Intensity or Insanity - Part One - Come enjoy the compelling story of John Defendis, at the time the future Mr. USA and IFBB Professional

This was in 1977. Richard Dreyfuss had won the award for Best Actor, the New York Yankees had won the World Series in baseball, bread was "on the cheap," and a young 18-year-old John DeFendis was learning the most masochistic style of training on his way to his goal of becoming a bodybuilding champion.

You see, I was a teenager who trained for eight years and competed a total of 9 times without taking home a trophy. In my determination to win, I made a decision that would change the next 15 years of my life. I decided to train with Mr. America Steve Michalik.

It all started one day when I decided to go to the gym where all the so-called champions trained: Mr. America Gym. This wasn't your normal fitness center. The walls were painted black and the equipment was painted red, very reminiscent of an old gothic torture chamber. There was a six-foot syringe painted on the wall by the bar that read, "Password of the Day - Up Your Dose!" The day's signature pad for the trainees also had a pen tied to it in the shape of a syringe.

I walked in and asked where Mr. America was, saying I wanted to talk to him. That was my first mistake. Steve Michalik was not your typical gym owner. He didn't care about business and he didn't care if he hurt anyone's feelings. Come to think of it, the only thing Steve Michalik really cared about was training. I don't mean training the way normal mortals think of it. His type of training gave the whole thing a whole new dimension. After all, Steve's motto: "Train beyond the pain...death is your only salvation" speaks volumes.

The guy behind the bar pointed to a section of the gym that was bordered by rope and said: "Steve's training over there, but I wouldn't disturb him if I were you." "Well, Mr. Gym Worker, you're not me," I thought to myself. After all, I was a very promising future champion who had just placed fifth in some local junior competition, so I was sure Steve would be very happy to talk to me.

John Defendis and Steve Michalik

Our meeting went something like this: "Hi, I'm John DeFendis and I was wondering....." I hadn't even finished the first sentence when this Hulk-like guy transformed into some kind of monster. I wished I had brought a cross and a stake to drive through his heart, because that would have been about the only thing that would have kept me from what was about to happen. He dropped the one-armed handles he was currently lifting to his biceps and started yelling at the top of his lungs, "You son of a bitch, I'm going to kill you if you don't get out of here right now. I'm gonna kick your ass. Get out of here right now and don't come near me again when I'm training!!!"

At that moment I felt like I probably wasn't welcome here right now and that it would probably be best if I left. So I left. However, my desire to win at bodybuilding far outweighed my instinct for self-preservation and my will to live, so later that evening I went there again - for more humiliation.

This time I crept around the outside wall and peered in the windows. Suddenly something landed heavily on my shoulder. It was someone's hand. As I turned around, I came face to face with my worst nightmare. I saw shoulders like bowling balls, biceps like grapefruits. It was him, Mr. America.

I was waiting for him to take me down. He looked me in the eye and said, " What did you want? But talk fast, because I gotta eat soon." I said, "I want to be a champion like you. I want to be Mr. America. I thought you'd let me train with you to achieve my goal."

Steve said, "Yeah, so you want to be a champion, huh? And what makes you think you have what it takes?" Before I could answer Michalik continued, "Alright Mr. Champ, be here tomorrow at 5am and we'll see if you have the balls to train like a champion. Don't be late, champ, be on time!"

The next day I was like a little kid going to the candy store. I was so excited to train with Mr. America. This was my first chance. I ran into the gym, expecting Steve to be waiting for me and explain my workout. Instead, he was engrossed in a crazy workout. Streams of sweat were splashing off him and he had an almost hypnotic look, almost intimidating.

When he finished a set, he dropped the barbell and looked in my direction. "It's 5:05 and you're late. Get out of my gym and don't waste my time. Be here tomorrow at 5:00 sharp and I'll give you another chance!" The next day I was there at 5:00 am sharp. The only problem was that there was no sign of Steve Michalik anywhere. I sat on the curb and waited. It was 6:00, then 7:00, and finally 8:00.

Steve finally showed up at 9:00 to open the gym. As he got out of the car I said, "This is bullshit, where the fuck have you been?" Well, that's not exactly what I said.... It sounded more like, "Mr. Michalik, I'm sorry I was 4 hours early for my workout. Can we start training now?" Steve just unlocked the gym door and mumbled something like today is not his training day and if I want we can start at 5:00am the next day if I have the guts to show up.

I left disappointed again. I didn't get much sleep that night because I was determined to show Michalik that I was tough and indestructible. The next morning I arrived at 4:45. Steve showed up shortly after. He asked me if I was training hard. I grinned and said smugly: "I train harder than anybody." Steve chuckled too and said: "All right, champ, let's get started."

He started setting up a few exercise stations. Then - after strategically setting up the dumbbells on several benches and setting up several machines - he fenced them off with thick rope. Later, we called that enclosure "Hell on Earth." This is where it all happened. Michalik convinced me that we were like gladiators going into battle. The confined area of the gym was our battlefield and you came out victorious if you could stand the pain and survive the battle.

On my way to victory, I met the porcelain throne head-on several times. In other words, I puked my guts out. I was forced to do series after series without any rest until I had to park myself in the bathroom again. Instead of doing forced reps, I did forced sets. I was forced to do them. After a week of these torturous workouts, I found myself in the hospital - trying to dig myself out of a state of utter exhaustion.

I learned my first lesson. Don't try to hang with Michalik. He's almost supernatural. I lay there wondering what went wrong. Michalik told everyone I was mentally weak and should switch to badminton or cricket. It pissed me off and I was more and more determined to convince this cyborg that I had what it takes to become a champion....

The day after I was released from the hospital, I went back to the gym and said dryly right to his face: "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger." We became a team. We encouraged each other to reach as high as we could and not settle for anything - except the best. My performance skyrocketed. I went on to win Mr. New York, Mr. East America, Mr. West America and finally the American Championship.

But I paid taxes along the way. The training was brutal and my name became synonymous with the slogan "Intensity or Insanity". People often wonder if my workouts were intense or already insane. We never did less than 40 sets per game. Sometimes up to 100 sets per game.....

Steve Michalik

When Michalík was training, his eyes were burning with hellfire. The man was an animal. I lived my every moment in anticipation of the ass-kicking workouts that lay ahead, wondering how I was going to stand up to them. I lived by Friedrich Nietzsche's quote: "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger."

The key was to find a way to survive these workouts and get better at them. It wasn't easy in the beginning, but I was determined not to give up. I wanted to win the U.S. Championships and earn a spot on the books. I wasn't doing it for my health. I was doing it because I wanted to be the best. If you want to be a champion, you have to sacrifice something. Michalik was not only a champion, but he was also the Vince Lombardi of bodybuilding. Winning at all costs... Winning meant everything. He always said, " Train till you hurt....death is your only salvation!"

It was a hot summer day in 1979. We had just finished a brutal 55-set leg workout. Yes - that's right. Fifty-five sets. It may look silly today and you may think we overtrained, but in my twenties my thighs were cut to the bone - measuring 73cm.

Big, thick, hard quadriceps back in the days when people still cried the word creatine and before anyone had ever heard the words "growth hormone". One then wonders about so-called harder training in today's era of IGF-1, insulin, and growth hormones.

But back to the past. That crazy guy Michalik invited me to go to the beach with him to catch some sun and get a little brown in preparation for the Mr. USA competition. On the way there, I kept asking him what I would have to do to win it. What other sacrifices would I have to make on top of the ones I was already making?

Steve was quiet. He just looked out the window of his car and didn't say a word. Soon we arrived at Jones Beach beach. We threw our towels in the sand and went into the water. As soon as we got deep enough away from the shore, Steve grabbed me and pushed my head under the surface. I slipped away from him for a second to catch one short breath above the surface, before he held me all under the water again, where I thrashed about. He allowed me to take at least one breath a few times before I had to go back into the depths. I fought with all my might, punching and kicking him. Eventually I had no strength left and was beginning to fall unconscious. Michalik pulled me out of the water and threw me onto the beach. As I spit and vomited water he started screaming like a madman, "Tell me how badly did you want that one little breath? How badly did you want it? When you want to win as badly as you wanted that little breath of air, then come to me! That's what you need to be the best!!!"

That day began a merry-go-round that wouldn't stop for three years. Michalik was a teacher with ever increasing demands and I was a punching bag. Day by day, week by week I started to grow bigger and better. The training sessions were indescribable. But Michalik taught me more than just how to train. He ingrained in me a will to win that was superhuman.

I lived for training, food and sleep. I worked just enough to afford the pleasures of life - like a 1972 Chevy Vega automobile with a battered front end, an endless supply of chicken, a basement apartment with a mattress on the floor, and a stack of vitamins. In retrospect, I realize the meaning of the phrase: Happier than a pig in rye. My lifestyle was misery for most, but I was at the height of bliss. I was doing what I wanted to do and getting closer to my goal.

I didn't mind getting up at 5:00 am every day so I could eat egg whites and be at the gym by 6:30 am. I didn't mind that for the second half of my workout I was basically being dragged around like someone getting caught on the bumper of a car. What was most important was the fact that I was training with the Master of America and even though he was mentally and physically torturing me to death, I was improving dramatically.

My biceps - once 45 cm - were now well over 50 cm and the tops were getting even higher hour by hour. The one-handed dumbbells I once used for heavy chest presses became a warm-up weight for biceps lifts and pull-ups. "Intense or crazy?" The workout was what we ate as regularly as other people eat breakfast. Every time someone said we couldn't do something, it inspired us to do it. 50 sets for a biceps lift with heavy weight? Done. 30 sets of squats...220lbs for incline bench press, 50lb one-arm biceps raises, 40s for deadlifts, 60 sets for back raises. Our lives could be characterized by a quote from the famous Walter Gagehot: "The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you can't do."

It was around this time that my parents realized I was becoming obsessed with Michalik. They hated him for making me a living, eating, breathing, training machine. They tried to cut me off, but it was too late. As I discovered that these long training units were the key to my improvement, there was nothing on earth that could separate me and the gym.

Yeah - the gym. Michalik's gym. No aerobics classes, no cardio zone, sauna, steam, or pool. No squash. Just big, black machines with red seats and red benches to make it look like a medieval torture chamber. When you came to Mr. America Gym to work out, there was only one way to.... one speed: very hard and very fast.

The facade and the outside walkway around the main entrance had to be hosed down several times a day to wash down all those returned breakfast and lunch items. This was the true hardcore Mecca of bodybuilding. The temple of insane workouts. No wanna-be-trainers going off for a few sets of biceps and then blabbing and looking in the mirror. If you didn't train hard, you were shown the door - unless you walked right through it. Medals were won based on how many brutal workouts one was able to endure. Respect was not based on how one looked, but how hard one could train.

Steve didn't fight anyone. One time a guy, with his arms spread apart with no obvious back muscle development, came to practice. Steve stopped him and told him he owed him three months for his season ticket. The kid, annoyed, said: "Well, yeah, sure, whatever. Look, I'll pay you next time." And he went on with his training. Steve reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a hammer. He stood up and walked to the door.

"Oh shit - I need to see this. This is going to be good." I thought to myself. As I walked out the door of the gym, I saw Steve walking over to the kid's Corvette and then smashing out the headlights. The kid flew out of the gym just as Steve was busting out the passenger side window. The kid was going, "Stop it! Somebody call the police! What the hell are you doing to my car?" Steve looked nonchalantly at the kid and said: "It's okay. Now we're even. You can go practice."

In retrospect, I was living in a very twisted reality. My morals and views were reshaped and upset by Steve's philosophy. Buying fifteen pounds of chicken breasts so I could have enough protein was more important than paying rent on my apartment. Being on time for practice was more important than being on time for work. If someone trained with us and ended up in the hospital (which happened a few times), we didn't even visit them and wrote them off as mentally and physically weak.

As I think about the past I have one thing to add to Friedrich Nietzsche's quote, and that is, "If it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger and if it kills you you shouldn't have trained with us!"

Pain! Pain!! PAIN!!!

Why is it that in a life full of suffering and pain, some of us become free to willingly endure even more pain? As I sit here looking back on the Michalik era, it's not hard to understand why I submitted to such torture. My determination stemmed from the fact that I wanted to win, to be a champion. We all have that deep down. We all want to achieve our goals. Some people make excuses for their failures, but there are no excuses. A champion is a champion, and a champion never backs down because of the obstacles that lie in their way.

Mr. America Gym. Michalik struts his way through the gym with 30-pounders for a stretch on the incline bench. I know that workout. Three benches, three exercises, all sets to exhaustion. Non-stop killer supersets. Steve starts with almost 150 pounds on the Smith machine on the incline bench. Immediately after the series, he jumps to the second bench for a series of lunges, and finally to pullovers over the last bench with a 45-pound one-armed machine.

He moves methodically like a programmed robot. I can see him in the corner of my eye as I slide down to the bench for the deadlift. He's indestructible and I know I can't slow down because in a few minutes he'll get behind me in the rotation and make me impossible. I realize now that I haven't trained this way since I left Steve a few years back. By the third round of these exercises, I feel completely exhausted and start to panic. As the fear takes over, Michalik yells at me, "Come on!!! Look at you! ! You're a piece of shit! What the hell have you been doing for the last few years? Sitting on your ass and eating chips?!?!?"

That really got me going and somehow I found the energy to switch gears. At that moment I must have gone crazy because I heard myself yelling at Michael: "Come on! Bury me if you think you can.... Just try to get me back to the hospital! You'll be the one who gets the ambulance, Mr. Mushroom!!!" And damn - I couldn't believe it. That came out of my mouth? I was starting to sound like a Michalik clone.

As I think about that moment now, I wonder how many brain cells I was missing when I was born. Probably too many.

Masochism: The state of being happy to be humiliated and hurt.

Masochist = John DeFendis.

Michalik was right. I was a cocky brat, but this time I was a cocky brat who was about to get the biggest beating of his life.

My pathetic remarks only energized the lunatic. His face tightened with a fury and madness that would have frightened Freddy Krueger. He grabbed me and threw me on the peck deck. Then he started running around like a madman, picking up brick stops from everywhere in the gym. It didn't take me long to figure out what was coming next. Pain and suffering.

He strategically placed all the stops between the bricks. All 5. The first set was with full weights and as I got to exhaustion, Steve made me squeeze in a few extra reps before pulling out the first stopper. The pain was unreal. I wanted to quit after the third indent, but I knew that wasn't an option. To quit was to die. It seemed to take hours to finish the set, but it was only a few minutes. Now it was the master's turn. I wanted so badly to enjoy the moment that was about to happen. His pain was my pleasure and it gave me pleasure.

Sadism: the pleasure of inflicting pain on others.

Sadist = John DeFendis and Steve Michalik.

Michalik went through repetition after repetition. It looked easy at first, but after the second stop, even his face started to twist. After the last reps with each weight, I threw the next stop as fast as I could so he wouldn't have a second to rest. I wanted him to die so I could go home a winner. Or to put it another way, I'd be happy to go home alive and in one piece.

It wasn't long before I found myself back at the machine. "Round two!" Shouted Michalik. I knew there would be five of them. This was Steve's favorite. He didn't quit while he could still move. He wanted to teach me a lesson in total destruction. I finally finished the last series and I remember whispering to myself: "Get me the fuck away from this machine..."

As always, there were a lot of wannabe-Michaels standing around, watching to see if I would give up or not. In all the years Michalik has trained with the emerging champions, only a few have endured his workouts. Most of them are now in isolation in psychiatric hospitals. And if you get close enough you can hear them screaming, "No more, I can't do one more rep! Let me go home!"

Training with the "Intensity or Insanity" style was not only the method that allowed me to become a champion, but it was a time that will not be repeated. It was an era when most bodybuilders relied on animal training to get big and strong. Bodybuilders at that time plugged in nutrition and vitamins to get better and supplemented with minimal steroids to even survive those workouts.

Today with drugs like growth hormone, IGF-1, etc. bodybuilders still cry "overtraining!". I think it's bullshit when they have far more of it in them than we do. But that's just my opinion. And that's everyone's right, right?

That's all for now. To be continued next week.

Written by: John Defendis, Mr. USA, IFBB Professional