I may have told this story before, but my dedication to adding a bit of muscle dates back to a day sometime in 2010 when I was having extreme difficulty wrestling a 40 lb bad of dog food out of the trunk of my car.
I got a glimpse into the future and it was not pretty.
I have always had thinnish arms but I could see they were starting to look like what I consider “old man arms”. Not fully there by any means, but the writing was on the wall. Thin, white bony appendages, with some loose age-marked skin dangling off the bone—is this really where I wanted to be in 10 or so years? Humiliated to roll my sleeves up, let alone take my shirt off?
No! No!
I wanted thick meaty forearms with rippling muscles and powerful tendons, capable of squeezing, gripping and choking the life out of others.
Fast forward a few years. My forearms now are in my view definitely not an embarrassment, but not wonderful. I can only imagine that they would be much thinner and weaker had I done nothing. But I w as starting with bad material, skinny little bony twigs and a predisposition to stay that way. Some men just have a nice chunk of a forearm as teens, and that’s the way they are.
. It’s not that they eat more or exercise more. They are meaty. Nice meaty muscly fellows. I have gone through periods in the last few years where I ingest tons of protein, way more than necessary, and work out super hard, and get little bitty results. And im grateful for those. Seriously. But others might do the same thing and be gifted with an awe inspiring bod.
My forearms, even with special attention and care, add muscle at a very very slow rate. There are many men who with no effort at all, started with far more impressive forearms, claves, buttock, neck, quadricep than I might ever possess even if I dedicated my life to those muscle’s development. My calves. Ach! My calves are shameful. Muscly, sort of, in a stringy way, like a non-USDA approved piece of meat, and strong enough to get me around and about, but shameful and unmanly looking to me.
My goal is to just try to at worst stop any muscle loss going forward, and to gain an ounce of muscle here and there when possible.
This sounds easy, but adding a bit of muscle requires a very high level of perceived exertion on my part.
