BUILDING BODIES : THE OLD AND THE NEW : Petropulos Has Chosen the Established Route to Build a Better Physique

When Christian Petropulos was decorating her Glendale condominium a few years ago, she decided to forsake the Art Deco, contemporary and antique styles favored by many young professionals.

Petropulos, 35, is a chiropractor and a body builder. She wanted the home to reflect her personality.

“Once you get into body building, you can’t stop,” she said. “The only place I really feel comfortable is in the gym.”

So, Petropulos junked the traditional decorating styles and created one of her own--Early American Iron. It is difficult to walk through her home without tripping over a bench, barbell or tanning bed.

“I’m married to a barbell,” Petropulos said. “No one else would understand.”

Petropulos has enjoyed a quick rise in the world of body building, although she didn’t start serious weight training until about a year ago. She won the middleweight division (114-125 pounds) in the only two competitions she has entered--The Los Angeles Bodybuilding Championships in Culver City and the Orange County Muscle Classic at the Disneyland Convention Center. Her next goal is to win the National Bodybuilding Championships in Miami, Fla., on Sept. 6.

“When Christian started, she didn’t have a lot of hard, dense muscle on her,” said Diana Dennis, a professional national champion body builder and Petropulos’ trainer. “She worked hard and created muscle.”

Lots of it. So much muscle, in fact, that Petropulos--with short brownish-blonde hair, a defined chest and broad shoulders--is sometimes mistaken for a male.

“She’s a phenomenon,” said Pete Grymkowski, co-owner of Gold’s Gym in Venice where Petropulos works out twice a day. “Christian has taken to an exaggerated degree what most women want to do to a lesser degree.

“She’s four or five years ahead of everyone. The judges really haven’t been able to comprehend her physique yet. A lot of competitors are worried because they see the future in her physique.”

Petropulos is confident that acceptance from the judges and the general public is forthcoming. Her family, too, is beginning to come around.

“My dad says that he wishes I would buckle down on my chiropractic practice,” Petropulos said. “My mom says, ‘I wish your brother looked like that.’ ”

At 5-2, 140 pounds, Petropulos is short for a body builder. She’s even short for a chiropractor, who often works with patients taller than six feet.

“It’s all a matter of leverage,” Petropulos said. “When I was 110 pounds and pouncing on people, I couldn’t hold them down. Now they say, ‘You just about crushed me.’ ”

Petropulos credits her chiropractic background for some of her success in developing her physique. She continues to study physiology and endocrinology in search of a competitive edge.

“I’ll read for hours at night about what makes muscles contract and what hormones are involved in this or that,” Petropulos said. “I like to go at it scientifically. I don’t like doing it intuitively.”

Petropulos has gained most of her recognition for the ability to reduce her body fat to between 4% and 8% for competition.

“She’s like a designer who makes a whole picture out of little tiny lines,” Grymkowski said. “You can see every single fiber sticking out when she works out.”

Working out is the center of Petropulos’ existence. She schedules her typical day accordingly.

Petropulos starts with a light breakfast around 8 a.m. Between 9 and 11, she does chiropractic adjustments and counseling at her practice in Toluca Lake. At noon, she drives to Gold’s Gym and works out for an hour-and-a-half before returning to work at the office from 2:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. After dinner, it’s back to Gold’s for a workout from 9 to 11. Petropulos gets home by midnight, but doesn’t go to sleep until she rides her exercise cycle and spends an hour in her tanning bed.

Petropulos’ first exposure to weight lifting came as a teen-ager when her uncle gave her younger brother a set of weights. “I lifted the bars,” she said. “My brother hung his underwear on them.”

Until 1980, however, most of Petropulos’ energies were devoted to mental rather than physical endeavors.

A sociology and psychology major at Central Washington State, Petropulos became a self-described flower child after graduation in 1972. She moved from her home in Tacoma to the Cobb Mountain Meditation Academy above Santa Rosa. She spent her winters eating papayas and pineapples on the beaches in Mexico.

Petropulos was a manager for a string of health food stores until 1980 when she decided to direct all of her interest in health into a career as a chiropractor.

To help pay for tuition at the Pasadena College of Chiropractic, Petropulos took a job unloading trucks with the United Parcel Service. There, Petropulos and the other workers moved about 1,000 packages, weighing from 2 to 70 pounds, every hour.

“I was the only woman there, and I thought I was strong,” Petropulos said. “When I hurt my back 3 1/2 weeks later, I found out that I wasn’t.”

Few doubt her strength now. She does dumbbell presses with 65 pounds in each hand and can leg press 630 pounds.

“She stirs a lot of commotion when she comes in the gym,” Grymkowski said. “People stand in groups and watch and talk about her. She’s broken barriers of development that women thought were there.”

Sufficiently bulked up, Petropulos entered competitions where the lack of camaraderie among the contestants surprised her.

“Everyone stands around backstage all oily and greasy,” Petropulos said. “No one wants to talk to anyone else. There’s a lot of attitude going on.

“Some of the competitors are really cutthroat, and I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t think I was competitive; I found out I was.”

Some lessons were learned easier than others. Petropulos was unaware that a body builder’s posing outfit--a bathing suit--must be glued onto the body. Otherwise, the suit would fall off while flexing for poses.

“I was real nervous before the start of the contest and I had to go to the bathroom,” Petropulos said. “But I couldn’t because my trainer was out in the audience with the glue and I wouldn’t have been able to get my suit back on.”

Petropulos discovered she really could compete after battling through a painful muscle cramp in her calf while posing in her first contest.

“I struck a pose and I couldn’t unflex,” Petropulos said. “The judges must have been thinking, ‘What is she doing down in that position for so long?’ ”

Cramping, an occupational hazard for body builders, is most often brought about because of deficiencies built voluntarily into a competitor’s diet. To maximize their appearance, most body builders deny themselves certain foods, minerals and--in Petropulos’ case--water, as they approach competitions.

“The worse you feel the better you look on stage,” said Petropulos, who will shed 25 pounds before the nationals. “The general rule seems to be that if you feel that bad, you’re definitely going to win.”

Petropulos is hoping to win enough championships on the amateur level so she can become a professional body builder.

“Ideally, I’d like to have my own gym with a chiropractor table in back,” Petropulos said. “I can’t think of a greater thrill than having a picture of what you want your body to look like then creating it.

“All my life, I was always seeking something. Body building is it. I’ve never been so turned on by anything else.”