When the news broke that Kali Muscle had been hospitalized, many bodybuilding fans just couldn’t believe it. You see things all over the interwebs and many times people are left wondering what’s real and what’s not.
Kali is one of the most talked about bodybuilders because of the fact that he was able to build a tremendous fanbase and hold on to that fanbase over the course of many years. I mean Kali was a contemporary of the late great Rich Piana. He was popular back then and he was commanding huge lines at the biggest expos in the country and all around the world. He did do some competing, but he never got a pro card. Interestingly, there is a lot of commonalities between him and Rich. He was a bodybuilder that tried his hand at the competitive side of the sport and ultimately found out that it was basically like a money pit. You keep spending the money on the supplements, the training, but unless you’re winning the biggest pro shows in the world, it really is not worth the money or the aggravation. That being said, Kali understood the value of having a huge physique, carrying around maximum poundages, but also understanding that muscle alone was not enough to make you famous. This is where Slap City came into play. This is also where he Incorporated his time in the penitentiary to create a persona that had the muscle but was more than that.
Bodybuilding alone is not going to pay the bills. It is not a sport that is even considered as such by its own adherents. A lot of bodybuilders see bodybuilding as a pageant. They don’t see what they do in the gym and what they do on stage as being on the same level as basketball, football, hockey, or baseball. They see it as a pastime. They recognize that it is inherently a competitive pastime, but they stop short of calling it a sport. I would beg to differ. I do consider it a sport and I do think that it is very athletic and it does incorporate various different disciplines – from eating clean, to understanding the science of supplements, to understanding the science of training. But that being said, that is not going to make anyone famous. You could have the best washboard abs, but at the end of the day, so what?
What Kali was able to do was he was able to incorporate a prison lifestyle as a means to developing a killer physique. At the end of the day no matter how clean you eat in prison and no matter how much you train, you’re never going to look the way that he did when he was commanding huge lines at the expos. That look is the product of synthetic, exogenous hormones, as well as other substances. The very suggestion that he was even taking anabolic steroids was highly offensive to him, but oh well.
This goes back to the whole concept of being able to build a physique-based solely on training and dedication. It’s not only unrealistic but it’s also a farce. It’s what a lot of companies use to sell protein powder but something that most seasoned fans and experienced lifters know is a bunch of horseshit. And that’s where the gimmick comes in. Of course we know about Liver King and his ascent to fame and his nosedive Into obscurity, but that didn’t happen to Kali. He wasn’t the victim of being called out, or being exposed, or being had as a fraud. Even though what he was talking about was largely bullshit. He was talking about using an energy drink that consisted of Coca-Cola and instant coffee. Other times he was talking about using ramen noodles to get swole. Other times he was talking about how guys in the penitentiary would train with their body weight using towels and buckets and that that somehow could lead the person to develop them a bodybuilding stage worthy physique.
All of that stuff is utter rubbish. None of that stuff amounts to anything factual or anything that any person in prison could actually replicate. So in many regards what Kali was purporting was nothing different than what the Liver King was. Eating raw liver didn’t make him look like that, and eating ramen noodles and training with towels didn’t make Kali look the way that he did at the expos. Both guys are full of shit, but only one guy got exposed and only one guy was able to continue the farce for years to come
Sadly, guys like Kali unfortunately got huge in terms of their fame and fortune and just couldn’t help themselves. I mean what other profession allows you to lead the life of a rockstar while living a lie? And even though Kali got off all of the gear and had a more or less normal looking physique, then he went and underwent dangerous cosmetic surgery to change the color of his eyes. And when that was no longer grabbing people’s attention, I suspect he may have started dabbling with PED’s again – perhaps to get as big as he once was.
That type of bodybuilding, if you want to call it that, is certainly a young man’s game because the heart is being stressed out, the joints are being stressed out, and even the gastrointestinal system is being stressed out. You have to eat an enormous amount of food, train at an almost freak level, and hold on to a tremendous amount of size for no other reason than to continue to be famous on social media. Unlike the guys that are gunning for a pro card, people like Kali were simply gunning to stay relevant.
And again maybe Kali was hospitalized for indigestion, maybe there is a pre-existing condition we don’t know about, or maybe it’s something hereditary, but I’ve been doing this enough to know that performance enhancing drugs take a toll on the body. Whether you take them for 5 years, 10 years, or 20 or more years. Maybe they’re not the direct cause of the hospitalization but I would be absolutely shocked if they were not at least a contributing factor.
At the end of the day you have to ask yourself why are people willing to sacrifice their health and well-being just for some Instagram fame? Personally, it doesn’t make any sense to me. I want to be able to point the finger at a company or at a sport, but in Kali’s case, he owns his own business. Nobody is exploiting him. He is very much exploiting himself. And ignorance is not a defense because I’m sure that if he’s been to any doctor in the last 10 or 15 years they probably warned him about the very real risks about using these substances, training to this degree, and walking around with that amount of size.
People need to understand that we all have relatively the same heart, with relatively the same amount of strength, and for somebody to walk around at 50 to 100 lb more than their body weight in hard muscle – it’s going to take a toll. This is why some of the biggest bodybuilders drop down in size once they’re retired. Nobody wants to lose their muscle, but they don’t want to keep it at the risk of shortening their life.
At the end of the day, like I said, I don’t know why Kali was hospitalized, but if I had to guess I would guess that steroids had something to do with it. If I’m wrong, I’ll be one of the first to write a retraction. I would love to be wrong, but I don’t think that I am. I think that everything is about cause and effect. And what I think is dangerous about the use of performance enhancing drugs is that sometimes the consequences are not felt for many years to come, but they are felt. And they do come. I don’t think you need to be a doctor to recognize these cold hard facts.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading my article here at IronMag. I look forward to reading your feedback in the comments. Please be sure to copy and paste a link to this article on all your social media feeds. It’s bound to generate lively conversation. And in closing, one last time, I hope that Kali will make a speedy recovery. I pray for that and I also want to send a shoutout to his family, friends, and fans. Get well soon!
Author Bio:
Christian I. Duque is the owner http://StrengthAddicts.com , a physique and strength website founded in 2008. He has worked for a number of bodybuilding websites, including RX Muscle and Muscular Development. Christian has written nearly 1,000 published articles for Iron Magazine, as well as articles for StrengthAddicts, RX Muscle, and others. By day, he is also a licensed attorney practicing in the areas of family law, immigration, and criminal defense.
