Portrait of the Artist as an Old Dog

Recently, in an online discussion place, someone insisted that young male actors with muscles (the one under discussion was Tom Welling, who plays Clark Kent in Smallville) must be using steroids. I insisted otherwise. You can read the thread here . At least, I hope that works.

To try to finally win the argument, I decided to add a picture of myself. I posted:

I was a fat and completely inactive child and teenager. When I went away to college, I lost the fat, but I didn't become all that active. I had admired bodybuilders and fiddled very slightly with very light dumbbells occasionally as a teenager and did it a bit more when in college, but I didn't really get into it until I was almost 40. I'm now 63, so I've been lifting weights -- not often enough, not regularly enough, without enough self-discipline (sounds like my writing career!) -- for just about 25 years.

The attached picture shows the results. Please ignore the busy background and the embarrassed smile.

The point of this picture is that I've never used steroids and I started relatively late. I do (as far as I can tell) have good genes going for me. So a healthy young man, starting lifting in his teens or early twenties, with good genes, can expect much better results much more rapidly. There's no reason at all to assume use of
steroids.

Here's the picture: