Pride, Productiveness, and a Good Pump

It’s May, and the warmer weather means that for many, outdoor recreation is on the calendar. Another baseball season is here. The summer Olympics will soon kick off, too, bringing to our television screens weightlifters, hammer throwers, and other athletes. Americans everywhere will be wearing lighter, more revealing clothes, and spending time on beaches and lakefronts.

Plus, as special tribute, we can remember bodybuilding great Steve Reeves, who died on May 1, 2000.

Shouldn't we just designate May as Muscles Month?

Think about it: sports are popular because we enjoy the physical skills on display, the unusual excellence in action. Sports are a means not only of enjoyment, but of inspiration.

But you can enjoy that excellence in your own body.

Ayn Rand was emphatic with regard to the importance of the mind in human life: mind, not muscle, moves the world, and even in the caves it was probably always so. A poetic example is given in Atlas Shrugged, when Henry Rearden and Dagny Taggart are driving through Wisconsin. They witness the degradation of muscle that occurs with the removal of mind:

In a distant field, beyond the town, they saw the figure of a man moving slowly, contorted by the ugliness of a physical effort beyond the proper use of a human body: he was pushing a plow by hand.

Indeed, the crucial importance of mind is the primary theme of Atlas Shrugged.

But that book is a hymn to life on this earth and to the proper pleasures to be derived from it. This description, for example, is of John Galt, in his first explicit appearance in the novel:

It seemed to her for a moment that she was in the presence of a being who was pure consciousness--yet she had never been so aware of a man’s body. The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy....

Elsewhere in the book the reader is told of Francisco d’Anconia’s flat stomach and of the “gaunt strength” of Rearden’s arms. Dagny Taggart herself is described as having “showgirl legs.”

One might ask, what good is human muscle today? It is no longer needed for pushing or pulling the tools of industrial processes — and, as in the plow example cited above, it is inappropriate for many agricultural tasks as well.

My answer is: Muscles provide pleasure. It feels good to move one’s own muscles, and the sight of finely-honed muscle brings pleasure to the viewer.

But, pleasurable though it may be, well-defined muscle comes only from work. Singer Tina Turner is well-known for her shapely, strikingly beautiful legs, which she attributes to years of dancing onstage. That’s muscle.

Muscles represent strength; a well-muscled physique speaks of pride. Anyone can be born big and beefy, but it takes thought and effort to create a sculpted physique. Such thought and effort brings satisfying gains, is worthy of admiration, and is fun.

We needn’t care about contest competition or professional bodybuilders. We needn’t take anabolic steroids or concern ourselves with looking like Dorian Yates or Tom Platz. I don’t do any of that: I don’t follow professional bodybuilding at all, and I have never used a steroid or diuretic for training or esthetic effect.

But — why not simply be the very best, physically and esthetically, that we can be? Is that not motivation enough? Isn’t it rational to want to feel better and look better?

Building an excellent physique is an expression of productiveness: it involves translating an idea into a realization. It requires thought and — obviously — effort. As a bodybuilder myself, I know that I must plan my workouts, recovery periods, and diet in order to achieve the results I want. I must then have the discipline to put in the hard work. Every bodybuilder knows this — knows that muscle depends on the mind.

So the corrupt contractor Ben Nealy is wrong when he tells Dagny Taggart that “all it takes to build anything in this world” is muscles. Building anything — including muscle — takes mind, and its proper application to the task.

Of course, the results are worth it. I am proud of my muscles.

I planned them. I built them. They’re mine.

I have good separation and vascularity, good proportions and symmetry. I like the sweep and flare of my thighs, my lats, my biceps. What I do not yet have, although I’m deliberately growing, is substantial mass. But I’ll get there, because I know what I’m doing.

Did I mention fun? I enjoy the triumph of completing twenty full squats with heavy weight and in good form. And nothing compares to deadlifting a new personal best. Nothing. I know I’ve achieved another goal.

I feel satisfaction when, after I’ve lifted, my arms are so pumped, so swollen with blood, that I cannot bend my arms back to reach my own face. I know I’m on my way to growing again.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand wrote: “Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned….that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul….”

I might add: we are also beings of self-made physique.

Building an excellent physique is a great source of pride: I did this, it’s mine, and it’s good. It is also an expression of pride: I’m worth it.

So it’s May again. Consider that it is good and appropriate that we like to look at good bodies, that it is good and appropriate that we are drawn to strength and health and vitality. Consider, then, that it’s only good, only appropriate, that we create something worthy of a look.

Looking is pleasurable, and being looked at is pleasurable. We all enjoy seeing muscles move, whether we are sports fans or not.

Remember Tina Turner’s legs (or Dagny Taggart’s). Give thought to Jennifer Lopez’s most celebrated feature, and bear in mind that it is a muscle, the gluteus maximus, which is directly amenable to work. And how many women, over the past forty years or more, have found Sean Connery sexually attractive? He was a competitive bodybuilder — in the Steve Reeves, pre-steroid era — before finding success as an actor.

May fashions include golf shirts and short skirts. Why not take advantage of this? Why not look good in whatever you’re wearing?

And then take pride in it, too: after all, you will have created it.


Craig Ceely is a corporate trainer, writer, and humorist in the wilds of west Texas. He claims the three trades are related. His blog, The Anger of Compassion, is updated at least semiannually. There is no truth to the rumor that he is writing an epic poem about commas.