A few weekends ago, I attended the Arnold Classic in Columbus, Ohio. First off, The Arnold is not just about bodybuilding, though it's the biggest show next to the Olympia. It's perhaps the biggest amateur sports competition/exhibition next to the Olympics. Weightlifting, power lifting, karate, gymnastics, cycling, Strongman, table tennis, wrestling, archery....it's all there on the first weekend of March each year. I was tickled to be able to catch the womens' olympic weightlifting - the clean and jerk. Now those are the real, functional athletes. Bodybuilders? I am beginning to despise all of them and their antics.

For the first time ever, I paid $50 to attend the Sunday morning seminar where Arnold speaks for the first hour, and afterwards, the bodybuilding winners - for male, female, figure, and fitness - come out and give a talk and answer training questions. I couldn't give a crap how those non-athlete, drug users train, because I am a purely natural and functional athlete, in spite of the addition of bodybuilding-type training to my routine over the last few years. What I saw and heard during this seminar clinched my dislike for professional bodybuilders.

Arnold came out on stage and he looked great. He had a semi-flat midsection, great posture, and he looked energetic and healthy, in spite of being about 60-ish. Next out was the male winner in bodybuilding, Dexter Jackson. I used to really like Dexter because he was smaller than the other monsters, and had always retained some classic lines while giving up size. We sat in the very front row of the auditorium, and when he walked to the podium the first thing I noticed was his terrifying hugeness. He leaned on the podium the entire time, using it as a platform to hold up his lazy, unhealthy self. He was so much larger than he had ever been before. Dexter noted that he gained some 20-25 pounds for this show, so now he was a monster like all the rest. He could hardly stand up for a half-hour, in spite of the podium that he was gripping like mad. He kept shifting his feet and bodyweight as he hung over the podium like someone about to vomit. His abs were bloated and his traps were so huge they extended upward beyond his ears. His speech was the laziest drawl I have ever heard. He was inarticulate and seemed strangely out of it. He was, in essence, a caricature of himself.

When asked about his traps, he said, "Man, I don't even have to train them." When asked the same questions about every other body part, he said the same. Basically, he alluded to the fact that he doesn't have to train very hard at all and it just "comes to him." These guys take myriad drugs and Frankenstein supplements, and the rest "just happens." When he was asked about his cardio training, I almost fell out of my chair. He responded that he only walks on a treadmill, but "I don't do any faster than 3.5 mph, because if I go faster, man, I can't handle it." Then he proceeded to tell he audience how another bodybuilder friend of his was doing 2.2 mph, and he thus noted his "superior training" at 3.5. He was a joke - a very unfit, unhealthy bodybuilder of incredible size with absolutely no level of sustainable fitness whatsoever. The whole time the audience laughed at him. As my friend noted, he laughed right along with everyone laughing at him. The whole time he had trouble holding himself upright enough to finish out the 20 minutes on stage. Then he went on and talked about his "one hour per day" workout schedule, and made fun of the fact that "once he sits on the couch and turns on the tv, it turns into hours." So he went on and on bragging about his laziness and tv-watching habits. This were were supposed to admire.

Next was the winner of women's bodybuilding, Yaxeni Oriquen. Here are some photos of her: Photo 1. Photo 2. Photo 3. Drugs have transformed her into a man. I was very close up to her and all I saw were the faint traces of one who used to be a woman. That's fine, that's her choice. But when she spoke to the audience, she amazingly said ( to paraphrase): "It's great that I can do all this and still be sexy, beautiful, feminine, and elegant, like a woman should be." I swear, the whole theater was dropping jaws at that point. Part of her talk is posted here. Funny thing is, these women look in a mirror and they see some other image looking back at them. We see the truth: a huge, muscle-bulging, square-jawed, awful-looking man with a faint trace of former womanhood in the face and body, and they see femininity, beauty, and grace.

These bodybuilders have all become jokes - huge, bloated, fat, lazy, and unhealthy who give out training tips to everyday Joes telling them to eat 8 meals a day, spend hundreds of dollars monthly on supplements, and walk 2 hours per day on the treadmill at 2 - 3 mph to burn the fat from all the calorie abuse. Eat, train, grow, as they like to say.