PTA: Tales of a Physical Therapist Assistant

Chapter One

The Y

Let’s just shoot some hoops, I said to my best friend Pat as we stood outside the door to the weight room at the Chesterfield County YMCA.

The odor from years of sweat soaked carpet combined with high humidity was blown into the hallway by one of the oscillating fans.

As I stared into that room of muscleheads, being the scrawny 16-year-old kid that I was, only one thought echoed through my head: Nope, not gonna go in there.

Pat had been making trips to the weight room at the Y for the past several weeks and I had noticed that he was gaining muscle.

Come on man, he coaxed.

I don’t know, I said, shaking my head.

Remember Diggs? he asked.

Diggs. That name brought back memories.

Every year in gym class we had the dreaded President’s Physical Fitness Challenge, a humiliating series of tests intended to classify you as a physical role-model or a weakling. We’d all gather together and stand in front of Coach Mullins in our dark blue, one-size-too-small gym shorts.

The pull-up challenge was the worst. With all the girls in gym class watching, the guys would walk one at a time to the pull-up bar to see how many they could complete.

A great deal of strategy went into when to volunteer for your turn. Following one of the weaker guys was the key. Following one of the football players would make your two or three reps look downright puny.

Todd Diggs was no football player. He had a body that lacked any hint of muscle tone. His look was complete with pale skin, stringy black hair, and reading glasses to match.

He sheepishly walked up to the bar after John Metten, captain of the football team, cranked out 15 reps causing all of the girls in class to break out into a spontaneous round of nervous laughter and applause.

Obviously Todd hadn’t received the strategy memo. He jumped up and grabbed the bar, arms fully extended above him. And that was it. He tried as hard as he could, but his elbows barely flexed even five degrees. Instead of giving up, he continued to hang in quiet perseverance in the pin-drop quiet room.

Pat yelled, Come on, Diggs! in mock encouragement, but it was of no use. Todd looked like a desperate soul clutching the ledge of a building.

Twenty agonizing seconds later, he dropped.

Zero reps! Coach Mullins shouted matter of factly, as he jotted it down on his clipboard.

Who’s next?

Several hands shot up, but anticipating Todd’s weak performance, I had already edged to the front of the class and walked to the bar without asking. With a burst of adrenalin, I jumped up and knocked out four reps. No applause followed, but neither was there laughter. I achieved my goal, I had avoided embarrassment.

Yeah, Diggs, I replied to Pat, still pondering the memory.

Pat opened the door and we walked into the weight room.

We’re going to get big, he proclaimed.

Little did I know, that sweat smell would become my new oxygen five days a week for the next two years.

So there I stood in the 600ft² weight room that was filled with mostly 30-50-year- olds, with barrel chests and thick bodies. The room itself was downright depressing. It had concrete block walls painted chickenshit yellow and featured no windows.

The room contained two bench presses, one incline press, a squat rack, one pulley machine, a couple of flat benches, and dumbbells. That was it. All were free weights except for the pulley machine.

Only years later would I understand how deciding to walk through that door set off a chain of events affecting every aspect of my future.

Upon entering, I was the immediate center of attention. At 5’11" and a 145 pounds my thin frame stood out like a sore thumb.

Pat walked confidently over to an open bench.

Spot me, he said.

Huh?

Just lift the bar off my chest if I need it, he explained.

Pat lied on his back and reached up to the bar with two manhole cover looking 45 pounds weights on either side. It might as well have been a million pounds to me.

Give me a lift off, he said.

Huh?

Lift it up, he said.

I grabbed the bar with both hands and was barely able to lift it off its rusty cradle. Pat took the bar and cranked out ten reps. He set it back down with a loud clank and sat up, Your turn.

He stood and replaced the two 45 pounds plates with two smaller 25 pounders. I nodded, sat on the bench, and leaned back feeling the fake Naugahyde against the back of my head.

Pat helped with the lift off and the bar fell quickly to my chest.

Come on man, big set, he said.

Big set, I thought, and probably my last set.

As my wobbly arms struggled to raise the bar back up, I grunted while my right arm overpowered my left until the bar finally returned to parallel.

That’s one, Pat said.

Pat was crazy. At least he liked to give people that impression. We met and started hanging out when we were freshmen. He lived in the neighborhood next to mine, and after knowing him for a couple of years I still couldn’t tell if it was a game or if he really had a screw loose. He loved shock value and would do anything to draw attention to himself in a way that would make people afraid of him.

He was over six feet tall with stringy blonde hair and eyes that were set too close together. I’d seen Pat transform over the past six months from an average built high school kid to someone who looked like a letterman in any number of sports.

Pat showed his love for lifting by sporting a collection of Gold’s Gym and World Gym T-shirts he had ordered from various far away locales. He was most proud of his Gold’s Gym Moscow shirt.

Pat was a kid of few words and deep inner contemplation. He had a distinctive way of answering questions that I was able to precisely mimic as time passed.

Hey Pat, you want to grab a pizza? I’d ask.

He would cock his head to the side, pause and take a deep breath, then on the exhale nod his head several times.

Yeah, he’d say after going through his routine.

Pat had no interest in sports, no real sports anyway. He was fascinated by professional wrestling. He constantly quoted pro wrestlers, and at the ripe age of 17, believed lifting weights would somehow connect him to the athletes he loved.

We were juniors in a high school of about eight hundred students. Neither of us was a brilliant scholar. We spent most of our days quoting movie lines and going on beer runs so we didn’t show up to parties empty-handed. We’d drive to the bad parts of town and offer an extra $5 for someone to buy us a case of beer. It always worked.

Pat confirmed his reputation as partially insane during an exhibition the wrestling team put on for the entire school. It was an episode that established him as certified.

The school had a makeshift professional wrestling ring set up in the middle of the gym. Each member of the wrestling team was dressed in different costumes and showed off various moves, much to the delight of the audience in the standing room only gym.

They even had a ref. In the middle of the final match, the two wrestlers circled the ring, just like the pros, pointing to the crowd and slapping their chests.

Suddenly, on the other side of the gym, something caught my eye. A lone student rushed down from the bleachers and sprinted towards the ring. On the way there, he ripped his shirt off and spun it around over his head. It was Pat. And I wasn’t surprised at all.

He dove under the ropes of the elevated ring. Both wrestlers stopped in their tracks and stared at each other shocked. This wasn’t part of the show.

Without hesitation, Pat charged the first wrestler and knocked him down with an arm strike to the chest. The other wrestler immediately started backing up, looking around for some kind of support.

Pat took a slow step towards him, then charged. The poor guy didn’t know what to do when Pat grabbed him by his neck and crotch, picked him up, and body slammed him. As Pat raised his hands in victory, the crowd went apeshit.

He then turned his attention to the five-foot-four referee. Mr. Butta, the biology teacher, had for some unknown reason volunteered to be the ref for the exhibition. The look on his face said that it was a decision he was deeply regretting.

He blew his whistle as Pat stepped towards him. He blew it again holding his arm outstretched, traffic-control style. Pat was encouraged.

Pat charged, grabbed Mr. Butta’s crotch and shoulder, hoisted him up, and body slammed him. He pumped his arms in the air which launched the crowd into a bigger frenzy.

I put my head in my hands in disbelief. Later on, I asked him if it was worth the three-day suspension.

Had to be done, he said plainly.

Pat would often come over after school and we’d hang out talking up the usual high school guy subjects: girls and parties.

Pat’s father was a preacher and very strict. More than once Pat would come over with a split lip or a black eye and blame it on a bike accident or something else. I never pressed him on it. Friends don’t do that.

The next day was Saturday and I woke up the morning after the first workout in my life. The results were as expected. The pain was everywhere, especially in my chest. Pat showed up around noon in his big green Galaxy 500.

Let’s hit the Y! He belted.

Instead of the pain keeping me from ever wanting to lift weights again, it had the opposite effect. Pain meant something was happening. Pain meant my muscles were getting bigger. In my juvenile brain, pain was good. And I wanted more of it.

Neither Pat nor I had a pot to piss in. We never could afford the $20 a month to join the YMCA. Luckily, a friend of ours named David Hardin had a family membership and never used it. We signed-in as David and Scott Hardin and walked right in.

A month later everyone knew us as David and Scott, and no one ever questioned us. The regulars in the gym soon became our friends. The same group of guys was there every time we went. We had nicknames for all of them.

There was Batman, a 250 pounds square-jawed guy made of solid muscle. He could bench 405 pounds for eight reps, the record in the gym. He looked just like a superhero.

Then there was Shorts, a 45-year-old 5’5" spark plug with a dark mustache and a prematurely-balding head. He wore tight yellow coach’s shorts and lived with his mom.

There was Hair Guy. He was permanently tan and looked just like the lead singer of any big hair band popular in the mid-80s. From behind, he could have easily been mistaken for a young David Lee Roth.

These were my first instructors and I absorbed every word they said.

The first time I ever did triceps press downs on the pulley was a lesson in frustration. Pat was in the bathroom and I thought I’d try it after watching one of the other guys. As I performed a couple of reps, Hair Guy came over.

Let me show you something, he interjected. Keep your elbows in, like this.

He performed a couple of reps then handed the bar back to me. I tried again.

No, no. Don’t lean over the bar. Elbows in. It’s all about form. Form is the number one most important thing when you lift.

I tried again.

You’re going too fast. You’ve got to control the bar on the way up. It should be half as fast as when you push it down. That’s a negative. That’s where you get stronger.

He wouldn’t let me do it wrong and made me keep working on it. I just couldn’t get it. Finally, after ten minutes, he was satisfied.

Remember, good form is what sets you apart from people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Pat and I became obsessive about lifting. Our early morning beer runs turned into early morning sessions at the Y. Sometimes we’d go twice a day.

A year later, I was 20 pounds heavier with solid muscle. I was bench pressing two hundred and twenty-five pounds for eight reps and maxing out at 305 pounds.

Maxing out, that’s the most weight you can lift for one rep. It was a constant topic of conversation. You max out today? we’d all ask each other. It was bragging rights if you went up ten pounds.

The one thing I noticed was that even after a year, the same guys were always there, always