same beefy, "convex" guys who never really look much different.

Listen, I'm going to slap you fat guys aside the head with a cold salami of reality (but try to use some self-restraint for once and not chomp a bite out of its fatty goodness). Getting big in itself is not a badge of honor; anyone can eat a lot if they put their mind to it.

Generally speaking, the bigger a guy gets, the more insecure he was to start with.

I remember this one episode in the The Office where Dwight, the misanthropic beet farmer/paper salesman extraordinaire, explained why he doesn't smile:

I never smile if I can help it. Showing one's teeth is a submission signal in primates. When someone smiles at me, all I see is a chimpanzee begging for its life.

It's a funny line, but that's kind of what I see when I look at some huge bastard who decided, against nature's will, that he was going to be a huge bastard – I see a large insecure primate begging me to respect him, or maybe, sob, to even like him.

Sorry, it ain't working. I don't necessarily disrespect you, but I do question your eating habits, your willpower, and your esthetic sense, while feeling mildly sad that your momma and poppa didn't help you develop any real self-esteem.

I know this doesn't make you happy, but attacks on self-image, the most sacred of individual sacred cows, are always the most painful. Now if you haven't already thrown down your nutty-buddy ice cream cone and broken something valuable in anger, I'm offering you a little challenge. In fact it's a dare, a double-dog dare.

Strip naked (assuming you're home alone, or at least in the company of tolerant workmates). Grab a hand mirror, and face away from a full-length mirror. Take a deep breath and position the mirror so you can gaze at your dark side of the moon that you've probably never seen before.

I bet the sight is so horrible that you'll never attempt it again without looking through a cardboard box with a pinhole in it.

I bet you look like a human manatee. A lot of you would probably think, "Hey, what's the saggy-assed old dude from my gym doing in my mirror? What's he gonna' do now, blow-dry his balls?" before realizing that the gray, cottage-cheesy thing that looks like Joe Lieberman's face is your very own ass. You'd see back fat and little unseemly rolls of Poppin' Fresh dough bunched up at the intersections of thigh and ass.

It's a sight you've likely never seen before because of the mirror logistics involved, but it's what the rest of us see when you leave the room.

And if you're questioning my right to cast stones at your blubbery butt, go ahead, but I'll confess, I've been there. I did the hand mirror thing last November and I freaked – not necessarily because my ass wasn't as delectable as I'd imagined it to be, but how delusional I'd been, how warped my sense of reality was. I thought I was the work of a master sculptor when I was really a lumpy ashtray made by an ADD kid at camp who'd eaten 3 boxes of Skittles instead of taking his Ritalin.

I immediately redesigned my workouts, my diet, and my supplementation. In two months, I got to the point where not only wouldn't I blanche in horror at the sight of my backside, I'd strip naked and press it against the living room window so women and children and emotionally evolved men could see it and wonder at it the same way they might wonder at a hummingbird and feel uplifted because as ugly as the world can sometimes be, there are beautiful things in it to make our spirits soar.

And I'm hardly the only one who's had this experience. Don't tell anybody, but another writer from the site...I won't tell you his name, but it rhymes with Shibaudeau, had the same experience when he took a mirror to his backside some time ago.

So you can see that delusional states happen to the best of us.

Yes, I refined my look, added a lot of concave to the convex, which is why I, too, look 'normal' in my street clothes. But, much like Doogan, I look very different with my shirt off.

And the disparity is fine. I don't have those insecurity issues about having to look big.

But I realize this poses a huge conundrum for human manatees. I know you're thinking, deep down inside, "How are people supposed to know I work out unless I cause the threads on my T-shirts to strain; unless I look like 50 pounds of crap in a 25-pound sack?"

I've written about why mooks like us work out hard and what moving iron means to us, but questioning why we want a good physique is a different matter.

A Hummer Between Sets

There are probably two main reasons for wanting a good physique, the immature one and the mature one. The immature reason is that creating a formidable body gives a psychologically damaged guy a sense of power in much the same way a 16-year-old girl without self esteem suddenly feels powerful when she finds that nature has given her a pretty face and ample tits and that men, both young and old, start to perspire around her.

It's a type of power, but it's fleeting and it doesn't develop self worth. Most of these girls end up either as trophy wives to some jackass hedge-fund manager or blowing guys on video.

And the guys who got big to feel powerful? They end up having heart attacks at fifty and their families, in a heartening display of community service, bury the fat bastards with their asses sticking out of the ground so kids will have a place to park their bicycles.

A big male body is often nothing more than a fleshy suit of armor that tries to hide a plethora of deep-rooted psychological problems, but true self worth doesn't come from intimidating people into subservience or even from getting approval from like-minded fat bastards.

The mature response, if such a response exists in bodybuilding, is that we want a body that's strong, functional, and despite the practices of some of you lug nuts to the contrary, healthy. We also take satisfaction in mastering our "craft" to the point where we can literally sculpt parts of our bodies to achieve an esthetic ideal.

There's satisfaction in seeing physical work manifest itself in something that started in our imagination whether it be a building, a birdhouse, or a muscle.

And of course, we like the idea of attracting sweet young things, too. You know, following through on the biological or procreational imperative, or, to be more accurate, just getting dates on Saturday night so we don't have to sit home alone and watch that shitty SNL.

Ironically, perversely, comically, the bigger the guy is, the more convex he is, the fewer females he usually attracts. "Skinny" Doogan? He stores extra babes in his locker in case he needs a pick-me-up during his workout; carries a tiny one in his gym bag in case he needs a hummer between sets.

And I'm not suggesting that strength, power, and size are irrelevant. No f-ing way. But they're overrated in that x amount of muscle doesn't equal x amount of strength. I'm sure you've seen little guys who look like Shia Labeouf who can rip phone books in half, do a hundred pull ups, or, like some sort of South American fire ant, deadlift three times their bodyweight.

There are a lot of things that determine strength and most of them are genetic; things like ratios of muscle fibers, nervous system conductivity, lever length, androgen levels, etc. So developing strength is great, but muscle size often doesn't play the role you think it would in strength.

Moreover, blubber doesn't play any role in it. It's a tired old chestnut but it's true, you can't flex fat. And that's all I see around me. I sometimes shudder to think how many kids we inadvertently ruined on T Nation by allowing forum members to bully young guys – young guys who had the makings of great, Doogan-esque physiques – into bulking up and turning into the aforementioned manatees.

A lot of these poor bastards aspire to be pro bodybuilders, or at least to have the imposing size of a pro bodybuilder, but the type of body that's capable of that kind of muscularity is as rare – maybe rarer – than the type of body that makes a super model. So in lieu of muscle size, they settle for fat size and convince themselves that it's the same thing.

If you don't have the type of body that was meant to be simultaneously huge and ripped, you're not going to fool anybody by substituting fat for the muscle you'd hoped to put on. The point is, you take what you got and you run with it.

There's a difference between a bricklayer and a sculptor; they both use stone, but one just piles them up while the other makes art.

Personally, as long as I've got concave curves to go along with my convex ones, my ass doesn't look like a manatee, and I continue to refine, I'm good with it.

And if someone thinks I look "skinny" in a shirt, that's o-fucking-kay with me.