Vishvak Sriram

Kristin Thomas-McGill

Writing 2

28, January 2021

Lift Big, Get Big

It was 7 AM on a bright Thursday morning in sunny California, and it was time for David

to wake up for school. A groggy David rolled out of his bed to get ready for school. His mom

yelled to him to come downstairs to eat his pancakes before she drops him off, as breakfast is ​the

most important meal of the day. David wolfed down his breakfast and hopped in the backseat of

his mom’s hatchback Nissan, and they were off on their way.

As David was on his way to school, he wasn’t thinking about his homework or about any

upcoming tests he had, rather he focused on all the fitness videos he had binged on YouTube the

night before. He had been very eager to share with his friends all the things he had learned about

fitness and the big news: David was considering joining a gym and he wanted his friends to join

with him. This was a big deal for David because he had always felt weaker and inferior to his

bigger and stronger peers. In his homeroom class, David eagerly sat with his group of buddies

ready to share with them all the things he had learned about getting jacked.

David pulled out his phone and played a couple of the videos he had seen on YouTube to

his friends. They seem disinterested and almost as if they were unimpressed. David immediately

noticed this and was curious as to why they didn’t have the same spark of motivation that he had
when he watched the video. It seemed as though his friends didn’t care nor know anything about

the fitness industry and worse, they would definitely be opposed to joining a gym. With this in

mind, David knew that this journey he was going to embark on would be a journey that he would

have to take all on his own.

David went home that day upset that his friends could not share the same excitement he

had, but nevertheless he wasn’t going to give up on joining a gym just because his friends didn’t

want to. The next step was to convince his mom to let him join. David knew in the back of his

head, “mom will say the same thing she says about everything, ‘it’s too dangerous David’.” He

had to be smart if he wanted to convince his mom to let him get a gym membership. He can’t

just barge in and demand a membership, he needed to show her his determination.

David decided to show his mom some of the videos he had favorited while he was on his

fitness binge. Of course, she immediately reacted just as he thought she would saying that with

David being so underweight, he would get crushed or injured by a weight in the gym. David

ignored his mom and kept pushing and pushing and pestering his mom until finally, she granted

him a visit to the gym to strictly “check things out” and ONLY that. David's excitement

skyrocketed as he was hyped to even be able to see the gym in person.

Once David and his mom arrived at the gym, David gazed at all the equipment in awe.

He knew what most of the equipment was used for but there were some foreign looking

machines that only made David more adamant on joining this gym. The manager working the

desk that day introduced himself to David and his Mother. His name was Michael, and Michael
sympathized with Daivd as he too was once his age. Michael saw the determination in David’s

eyes and it reminded him of himself when he was a kid. Michael and David’s mom chatted about

pricing and safety and Michael decided to offer David and his mom a discount. David knew his

mom was a sucker for discounts so he knew his chances of getting a membership had gotten a

whole lot higher. After talking to the manager about safety issues and seeing the determination

and eagerness her boy had, David’s mom agreed to let him join the gym. David was

overwhelmed with joy and excitement, and ready to put all the things he had learned from

YouTube to the test. He was going to become just like them, David thought to himself.

David’s mom left the gym and told him “I’ll pick you up, in one hour”, and just like that,

David was free to explore the iron kingdom. David remembered the core lesson of all the videos

he had watched: lift big, get big. With this in mind, David found the biggest weight he could fit

in his hands and he mustered up all his strength to pull this dumbbell off of the rack. The weight

didn’t even budge. “This 100 pound dumbbell should have been perfect”, David thought to

himself. Well that didn’t work, so he opted for a slightly smaller weight, but one that still proved

to be a huge struggle to lift for a beginner like him.

For a whole month, David kept lifting as he was taught in the videos. He didn’t worry

about his diet, his form, his progression as a beginner; the only thing that he worried about was

lifting big and how he could lift bigger. Over the weeks that he lifted, David experienced many

things like injuries and soreness, but the one thing that David didn’t experience was significant

progress. He was still the same exact fitness level and had the same muscle size that he had when

he had first started. Summer was getting closer and closer and David knew he could train all he

wanted during the summer without being distracted by school. But he had to do it right this time.
He wanted to achieve his dream of packing on some muscle so he wasn’t so scrawny and easy to

pick on. Nothing had changed since day one at the gym, and this was because David was victim

to all the misleading information that exists in the media for the fitness industry. How was this

possible? All the people in the videos were super jacked and they had to have known what they

were doing right? Otherwise they wouldn’t be as big as they are. David thought, maybe it’s

because he didn’t buy the supplements or programs these YouTube fitness stars were selling.

David needed to figure out his mistakes, so he could fix them and really train properly for

the summer. David decided, instead of looking at videos where the teacher is some jacked up

dude screaming at him through his phone screen, he decided to do some research and look at the

science behind lifting. David learned that Fitness and muscle building involves a LOT of things:

diet, training, genetics, supplements, and time. No matter how heavy David attempted to lift, he

wouldn’t make any progress unless he had a good diet, and he used proper form. He needed to

work on consistency, form and diet all together in order to make any significant changes.

David learned that, a lot of times on social media, the fitness community will portray

false information about fitness and make certain false claims about how one may succeed in

building muscle in order to get views and sell fake supplements and programs. These fitness

influencers would sometimes even use performance enhancing drugs that gave them a boost in

their fitness performance that was unrealistic for the average non drug using kid like David.

David saw through all these jacked up fitness advisors who were in fact just taking performance

enhancements and learned that they were just portraying a fake story of their fitness progress.
David learned from his mistakes in the end, and decided to start his summer lift session off with

some humble weights and good form!

Lift Smart, Get Big

This assignment brought back so many memories I had from back when I was just 15 or

16 years old, entering a gym for the first time. “David”, the main character of my children’s book

translation, and I are very similar in many aspects and the story I wrote is really just a retelling of

the things I went through as a novice lifter. The original article I translated, ​‘Lift Big-Get Big’

culture: Impact of images of hyper-muscular bodies and training information upon resistance

training beliefs in males,​ highlights the duality of using media sources to learn about fitness. Of

course there are many good resources on the internet, but there are just as many, if not more, that

are bad. By bad, I mean misleading information that could result in injury and worst of all, no

gains! The article is written in a way that’s geared towards an audience of adults. The diction

used in the text is definitely much harder to understand than the diction you would find in a

children’s book. This was a challenge for me as I needed to take something that seemed so

complex, but boil it down to something as simple as a children’s story. I decided the best way to

do so was to write my own story from the perspective of the character “David” and adopt the

same central idea of the article, but with my own personal experience tied into it.

Starting with the audience, I knew I had to make this story simple and fun to read. I’ll

admit, I had a tough time thinking of a way to make the idea of misleading media information

fun to read. “David” has quite a similar story to mine as I too was in his shoes once and had to

learn from my mistakes. It took me two years to actually start training properly because I was so

misinformed by the videos I was watching, I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t eating a

proper diet, I wasn’t training my entire body, and I was so caught up with getting big as quick as
I can that I injured myself in the process many times. The message of my story is one that I

resonate strongly with as I hate the fact that there are people out there pushing their physiques

and programs while claiming they are natural, but in actuality are taking PEDs. PEDs in short are

things like steroids and SARMs. These will increase the rate in which one is making muscle

gains but at the cost of their life span, cardiovascular system, and some body defects. These

drugs are not worth taking, and they are illegal to use. A lot of times, these fitness gurus on

YouTube will be on these drugs, so their results from their fitness activity will be very different

from that of someone who isn’t on these drugs. Not to mention, genetics is also a huge portion of

how fast someone makes gains as well as how someone looks after they have made gains.

Someone with “bad muscle insertions” may look very different from someone with “good

muscle insertions”. I put these in quotes because there really is no such thing as “bad muscle

insertions”, this is just another misleading concept pushed by the fitness media that I used to

believe. There are DIFFERENT kinds of muscle insertions, so of course everyone will look

different, but that doesn’t mean one looks good and one looks bad.

There were a few things I decided to not include in my translation just because it would

have made the children’s book narrative a little too complicated. There were really only a few

main points that I wanted to translate because the message resonated strongly with me. I wanted

to show how young adults and kids can easily succumb to what they see in the media and fall for

scams. I remember being a kid watching these fitness “tutorials” by these jacked individuals, and

thinking to myself, “man why can’t it be that easy for me?” The truth is, I wanted to get as big

and muscular as the people that I was watching, so whatever they said must be what’s working.

Obviously this isn’t true, and a lot of times these fitness people will sell their program in a “get

like me” way. You buy their program and their supplement line, and you’ll become just like
them. I’ll admit, there are a few gems out there that put out honest content and are giving out

good information that will actually help those out there that are just getting into fitness.

However, there are an overwhelming amount of people that are just using their platforms to

promote fake information and make money doing so.

Moving on from my personal experiences, there were a few resources and teachings from

our Writing 2 class that I incorporated into both my story and my reflection. I tried my best to

keep a more relaxed and less informal way of writing as this felt the most comfortable and also

just makes things easier to read and understand. After reading the article, I felt as though the

article could have been written in a simpler way. I was trying to read the article as a writer. I was

attempting to apply what I had learned from Bunn’s ​How to Read Like a Writer​ and I had

specifically tried to identify the choices that the author's of ​Lift Big, Get Big​ were making “so

that [I] can better understand how such choices might arise in [my] own writing.(Bunn, 2011)” I

knew that the target audience for this article was for people like me: adults who have had some

experience in fitness and have still lots to learn. In my own writing, I knew I had to boil this

article down to simple key ideas so that everyone could understand them. In this case, I tried to

write it in a children’s book style of writing, but that doesn’t limit my audience to only children.

If a child can understand it, so can an adult and this was my thinking behind my translation as I

didn’t want to make my story too childish in a way that limits my audience to only children.

Another key concept I used was from Lamott’s article, ​Shitty First Drafts.​ Lamott explains how

her first draft is a “child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the

place”(Lamott, 1994). I wrote my WP1 draft just as Lamott has explained, a “child’s draft”. I

wrote from the perspective of a kid and I just put my thoughts onto the document. There wasn’t

much review or changes being made, I just focused on getting my thoughts jotted down. Of
course Lamott does not mean to write from a child’s perspective when she says “child’s draft”

but I ended up doing that anyway and I’ll be honest, the first draft wasn’t so great. However,

with a lot of shaping up and rethinking, I was able to create a better and more enticing narrative.

I’ve always been big on writing a “shitty” first draft just because I am someone that has lots of

ideas and thoughts. I spill out all my thoughts, and then condense it down to what’s best for the

paper I'm writing. One of the biggest problems in my writing in the past, and sometimes in the

present is trying to sound overly academic. Vershawn Ashanti Young says it perfectly here, why

“[use] a big word where a lil one would do”(Young, 2010)? I have become more comfortable

with writing in a more relaxed and less formal tone over time but my main issue was with what

circumstances to use a formal writing style and when to not. Young puts it pretty clearly though,

why make something more complicated than it has to be. You're much better off writing

something that may sound less academic but is easier to understand than something that makes

no sense. This is something that a children’s story should employ obviously because the goal is

to make the story easily understandable.

As most of this reflection stands true for my second run at this assignment, I had decided

to make my narrative sound more like a narrative and less like an assignment. As I had

mentioned before, the translation was hard at first as I had to take something that involved so

many moving parts and really just make it digestible to a much broader audience. The second

time around, I tried to create a better flow for the story, and remove parts of the story that

seemed forced for the completion of the assignment. I had to convey the important aspects of the

article and in doing so I had put in some lines that just didn’t fit with the narrative and sounded

more like stating factual information.

 This assignment, again, has brought back some old memories and was an interesting task.

Taking an academic article and boiling down it’s concepts is something I learned from

completing this assignment as I tend to sometimes get overwhelmed by certain academic

writings. Some may be too hard for me to understand at first, but boiling it down to its main

points makes things so much easier to understand. So for next time I come across an article that I

have trouble understanding, I’m going to turn it into a “children’s book” and interpret it in my

own English.
 Works Cited

Lamott, Anne. ​Bird by Bird.​ Anchor Books, 1997.

Lowe, Charles. ​Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing Volume 2​. 2010.

Martino, Elio, et al. “The ‘Lift Big-Get Big’ Culture: Impact of Images of Hyper-Muscular

Bodies and Training Information upon Resistance Training Beliefs in Males.” 2019,

doi:10.31236/osf.io/7pbfc.

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” ​Writing Centers and the

New Racism,​ pp. 61–72., doi:10.2307/j.ctt4cgk6s.7.