Read Online FITNESS CONFIDENTIAL by Vinnie Tortorich, Dean Lorey - Free Book Online Page A

hundred degrees outside, it was a hundred and thirty inside.
    It was heaven.
    Joe didn’t allow many people to work out there. Aside from Joe, there was this other buff guy named Charlee. He had a great tan and long brown hair that hung halfway down his back. He looked like he belonged on the cover of a Harlequin romance novel, if the guys on those covers could kick your ass.
    Then there was a black guy named Batiste, although everyone called him Bat. He was always quiet. He eventually moved to Ohio and did really well in body building competitions.
    Finally, there was Joe’s younger brother, Meatball. That’s right, Meatball Bonadona. Meat was in pretty good shape, but he wasn’t all that serious about working out. If the other guys spent four hours in the gym, he was in and out in an hour, and most of that time was spent cracking jokes. I liked him a lot.
    And then there was me.
    Joe had one rule I had to follow if I wanted to work out in his place. “I want you here five days a week,” he told me. “If you miss a day, don’t come back.”
    Looking back on it, Joe probably thought that a kid my age would never stick to the program and I’d be out of there in a couple of weeks, tops. What he didn’t realize was that I was at such a low point that I was literally ready to hang myself.
    It was my only shot.
    So Joe told me not to miss a day and I never did. In fact, there were days I’d go to school with a fever because it was within walking distance of the gym and I needed the school bus to get me close to it, rain or shine, sickness or health. Those four cinderblock walls gave me hope for a better future.
    As soon as I started pumping iron, my body changed quickly. In fact, adults used to tell me, “Be careful, because as soon as you stop working out, those muscles are going to turn to fat.” But I knew that would never happen because I knew that I would never stop working out.
    When I was eleven, Joe decided to take me from Donaldsonville, my small town in the Bayou, to Gonzalez, which had the first real gym I’d ever seen. He told me to bench press two-hundred pounds because he wanted to prove to the gym owner that he was training an eleven-year-old who could bench such a crazy amount of weight. But I didn’t bench press two-hundred pounds that day.
    I benched two-ten.
    The reason was simple. I was used to the bench press at Joe’s gym, which didn’t have any foam padding on it. It was just raw oak, which used to stain the back of my t-shirts with blood when the wood cut into my skin. But that bench at the fancy gym was so comfortable that I was able to do another ten pounds easy.
    The adults in the place were amazed. And supportive. It was a good feeling. Soon, the kids at school started to respect me and the teasing stopped.
    Except that’s not true …
    The kids didn’t respect or like me any more than they did before and the teasing got even worse. The only difference was that, now, the kids started coming at me in larger groups. So instead of fighting a kid here and there, I found myself fighting three or more kids at a time. And, of course, the school considered me the problem. Once you get that label, it never goes away.
    This all culminated at the end of sixth grade, when a record five kids tried to beat the shit out of me. But I’d gotten pretty good at fighting by then and I ended up kicking the shit out of them. The only thing I suffered was a ripped t-shirt. But I knew I wasn’t going to get away with it that easy. The coach, Lou Latino—and, no, I’m not making that up—saw the fight and took me to the office. On the way, we had a curious conversation.
    “Do you know that there’s actually a legal way to kick kid’s asses and have people applaud you for it?” he asked.
    “No,” I said, but I was certainly interested in hearing more.
    “Did you get held back a few years ago?”
    I nodded. “Yeah.” I braced myself, afraid he was getting ready to tease me. But he didn’t say