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A NATURAL WINNER

By Chris Tucker |

PEOPLE JOHN HOFFMAN just wants to pump you-and himself- up. The legal way, that is.

Hoffman, 31, spent most of the ’80s as a highly ranked power lifter and popular personal trainer. At his peak, he could bench-press 550 pounds, dead lift (from the floor) 740 and squat lift 850. In 1988, he placed second in the United States Power Lifting National Championships with a combined lift of 2,000 pounds.

But Hoffman had some help keeping that iron aloft: steroids. It all came crashing down in August

1989, when Hoffman was arrested after customs agents traced dozens of packages of steroids to mail boxes he had rented. He received two nine-month sentences for smuggling and distributing steroids.

Hoffman did nine months of soft time at a minimum security prison where, ironically, he was put in charge of the weight room. He kept working out, figuring that once he was tree, he would go back to the drugs.

“They were a crutch, and I didn’t think I could lift without them,” he says. He discounts stories of dire side effects and thinks steroids should be available by prescription, as they were when he began taking them a decade ago. Shortly before his release from prison, owever, his religious beliefs-“the importance of Jesus Christ in my life”-led him to swear off better lifting through chemistry.

So Hoffman joined the Natural Athlete Strength Association, a national group that holds competitions for lifters who are not artificially pumped-and who can prove it with a lie detector test or a urinalysis before each meet. He recently won the Sooner Open in Oklahoma with a combined lift of 1,712 pounds.

Hoffman, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in theology, figures he will always lag about 60-100 pounds behind his chemically aided total. Still, he’s satisfied. “No weight lifter wants to see himself get weak and little,” Hoffman says. “But if your security is in the size of your arm, what do you have?”

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