The Last Dance provided some insight into how Michael Jordan's effort to rebuild his body after three consecutive physical playoff defeats to the Detroit Pistons' “Bad Boys” and their proudly physical “Jordan Rules.”
“I was getting brutally beaten up,” Jordan said in the fourth episode. “I wanted to administer pain. I wanted to start fighting back.”
After Chicago's 1990 seven-game Eastern Conference Finals loss to Detroit, Jordan linked up with trainer Tim Grover for a 30-day trial, and the partnership never ended.
Grover had Jordan lifting weights consistently. “We started at 200 [pounds],” Grover recalled in the docuseries. “We added five pounds until he got to 215…I would give him a certain amount of reps to do, but he would never stop at that number,” Grover said. “If I asked for six, I knew he was gonna do 12.”
Besides Jordan's increased muscle mass, another product of Grover's weightlifting-heavy regimen is Andrew Bernstein's iconic photo of Jordan—donning an “Air Jordan” tank top and flanked by a young, wonderfully mustachioed Grover—expressing a face of determined struggle while shoulder-pressing 65-pound dumbbells.
Bernstein reflected on the moment on “The Habershow” podcast with NBC Sports, and the Hall of Fame photographer was still taken aback at the memorable frozen moment in time.
“Man, Michael is ripped in this picture,” Bernstein said. “Look at those biceps! Tim was doing his job.”
Bernstein also explained why intimate workout photos of Michael Jordan were a rarity. “There aren’t really any other still photos that exist of Michael lifting like this…I had the same experience with Kobe too because he was also very private with his weight lifting regimen.”
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