For natural bodybuilder Robert David, the most exciting event of his bodybuilding career came in 1995, when he jetted all the way to Australia and won the medium height class in the Word Natural Bodybuilding Competition. He weighed in at 210 pounds, flexed in a competition featuring athletes from 20 different countries, and came home with a trophy that surely must have been difficult to fit safely into the passenger cabin's overhead luggage rack.

At that point, he'd already been competing for about three years, so he was no rank beginner. Since he started posing in competitions in 1992, he's been in more than 30 of them.

Between 1993 and 1995, Robert spent 2½ years in the Air Force, where he was an electronic warfare system specialist, working on the fibre optic systems of reconnaissance aircraft. During this time, he continued to lift.

Another one of the thrills of his competitive career came in 1997, when he appeared on ESPN's "MuscleMania." A little bit of glory here and there goes a long way in justifying all the extensive dieting and hard work any competitively successful bodybuilder endures. How can amateurs be seen? Unless you're one of the Weider contract pros, you'll see yourself in the magazines rarely if at all. For Robert, one of these occasional splashes of print publicity recently arrived when his picture appeared in the December 1998 issue of MuscleMag International for having won the medium height class of the Natural Universe Bodybuilding Championship 12 months before.

Born on the 14th of September 1969, Robert lives in Marysville, California, and has been a drug-free, natural bodybuilder all his lifting life. He's proof that you can get very well built,indeed, through hard work, dedication, and persistence, without steroids. He'd be the first to admit, of course, that it helps to have the genetic background. About his bodybuilding talents, Robert quips, "I don't know how to sing and dance, but I do know how to grow."

Robert notes, "I like natural bodybuilding events because you don't find 'attitudes' at most of them, the way you do at other types of competitions." He bodybuilds not only for the healthy lifestyle the sport necessarily involves participants in, but also for the good times he enjoys. Robert is married, and he and his wife are expecting their first child in April 1999.

Not being a professional bodybuilder, he's just like most of the rest of us in this world—he has a job. He's a juvenile probation officer, a position that entails an enormous amount of responsibility regarding what happens to youthful offenders. His caseload includes the entire spectrum of youngsters in trouble, ranging from first-time delinquents caught up in petty shoplifting to far more serious offenders such as holdup artists and murderers. His job isn't one for the naive or the gullible. A lot of it depends on the successful "reading" of a kid to see whether, below the bluff, the bluster, or the silence, there's anyone who deserves another chance .

Robert follows each case from shortly after arrest through court, making his recommendations to the judges and monitoring each offender's life. In the end, he must decide whether a kid will go home, stay in a youth home, or do some genuinely hard time at the California Youth Authority.

His job obviously entails a lot of paperwork. Here, when he's dieting for a bodybuilding competition, is where Robert sometimes has to make an extra effort to stay focused. His diet during these periods is an unusual one—high fat and low carbs five days a week, followed by two days of increased carb consumption. During those five days a week, 70% of his calories come from foods a lot of other dieting bodybuilders might hallucinate about—pork rind, pork, bacon, eggs, and cheese. He eats about 400 calories every two hours.

It's when he's approaching the end of five days of low-carb, high-fat dieting that he really has to work at concentrating on his paperwork. As anyone who's ever been on this kind of diet can testify, that's when you're likely to feel as though all you want to do is sit back and watch paint dry.

Robert's outside activities include volunteer work as a motivational speaker with youths at risk. Kids naturally look up to a man who weighs 210 pounds when ripped, has a back half again as wide as most people do, and bears biceps like oversized baseballs. He teaches kids at risk a variety of subjects ranging from CPR to self-esteem.

One of the most important lessons he teaches them is that schoolwork is an essential part of the path to a better life. In church, he works with a group called Young Men on the Move, which focuses on helping youths deal with difficult situations, educating them on how to avoid making serious mistakes, and helping them pick up the pieces of their lives if they've fallen into something they shouldn't have.

Robert's long-term ambitions include appearing in a few print ads and commercials and continuing to be as effective as possible in his career as a juvenile probation officer and in his volunteer work.