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he bro with the muscles spies himself in the full-length mirror and is stopped in his tracks. Look at me. He’s in a singlet now, the Rocky Balboa-like grey hoodie in which he rocked up to the gym cast off somewhere, along with the T-shirt bearing a photo of “some bitch with her nipple out”. The scrap of cloth left accentuates his “shredded” upper body
- and he can’t take his eyes off it. He stands still, just “mirin”. That’s “admiring”, for you old dudes. He tenses his bicep, the one with the $2000 tattoo on the sleeve. Anthony Young’s an aesthetic, bro, a music festival-goer who gets the “bitches”, a risk-taker who looks good. Big. Built. Shredded. Ripped. That’s what you’ve got to be nowadays. It gets you respect. A guttural sound fills the gym. “Nngg-ha!” grunts Brett Eakins, an old private school mate with whom Young shares an often-strained relationship. “Err-yah, aarr, tchuu,” he groans as he pushes 120kg of dumbbells out from his massive chest. Young can’t hear him. He’s listening through earphones to dance music, not that mainstream crap on the video channel.
He’s wired into the techno stuff his idol, Aziz “Zyzz” Shavershian, used to dance to. Used to … before he died in a sauna in Thailand, his 22-year-old heart unable to cope with the cocktail of drugs and steroids he had allegedly pumped through it. Thump! Bang! Eakins drops the two 60kg weights – the heaviest in the gym – on the floor. He gets up, shakes his body, takes a slug of the amino acid drink Young mixed up earlier. He stands next to Young and the 20-year-olds look in the mirror. Just mirin. Later Eakins sidles up and lets me in on a secret. “We can put the weights down without making a noise,” he says. “Just drop ’em to show off.”
I FIRST SPOT YOUNG AND EAKINS AT ThE flesh-fest that is Creamfields, an international techno dance festival that hit the Gold Coast in May. Shirts off, tatts and abs on show, they thread through the crowd at the edge of the mosh-pit like trainee Zyzzs, stopping to exchange elaborate handshakes and backslaps with a mind-blowing glut of other buff dudes. On stage, someone’s singing about big booties and skinny bitches. This was Zyzz’s domain. He ruled at festivals, a tall, swarthy-looking guy of Russian origin with a killer smile, a sleeve tattoo and 100kg of honed bulk. He had swagger, he had confidence, he had ’tude. He’d let people – male or female – press a bicep, feel his taut skin. He’d ask them if they were “jelly” (jealous) and they’d say “yes”. His sidekicks were a coterie of mirror-licking narcissists he called the “Aesthetic Crew”. They moved as a pack, arriving to festivals ripped and shredded, living their credo: get big, get looked at, get girls. Their advice to would-be imitators? “Make sure your body fat is sub 10 per cent and you’re aesthetic as f..k and walk around at festivals.” Oh, and go shirtless “rain, hail or shine”. Zyzz was a product of the Facebook generation and he knew how to use it. Before his death in
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Half-naked, bulging with
muscles and preening at a
gym near you is a new breed
of young body sculptors
doing what it takes to stand
out from the crowd.
Photography David Kelly
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Story Leisa Scott
They say they’ve done their research into the side-effects of steroids. Melbourne-based Professor Rob McLachlan, an endocrinologist, researcher into male reproductive health and director of Andrology Australia says: “[Steroids] will cause fertility problems, make your testicles shrink; they can bring on breast development; they can damage your liver; it can affect your cholesterol and heart disease risk. When they stop it, in between the cycles [steroids are taken in set timeframes], there’s often a period where they feel terrible. The testosterone plummets.” He didn’t mention the acne, often from steroid use, but also a side-effect of protein shakes and legally bought so-called “testosterone boosters”. But steroids themselves, of course, are illegal. That doesn’t faze risk-takers such as Young and Eakins. They know “heaps” of people on steroids and reckon they could rock up to “80 to 90 per cent of bodybuilders in the gym” and get a supply. Look at Customs seizure figures, and they’re probably right. There has been a 500 per cent increase in confiscated steroids in five years, up from 1090 seizures in 2005-06 to 5559 in 2010-
- Look on the internet, and you can see why. Sites with offers such as “direct online and safe deliveries” to Australia abound, without mention of the illegality, and bodybuilding forums openly discuss – condemning and condoning – ways of
getting them into the country. “If you don’t do it stupidly, take over amounts of it, it should be all right,” Eakins opines. Young follows: “Use small doses and have your rest period, I guess it’s all right. As long as you’re eating a good diet. Drinking alcohol kills your liver as well.” You see, Young and Eakins have given up the booze and are very proud of how healthily they eat, with a strict diet of unbelievably boring food. They point to fat, beer-gutted haters who’d have trouble lifting a carton, or pallid gamers playing with joysticks and wonder why their preoccupation with fitness is questioned. “Feel like we’re using our life for a good cause,” Young says. “Making something of ourselves,” Eakins says. Or as the older head of McLachlan puts it: “They think, ‘I’m doing so many things right, why can’t I just have one little free pass on filling myself up with steroids that could have any number of contaminants in it, or a veterinary product. So cut me some slack here, I’m much better than I used to be’. So what sort of party pooper are you to go in there and start telling them, ‘You’re very silly boys’.” For now, Eakins and Young claim they’re happy to keep shovelling bucket-loads of chicken, rice, kangaroo, tuna, broccoli, oats and eggs down their throats and going to the gym every day to build up a different part of the body.
And taking supplements. This is a burgeoning industry, the growth in the popularity of these potions and pills illustrated by the proliferation of supplement stores in suburban strips over the past five years, some even muscling into prime CBD real estate in the past year. Once confined to selling to elite athletes and professional bodybuilders, the supplement makers (some affiliated with powerful pharmaceutical companies) have found a new, eager market – the young “aesthetics”. With names such as “Ripped”, “Awesome Mass” or “Max’s Life’s too Short to be Small”, these tubs of bulk-making proteins and carbohydrates often feature photographs of outlandishly big bodybuilders who even Young and Eakins don’t think they’ll ever match. But they admit they were seduced by the marketing when they started out. They’re still in its thrall. Young spends up to $400 a month on supplements and thinks that’s reasonable. One of his regular potions is a pre-workout supplement, an energy hit loaded with caffeine that is increasingly popular in gyms. He was using Jack3d but that was banned last month by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, along with a number of other brands that contain 1, dimethylamylamine (DMAA), commonly found in party drugs. People report tingling sensations, an extreme focus, an inability to sleep, and a desire to scratch themselves silly. Young says it used to make him “really zoned out”. But the duo say it’s the natural testosterone boosters they use occasionally that have the greatest side-effects. “They work all right, but they do increase anger levels, definitely,” Eakins says, as Young nods agreement. “You just get ticked off easier. Short fuse.” Good thing they don’t take them often, given every night out on the town involves a challenge from haters. Girls love them, and they’re happily playing the field, but some blokes just can’t resist having a go. “They want to start a fight because you’re bigger than them,” Eakins says. “Little man syndrome. I tell them to walk away. They’re generally pissed at the time. I haven’t had to hit anyone.” “Yeah,” Young says thoughtfully. “You could hit them, hurt your hand and be out of the gym for a week and that will put you behind for a month.” And that would be hell. I’ve only kept them from the gym for an hour and they’re twitching and fidgeting, keen to get this chat over with and back to pushing weights and being mired. They’re getting noticed in the gym. Younger blokes are already asking them for tips on how to bulk up and get shredded. “Some of them, they actually look up to us,” Eakins says. “I want to be a role model for the young people. Which is what Zyzz did.”
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SCOTT WASSON IS AN OLD-STYLE POWER- lifter with an old-style gym. In a garage in the back streets of Northgate, in Brisbane’s north, it has heaps of weights, six squat racks and a barbecue to throw a steak onto after working out. Not a television streaming music videos in sight. Wasson is also a moderator on bodybuilding forums and has developed a searing dislike and moderate concern for the new breed of Zyzz followers. He sits back in a dilapidated chair and lets rip. “As soon as I see a post that says mirin, I edit it and put admiring,” Wasson says. “Because we’re not six! Please, talk like adults. “Zyzz started all that and then it caught on and he’s known as the creator of this whole subculture. Some might diet and train properly, but it’s the Zyzz attitude that shaped them in the wrong direction,” he says. “The attitude. The only reason they train is to take shirts off and have sex with ‘bitches’. Just stupid.” Wasson, 25, holds multiple records in Australian and world powerlifting events and last week won the Raw (limited support gear) 90kg open men’s division at the Global Powerlifting Committee World Championships in Slovakia. He is particularly scornful of the supplement industry that he says preys on youngsters’ naivety. “They stick pictures of guys who have been using steroids for 10 years on the label and say ‘awesome muscle gaining protein’. It’s to capture these young blokes. Fifteen, 16-year-old kids think, ‘If I use this protein powder, I’m going to look like this guy. Well, yeah, if you spend $20,000 on steroids as well, train hard and use that protein, you probably could. But they just buy into it all.” Wasson pulls out a plain-packaged bag of the protein powder he uses, necessary he says to add the bulk he needs for competitions. It costs him a maximum of $60 a month. The only other supplement he takes is fish oil, about $ a month. “Apart from that, there’s no other supplement that is worth it. At all. “A supplement is to fill a void in the diet, if you’ve got your diet right you don’t need them. Not at these guys’ level. If you were a top-level bodybuilder, talking 130kg and shredded … that’s when all these other supplements come into play … There might be 10 people in the country that need the amount of supplements that these [young aesthetic] guys are taking.” Worse, he says, is the increasing interest in steroid use among the young. It’s an open secret that most bodybuilding champions use steroids and Wasson’s not against them. In fact, he argues they’re “safer than drinking alcohol” for people over 25. But he says they are dangerous for the young men “because your body is going through so many changes and once you start adding synthetic hormones, it just messes everything
up and your body doesn’t recover, then you have to be on them the rest of your life”. Or dead, in the case of Zyzz. “Kids used him as a role model and then they all figured out he used gear [slang for steroids] and now they’re jumping on the gear as well.” Steroid use is exploding among the young aesthetics, he says. Children of 15 are using. No doubt about it. That concerns Rob McLachlan, of Andrology Australia. He’s taken to going to the gym to observe this growing culture and been struck by the young fellows “with arms five times bigger than mine”. He’s also watched the camaraderie, the way mates “spot” for each other as they lift weights, the group-think of the subculture. “It’s easy to imagine how an impressionable 20-year- old might see the older, apparently wiser heads [at the gym] with all the very pseudo-scientific information they have as being legitimate,” McLachlan says. “They’re often fairly accurate, but can also be completely off and inappropriate.” For example, some of Wasson’s views match McLachlan’s, but McLachlan says there’s no basis for Wasson’s claim that steroids are worse for someone under 25 than over. The scientific community is not faultless, either, McLachlan says. Back in the ’80s, he says, science denied that steroids had any effect on
sports performance and physical appearance. When studies proved they did about 15 years ago, he says the bodybuilding community’s retort was, “Oh brilliant, you worked that out, have you?” “They’d known that. So [with science] having lost credibility early on, now they say ‘Bugger science, they didn’t even acknowledge the fact this stuff works for us’.” Warnings of side-effects by scientists are often seen through this prism. Science is also on the backfoot because of the clandestine nature of steroid use – researchers can’t conduct studies of their long-term effects. “It’s essentially unobservable,” McLachlan says. “What are the effects of being on these drugs long-term in high doses, in complicated mixtures for long periods of time? We don’t know.” What he does know is that he and colleagues around the world have patients who swear they stopped using steroids years ago, but are battling low testosterone, feeling unwell and are depressed. He’s also aware that information is unlikely to stop steroid use among young risk-takers. “They know where they want to go and they are just looking for fragments of information, factoids, that will allow them to have a structure to get them there,” he says. “If a factoid doesn’t agree, they’ll ignore it.”
THE GYM IS PUMPING NOW, fILLED WITH THE after-work crowd and the astringent smell of sweat. Podgy men do battle with machines, a couple of girls on exercise bikes are chatting more than pedalling and some scrawny blokes are dithering over which weight to use. Other young men with biceps to rival those of Young and Eakins amble in and get right down to lifting. Bang! Thump! Eakins drops his weights to the floor again. A few fellows turn around, mirin, but I’m pretty sure I saw an older guy sneer. Now it’s Young’s turn to grimace under the weight and Eakins stands behind to guide the dumbbells. “I’ve got it, dude,” he says. It’s then I notice the pimples on Eakins’ back. Not just pimples, but acne, a swarm of angry pustules disappearing behind the singlet. A protective impulse sweeps over me. I’ve grown to like these lads, saucy and vain as they are. They’ve always been polite and forthright, an endearing quality to a journalist. Is he already taking steroids? Has Eakins become another willing guinea pig in an unofficial case study, the dangers of which he won’t know until it’s too late? Is he on the road to ending up like Zyzz, a buffed-up corpse at 22? I wait for the lifting to finish and whisper to Eakins: “Is the acne from too many protein shakes or are you already on steroids?” He looks a little startled, or maybe slightly offended, and grins. “Too many protein shakes,” he says, then takes his place on the bench, pulls the weights up with his giant arms and starts pumping. n
vanities
Kids used Zyzz as a role
model and then they all
figured out he used gear.
Just mirin … Muscle-bound Brett Eakins strikes a pose on his Facebook page ( above and top ).
