Muscle: A Writer's Trip Through a Sport With No Boundaries
About this book
A hilarious and somewhat disturbing look at the weird sport of bodybuilding, Muscle is a journey through a land of giants — men who worship at the altar of Arnie.Bodybuilding is the wildest, weirdest sport in the world, but it is more than just a sport; it’s a whole way of life for the supermen who scale its Olympian heights. In Muscle , John Hotten fights his own unpromising genetics to hitch up with the bodybuilding circus, from London to Las Vegas, Amsterdam to Arnie’s place. As his forbidding subjects open up, confiding their fears and ambitions, he discovers a story of unregulated excess, chemical mayhem and hard-won glory in the pursuit of the perfect pec.Beginning with the shocking death of Andreas Munzer, a fallen hero with a 58-inch chest and 21-inch arms, and ending with the glitz and drama of the Mr Olympia competition, Muscle hangs out at the gyms and the shows, going head to head with the stars and legends — Dorian Yates, Ronnie Coleman, Jay Cutler and the Terminator himself — as well as the casualties, gym rats and iron junkies!Taking beef as its motif, Muscle is a book for everyone who’s ever looked in the mirror and wanted more.