An Uplifting Experience : Saugus High’s Kimberly Templeman Racks Up Some Powerful Performances With Weights

Someone could have predicted this. Perhaps the grade school principal in Chicago who routinely hauled her into his office for fighting. Or perhaps the boys who were her victims in those schoolyard tussles.

Someone, certainly, could have foreseen that one day little Kimberly Templeman would become strong Kimberly Templeman, a young woman with a hard and chiseled body, a teen-ager who now uses her unusual strength not to pummel boys but instead to pump iron.

Templeman, 17, a senior at Saugus High, grunted her way into the world record book twice on Dec. 14. The first mark fell when she surpassed by 10 pounds the existing record for women in the strict curl, a test of biceps strength.

Competing at 159 pounds, she curled 80 pounds, winning both the teen-age and women’s division easily and setting the world mark for all women with a weight that would cause a large vein in the forehead of an average man to rupture.

In the bench-press, Templeman won the teen-age and women’s divisions with a press of 150 pounds. Perspective? Try lying on your back and completely lifting an average-sized mule deer off your chest. That lift, recognized by the American Power Lifting Assn., put her in the world record book in the teen-age division.

Most amazingly, it was Templeman’s first lifting competition.

Since that venture, she has competed again, taking first place on Jan. 24 in the California Bench Press Championships in Bakersfield with a press of 140 pounds, despite having cut her body weight to 148 pounds.

Training heavily at Gold’s Gym in Canyon Country, Templeman had been told repeatedly by experienced lifters that her strength was far above average. She didn’t really believe it, she said, until she set the world marks in the competition in Selma, Calif.

“The funny thing was I got sick before the event and didn’t train at all for two weeks,” the 5-foot-8 Templeman said. “I came back to the gym a week before the competition and had no idea how I was going to do.”

Her accomplishments turned a lot of heads at Gold’s Gym. “The guys in here, some of them who have competed for years, really took notice,” said Gold’s Gym co-owner Bob Germek. “To do what she has done at her age, it makes everyone in this gym and everyone in the sport a bit envious, I think.”

Gold’s is not a place where envy runs rampant. It is a gym filled with serious intentions. On one wall is a sort of bodybuilding Hall of Fame, with pictures of slab-muscled men and women.

And while Templeman has not decided on a career or even a definite direction for her notable strength, she has decided that she does not want to end up looking like some of those people on the wall.

“You look at pictures like that and the pictures in the muscle magazines today and it’s pretty strange,” she said.

“Bodybuilding is my goal, but bodybuilding while staying natural. No steroids. That’s pretty tough today, from what I’m told. But for me, there will be no steroids. I just want to be me. None of that Hulked-out stuff you see in the magazines.

“Can I be a top-ranked Miss Olympia competitor without steroids? I honestly don’t think so. Not yet. Not today. But more and more the sport is shifting toward natural competitions and away from the steroids. Maybe things will change.”

In the meantime, there are bodybuilding competitions a notch or two removed from the international, Miss Olympia-type events. A goal Templeman has set is to compete in the spring of 1993 in the Miss Teen Olympia, against young women her own age.

There are other interests too. She has studied French for four years and is an accomplished artist, drawing with pen and ink and creating pastel works. On the surface, it seems a contradiction, hammering away with plates of black steel and building a heavily muscled body and then creating intricate art work with a fine-tipped pen.

But Templeman bridges the gap. She does not draw landscapes.

“I draw bodies,” she said, laughing. “Muscles. I have a real fascination with muscles. I’m always drawing the male physique. My friends kid me about it all the time.”

It is a kidding she minds not at all. “ ‘I’ll sic Kim on you.’ That’s one I hear a lot,” she said. “And I have a nickname. Some friends call me She-Ra.”

The reference to the cartoon super-woman does not bother Templeman.

“I like it,” she said. “I like the feeling I get by lifting and the results it has brought. Sometimes I see guys staring at me, and I know what they’re staring at are my arms. I kind of stopped wearing tank tops in the summer. But really, I like the attention. I think all bodybuilders like it. It’s an ego thing.”

The roots of her weight training go back to the sixth grade when she would watch TV training shows featuring then-Miss Olympia Cory Everson on ESPN. She lived with her family in Colorado then, having moved from her birthplace of Chicago. Life later took her father, a finance director with the Bendix Corp., and the family to Saudi Arabia for three years and then to Maryland before they settled in Saugus two years ago. It was in Saudi Arabia that she began serious training.

“My last year in Saudi Arabia I trained almost every day,” she said. “All I had was a set of dumbbells that belonged to my dad, but I always liked it, right from the start.

“As a little kid I think I was a bully, a tomboy. I always remember being as strong as any of the guys. Messing around at school, on the playgrounds, I’d always be getting in trouble. I’d get sent to the office and the principal would say, ‘Did you beat up this guy?’ And some big guy would be sitting there. Usually, I had beaten him up.

“I guess I wasn’t very ladylike.”

From those beginnings, Templeman has honed her strength in the gym. A typical week includes 20 hours of intense training and endless hours of self-discipline. When her friends go to a fast-food restaurant for cheeseburgers, Templeman orders only a diet soda. “That’s the negative aspect of all this,” she said. “I spend so much time in the gym that I feel separated from my friends at school. I don’t get to go crazy partying. My fun most of the time is in the gym.

“But the good part is the feeling it gives you. Hearing people talk, hearing people say, ‘Wow.’ It makes you feel that way. The pump you get from a workout becomes a mental thing.”

The mental aspect of weight training is what separates Templeman from the big-shouldered crowd, according to Germek.

“Kim’s workouts are different,” said Germek, who competed in bodybuilding tournaments for 13 years.

“A lot of people in here are trying to lose some weight or reshape their bodies, but they don’t have goals much beyond that. Kim has goals. Kim is focused. And when you have goals, your training comes from a little deeper in the heart. Kim has aspirations a little higher than most people in here.”

Perhaps. But at 17, the aspirations are still a bit fogged.

“I’d like to be in sports medicine,” Templeman said. “Or own my own gym. Or be a personal trainer. And I’d like to compete for a while too. But mainly, I don’t want to look like the Hulk. I’ll stop short of turning into something like that.”