Thus Far…

Strength training has taught me lessons that I didn’t learn from anything else in life. It is who I am at my core and what I do. It shapes my decisions every day in every way. I have no other bond as strong as mine is to training. If asked in 2019 what I was athletically I’d have said that I am golfer who lifts, but now in 2021 I’d say I am very firmly a meathead who golfs. This essay is meant to give a brief background of the last 19 years so I can start writing about more specific training subjects. I’ve been thinking about about that over the last couple months but I realized in order get to the specific subjects I first had tell about my journey into serious strength training first.

My first experience with strength training was my senior year of high school at North Polk in Alleman, Iowa. I had played baseball as a freshmen and junior, and decided I wanted a serious go at the sport my senior year so I planned to hit the weight room hard. That started with biking 5-10 miles every day in August preparing my legs for what I knew would be an uphill battle on legs. I hit the weight room religiously that senior year, covering September 2001- May 2002, and I made progress though the year but my lack of general athleticism was something that was very hard to overcome. I was lifting not only to get ready to a chance to play but also a spot in the 500 pound club. That was a goal created to motivate athletes to total 500 pounds in a 1 rep max in squat, power clean, and bench press. It was proving difficult because my bench press sucked so I had to make up for it with the other 2 lifts. This pursuit, looking back, was the first evidence that I had the potential of having an iron clad lifting discipline. I achieved it on my last chance to max out, though I only remember the total from the power clean of 185 (145 pounds 8 times). Baseball never panned out on the field as the combination of relative lack of athleticism, better players, and an unsteady confidence in my game prevented me from seeing more playing time. However, I did get a lot of understanding of the game, its lessons, and some good moments along  the way so I consider it worthwhile. 

I attended Drake University and intended on becoming that gym rat I was becoming, but that never happened. What had been a growing confidence that was gradually outgoing became a shell again in a new environment. That led to more negative things than positive things, but I did graduate with a Bachelors of Arts in History with a minor in Rhetoric. Nowadays, I find a lot of lessons in that time period of learning my life that apply to strength training. Without getting into too many of the everyday details of life, lifting weights was not anywhere in the picture. I hadn’t gained a lot more weight from the end of high school to the end of college but I definitely wasn’t getting any lighter. Something that changed that was that about 2008 or so I dedicated myself to learning how to cook. This might not sound like life changing on the surface but it definitely was my case because I picked it up pretty quickly. I’m the type of person who once I decide to commit to something that I am all in. I got a smoker, the kind with a side firebox, around 2010 and learned how to use it. I still have it to this day. I had always watched cooking shows, primarily on PBS because lack of cable, so continually got better year by year until about 2011-2012 when I “let my inner French chef” out and started making very high calorie, high carbohydrate, high everything meals that all tasted great. That all came with a price. My weight started climbing to probably more than 300. I’m sure it was, but I don’t ever remember getting on a scale so I couldn’t give a formal figure.

Paralleling this growth in cooking skill was the death of my passion for spectator sports. I was very emotionally invested in sports in my developmental years, mostly the New York Yankees and Iowa Hawkeye football. According to my oldest brother, Mike, my older brother, Steve, is to blame for my being a Yankees fan because I don’t have solid memories of anything until I was about 7 years old. I very vividly remember being in my dorm room watching the Yankees lose to the Chicago White Sox in the 2006 American League Division Series and throwing the ping pong ball size wad of silly putty extremely hard against the wall. What made it all the more maddening is the hall was full of Chicago based students because one of Drake’s biggest areas of student recruitment is Chicago. I decided from that point on I would never get that emotionally invested again. What’s important about that decision with regards to strength training is that I never considered any athlete a role model within the prospect of improving physically. A storm caused from non-motivation combined with relentless drive to get better at cooking was brewing. 

Mike is a women’s basketball coach at the collegiate level. In June of 2013, he got in contact with a former player from one of his early teams who was a personal training for a commercial gym company called Aspen Athletic Clubs in the Des Moines area to have me join. I followed through with it and this is where my strength training journey began anew. After an initial consultation with Mike’s former player, I went about my first couple months in the gym quite haphazardly. I leaned on my previous knowledge from 11 years earlier to guide my first workouts, but was always watching other people at the gym to see what they were doing and repeat it. By my current standards, this was a very non-serious phase of training because I had no direction and was just trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. I pulled in some cardio from both jogging outside on the streets of Polk City and on the treadmill as well. The early numbers on big compound lifts were grim, especially person of my size, and gym intimidation is real. It’s very easy to get swayed by watching other people lift a lot of weight while being stuck barely getting full 45 pound plates on both sides for a bench press. I befriended a few people in those early months, talked about various sports subjects, and got spots and advice when needed. The latter was especially true when I was trying to overreach on a given weight during lifts. After about 6-8 months of lifting at the gym I started to feel a bit top heavy. I realized that I hadn’t much of any lower body strength training. I can’t recall a reason why, but it just never happened. That changed in a big way because starting in 2014 I hit legs with everything I could ferociously: Squats, extensions, curls, calf raises and especially leg press at once a week and to the point I could barely walk out of the gym. The gains in muscle came relatively easily at this phase because they started out at virtually nothing. The weight I could handle went up steadily but not quickly. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was working a very hypertrophy style workout.

I came to the end of 2014 very driven but decided it was time to lose some weight. I was about 270 at the time and was determined to get as low as I could. I did not have a number in mind. To this end I ate a very strict diet that was heavy on chicken and fish/seafood in December of that year and followed that with a month of the most sustained commitment to running I have ever hard before or since. I ran 140 miles in January of 2015 on the treadmills and continued to run into the spring. I could see progress in the mirror and on the scale. At my lowest, I was 226.8 pounds. I noticed a big effect on my golf game, but it wasn’t all positive. I started golfing in 2010 or so and my dominant miss was a medium to hard slice, but this drop in weight made my hips more mobile so it introduced a new miss into my game: the straight pull, a shot that goes straight but is anywhere from 15-30 degrees off to the left from the intended line. That straight pull has been a permanent addition to my golf game 60 pounds later. That weight loss was doomed ultimately by my lack of commitment to a diet I knew was too strict and my desire to lift heavy. 

Summer of 2015 is when I really started to figure some things out strength training wise but I was still kind of screwing around. Looking back on it with today’s vision, I’d say I was going hard at it but still wasn’t as committed as I could be. My legs progressed at a better rate than everything else in terms of both muscle development and weight lifted. I still found myself not making much progress in upper body lifts. It had always been a weak spot, and many ways, still is. I remember struggling with 55-60 pound dumbbells on flat presses in this time frame, and doing tricep pushdowns way too much weight than I should have been doing. Overhead strength was even worse. Getting 65 pounds on a military press was a cause for joy. 2016 and 2017 unfolded a lot like 2015. Legs getting stronger, and upper body coming along at a snails pace. However, the big difference in the former’s years was I began serious back training. I had discovered the deadlift and started to introduce that into my training. It wasn’t great all the time, and I dropped it here and there because my form was terrible. In December of 2016, I nearly injured by back attempting straight leg deadlifts to get one last hamstring lift at the end of the night training legs because the machine I wanted to use, a laying leg curl, was taken and there was no more time left before the gym closed. I felt the twinge in the back after my straight leg deadlifts looked more like the normal variety and stopped. I could feel acute pain in the lower back region in general for some time and didn’t seem to go away. After a few weeks of not lifting I went back at it with the understanding that I need to strengthen my lower back and my hamstrings in particular. The strategy worked and the pain subsided.

Each year entrenched at the gym made my lifting discipline deeper, but I wasn’t learning from outside sources for the most part. I have always learned physical skills better by doing than reading. By the end of 2017, training legs by this point was becoming less and less fun. I could feel my knees getting heavier and I was just getting tired of grind. This isn’t news to anyone who has done serious leg training, but it was a new feeling to me coming into spring of 2018. I don’t recall skipping too often, but I made a decision in fall of that year to stop training lower body, including low back, to focus all of my energy on getting my upper body caught up to my legs. This focus on upper body in 2018 and all of 2019 was primarily dumbbell and strength focused. Muscular development definitely came along for the ride, though. I started getting up to the 100 pound dumbbells around the fall of 2018, and was determined to get to the end of the rack. The last set of dumbbells on the rack was at 125 pounds. It was a goofy goal for sure, but those specific goals I found helped me get to the bigger ones. There’s nothing really inherently interesting about my strength training in 2018/2019 because it was not only quite repetitive but also very successful in attaining the goal I set out to accomplish. I did notice that if I bench pressed up to 215-225, which was around my max at the time, it effected my ability to do flat dumbbell press. If I did dumbbell press up to 110-115 pounds for  final set, I didn’t feel safe even attempting 185 pounds without a spotter. That led me to nearly completely let bench press go to concentrate fully on dumbbells for strength movements.

The following year, 2020, was the most important year in my development because the most changes occurred during it. In many ways, that statement is also quite false. Nothing about my life really changed that much. Work hours got absurdly long leading to bigger paychecks and the gym shut down, there were developments that allowed me to keep training. My life was still very much the following: sleep, work, lift, eat, golf on the weekend. Prior the news developments of the cruise quarantine, my training was like it was at the end of 2019 but did actively think about how to get back training into what I was doing without adding another day at the gym. Before I could answer that question, I started to feel a bit run down in the couple weeks before the day the news from the cruise ship being quarantined hit. It graduated to a full on muscle ache unlike I had felt before my last day at work for the week then a crazy hot fever. I never measured the temperature but was easily north of anything I’d ever experienced and it just didn’t stop coming. I couldn’t sleep at all during the weekend, and couldn’t really hold any food down. I even took Theraflu on Friday night, and I never take medicine for anything. Just as soon as it there and tormenting me, it was gone by the following Monday. I chalked it up to being a badass flu bug, but looking back now, I don’t know. I stayed away from the gym for rest of the week and something unexpected happened: I felt really fucking great! I’d hadn’t felt that good in a long time. The only way I understood it was that I had a central nervous system reset. I lifted heavier and more proficiently than I could remember. The 125 pound dumbbells were going up for 5-6 repetitions. Given what I have learned about powerlifting in the recent 12 or so months, that all made sense. Then…poof.

Learning is fascinating because not all forms of information are created equal during the process of figuring stuff out. Axioms that are read or heard about can be understood but the concepts behind the truths fail to be learned without experience. I found this out very profoundly    in Spring of 2020 after a friend from work, Pete, asked if I wanted to lift with him in his garage. Most public places were shut down for safety reasons and that included gyms. I did not handle it well mentally because lifting is how I get rid of negative energy. It kept bottling up up until Pete, who could see it everyday because he worked within sight of me, made the invitation. I had always heard about a couple different concepts in lifting but not really experienced them: Muscle memory and lost gains. The latter hit me right away. I started lifting with Pete about 4 weeks after the gym shut down and found that I had lost so much strength it was actually comical. I was struggling with 80 pound dumbbells 4 weeks after crushing 125 pound dumbbells. I had to readjust and rethink my approach to training. This round of training was different because we were lifting together and I had never done that before. That meant more of the strength training playbook was open to me. I had been working almost purely hitting upper body without barbells for a year and a half and now was organically transitioning to a concept I would learn was called “powerbuilding” in 2021. I put the bench press back the plan, moved from barbell rows to deadlifts, and started doing squats again after getting a Rogue squat rack. Without dragging everyone reading this into the weeds of programming, 2020 was transformational because I had to take what I was “book learning” through Youtube videos and combine it with what I was learning through experience. Pete, who is a dozen or so years older than me and quite a bit stronger than me, decided to let me steer the training and that was the biggest leap forward on the mental side of training. I knew what I liked and he had the equipment for pull it off, then I added to it through the year: 5 special bars, a squat rack that turned into my current power rack, monster bands, dumbbells, chains and other accessories. I was experimental in my approach to training so I messed around with lifts safely that I saw other people doing so I could make a determination if they were worth continuing. My process can be both additive and reductive at the same time so that can be maddening for some but it wasn’t for Pete.

After the gyms reopened, we lifted in the garage solely except after I decided to start training legs again. This is when the muscle memory knowledge turned into actual learning. Anyone who golfs in a part of the world where winter is a reality understands muscle memory because of that layoff so I had brushed up against the concept before but not to this extent. By the time I had stopped training legs in 2018 I was squatting close to 350 pounds regularly. We started lifting in the gym on Saturdays for legs because the lack of equipment for legs in the garage. Top weight was in the 275 and I knew to go much any higher I’d need a new powerlifting belt, which I bought in June 2020. I knew I was capable of more than 275 before the belt arrived but I wanted to be safe. Leg strength came back very fast. By the start of August I was regularly squatting 365 and at the end of the month I successfully lifted 405 pounds for 1 rep. My legs also began to physically grow and I could feel muscular development throughout the process. My upper body was still very much behind my legs in terms of pressing power but my body was much more in balance. The biggest thing 2020’s training taught me was the need to keep learning, and specifically how to put all the aspects together to create a training program to keep getting stronger and build muscle. 

I took the lessons of 2020 and learned different ones in 2021. My training kicked over to the commercial gym I still had a membership at due to winter becoming colder. It was beginning to effect my motivation to train and the realities of lifting barbells in what was effectively an outdoor facility: freezing cold bars and cold hands. The next lesson on the journey was understanding just how differently I trained in the garage than I did at the gym. I took some of what I was doing but left some out. Anyone who has ever trained at a commercial gym knows how ridiculously hard to actually get done what they are trying to get done. I started to train like I had in the past without barbells on pressing movements but this go round my accessories were very specifically picked. I was very dialed in on what I wanted done. I also started looking at the gym differently. I realized how spoiled for variety of training I had in the garage through all the speciality bars I purchased. It made me recognize just how different I trained in a gym setting against the garage setting. I was two entirely different lifters based on my surroundings. With so much equipment in the gym I did more isolation based lifts and gaining more muscle as a result. I began consuming Youtube content by Strongman competitors, powerlifters and bodybuilders at a much higher rate during this time. One video by Robert Obherst, a Strongman competitor, detailing how to get bigger shoulders from June of 2020 changed how I trained upper body in April of 2020. I started hitting my strength based sets of flat dumbbell press up front first and finishing with hypertrophy sets at the end. In the beginning of that 6 week stretch that I did that twice a week, the second day of the week from an incline position, I felt myself growing stronger. However, over the weeks I could feel myself hitting a plateau and fail to get as many good lifts as I was in the prior weeks. I knew I had to change up my training plan. The rest of my body was coming along well. As winter turned into spring, I had started doing squats and heavier leg lifts in he garage because it was safer. I was transitioning organically back to powerbuilding so I formalized it in a program of my own creation. What I found in May of 2021 was lesson very lifting specific lesson: Dumbbell gains do not translate to bench press gains. I closed 2020 with the ability to bench press 275 pounds but by June of 2021 found that 255 3 times was the best I could do. 

My plan for summer of 2021 was the most ambitious one I had thought of doing ever, and it in turn also taught me a broader lesson that applies to life as well: General goals will create general results. My training had always been a bit aimless in its end game. I’d never once considered entering a powerlifting meet or done Strongman despite my gained significant interest in both sports. However, it was time to really start implementing what I had learned and experienced to a plan that was more specific and more goal driven. It had the intended effect of creating greater willpower and led me to successfully hit all of the goals that I aspired it to hit. My deadlift was a major part of the plan. It is the lift I am most proud of in part because of the influence the lift has had on strength culture lately and my late exposure to it. I didn’t start deadlifting until 2016 or so. Since the start of the 2021 I’d been getting closer to 405 pounds, and I was intent on getting there. By April, I had successful deadlifted 385 pounds with straps and belt while getting 3 or 4 reps at that weight. I knew enough to know adding 20 pounds at a time to a lift at this stage of my lifting career was asking a lot. After going through my normal deadlift routine in late May, I attempted to deadlift 405 and got it off the ground but failed to get it above my knees. I was determined to get it up by the end of summer. That lesson of failure as a good thing or something one looks for is what strength training does at its core. I am constantly searching something I can’t accomplish so I have something specific to aim for. That creates motivation and acts like a magnet for willpower to do what it takes to accomplish a very specific goal or set of them. More meaningful progress is made in this way. 

The lessons strength training have taught me over the years, especially since I got serious with it in 2016, are things I want to write about and explore in a deeper, well thought out way. My desire to pass on what I have learned is why I have chosen to write about it in this way. This has been just a primer for what is to come. I love talking and reading about this stuff, and always will. I hope those reading will keep coming along for the ride.