LESSONS FROM THE BARBELL MAN

THE BARBELL MAN

By Shane Robert

 

Frank was a Barbell Man. That was undeniable. He was a walking powerhouse that weighed 260 if he weighed an ounce and even the most ignorant ‘98 pound weakling could see that Frank had spent the majority of his life moving iron and lifting heavy forks. He had that look of indeterminate age that so many men of his disposition often have. If you had told me he was thirty I wouldn’t have been any more surprised than if you had said fifty.

 

I had seen Frank around the gym since my first day there. It was hard to miss him—he had the kind of size that made it hard to breathe when he walked into a room from the sheer displacement of oxygen. Like most people there, I had never spoken to him because I assumed he was a jerk and probably kind of stupid. After all, his training was so simple—it seemed all he’d do was a couple big lifts for a few heavy sets, usually around five to eight reps, and leave. If he was really pushing it he’d hit four to five sets of ten or twelve reps of a few smaller exercises like curls or lateral raises. Really, I was intimidated. In my early gym days I trained, to borrow from powerlifting luminary Paul Kelso, like a complete mullet. Of course I didn’t know it at the time and thought I was quite knowledgeable, undoubtedly more so than Frank. Afterall, I was an active poster on exercise forums and had a subscription to not three but FOUR different muscle magazines; I doubted whether Frank could even read.

 

My first interaction with Frank happened by mistake. I was busy doing a circuit that mainly consisted of arms and every ab exercise I’d ever read about when I bent down to pick up a pair of fives that were laying on the floor next to a heavily loaded barbell.

 

“I’m still using those,” came a voice from behind me. Realizing my enormous error I dropped the plates and turned quickly to face my imminent death.

 

“Sor….sorry. I didn’t think anyone was using them.” I said assuming as submissive a posture as I could conjure up.

 

To my great shock and even greater horror, for this confirmed that I was dealing with a psychotic person, Frank started laughing.

 

“I suppose I do rest kind of long. Especially compared to how you hustle around here,” he said with a smirk. I backed away as he approached the bar, slid the fives on and did a set of six smooth reps.

 

“Deadlifts.” I said knowingly, though in reality I knew no more than the name of the exercise.

 

“Yep,” came Frank’s direct answer.

 

“That’s a lot of weight.”

 

Another small chuckle. “It certainly feels that way sometimes.”

 

“How much is that?”

 

“About 525.” He might as well have said a million.

 

“You’re not worried about hurting your back when you do that?”

 

“No.”

 

“That looked pretty easy. Why didn’t you do more reps or heavier weight?

 

“What makes you say it looked easy?”

 

Panic. The few sentences we had exchanged were already pushing my comfort zone, and now I was expected to answer a question!

 

“Well...you know...it looked...easy. Every rep moved...I don’t want to say…,” I grasped at the ether for any word that wasn’t ‘easy.’ “None of the reps looked like you struggled.”

 

“That’s why. If I had done more than 6 it might have turned into a struggle.” I heard the words, but to my extreme detriment, it would be a long time before I grasped their meaning.

 

“Oh. Cool. So...um…” I stammered, trying to build up the courage to ask what I knew was surely going to show my ignorance. “You just kind of bend over and pick it up?”

 

Frank paused for a moment to reflect on my question. “Kind of,” he said as he started to unload the bar. “I’m Frank by the way.”

 

“Shane. Nice to meet you,” I said, slowly accepting that I was probably not going to be murdered. “What’s the point of deadlifting?”

 

“To get big and strong.”

 

Though I had asked the wrong question and actually wanted to know the classic “what muscles does that work,” I received an answer that was fortuitous and hit like a punch from Ivan Drago. I realized then that, perhaps, I was on the wrong path. Having abs and looking like Brad Pitt from Fight Club, my motivation until that moment, suddenly lost its first battle to the barbell.

 

I hung around a bit longer that day and waited for Frank to leave. Once the coast was clear, I grabbed a bar and slapped a wheel on each side. I bent down and got set to grip and rip. The bar didn’t budge. I dropped down to a quarter on each side. At this weight, I managed to pull it up to about mid shin level, shaking like a demon, before it slammed back to the floor. With my ego now beaten black and blue, I stripped the twenty-fives off and put a ten on each side, finally managing to pull five reps at the gargantuan weight of sixty-five pounds. I stayed for another hour to punish myself for being so weak, doing set after set of back-breaking reps. That evening, I was so exhausted that I could barely stand from the couch; the next morning, I felt just how much work I had done and relished the feeling.

 

Despite my immense soreness, I went back to the gym and deadlifted again. I started with sixty-five for five and added five pounds each set, doing as many reps as possible each time, until I got to a weight I couldn’t lift for one rep. Then I would drop back down to sixty-five for as many sets to failure as I could possibly manage. I did that every day for twenty-eight straight days.

 

At the end of that month of concerted deadlifting effort and crippling soreness, I’d finally managed to pull the big plate that not long before was immovable. That same day, Frank came in and saw me lifting.

 

“Started deadlifting,” said Frank, “Good. How do you feel?”

 

“Honestly? Kind of like I’ve been hit by a truck.”

 

“Yeah,” Frank said knowingly, “that happens.”