Muscle: A Writer's Trip Through a Sport With No Boundaries

by Jon Hotten

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.

Genres: Sports

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

English author, sport and music journalist. Contributor to Kerrang! magazine (1987–92) and Classic Rock Magazine, author of cricket blog The Old Batsman.

Reviews

[S.L. Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great read about the bizarre sport of bodybuilding. I can't get enough of these! Hotten's is particularly well written. Mr. Hotten starts from the beginning of the sport and traces through the early 2000s. He touches on the men who died from the excesses, like the Mentzer brothers and Andreas Munzer. He also discusses the winners who have managed to profit from the sport, like Schwarzenegger, Yates and Coleman. A large part of the book deals with the transition from the earliest bodybuilders, like Reeves, to the golden era of Columbo, Zane, Arnold, Oliva to the current era of heavily muscled freaks of nature like Coleman and Cutler.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun look at the Yates to Coleman era in bodybuilding through a series of chapter-length essays by Hotten. Much of this stuff--the Munzer death materials, the first Yates profile, the profile of the Welsh amateur Hotten knows--was published elsewhere, and this is your typical "let's shove it together for a book and get it out there." Hotten's a graceful writer, though, and the book flows like a bunch of Men's Journal pieces, which is essentially what it is. It's also odd that this book shares a title with Sam Fussell's memoir, since I'm reasonably sure Hotten was aware of that work (of course, Hotten's book was primarily aimed at the British market, so perhaps that has something to do with it). Hotten's weakness, that he's an outsider to the sport, is also a strength, but at times it seems that he veers between exoticizing and ridiculing these guys, which is what most outside journalists (even Paul Solotaroff, who has written some excellent pieces and claims a steroid-aided 305 bench PR for himself) do. Here's a simpler overview of the sport's history by yours truly: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/arc...

[Jonathan McGee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating

Best bodybuilding book I’ve read yet. Found the chapter on Andreas Munzer fascinating couldn’t put it down till I finished, brilliantly written interesting, covers all aspects of bodybuilding from the history, to the drug’s

[R. Moores · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man professional-bodybuilding is absolutely mental, all that sacrifice and suffering for an obscure title!

Great book.