Evolution of a Lifter - II

My friend Bob Gorinski ("So Whattya Think Robert?"- see my links) posted a great blog on weight-training not too long ago.  Bob blogs on life, faith, family and sometimes lifting.  He is a SICK athlete,a thoughtful Christian and a great dad.  He's also a great PT and he blogged about the toll that lifting takes even as he hit an incredible personal best in the squat.  Anyone considering PX90 or whatever it is, should see his review of that program.  

Yes, there is a masochist element to most of us who like exercising whether we are runners or lifters or whatever...  But, I think there are ways to at least maximize our pain to payoff ratio, and one major way to do that is to maximize time.

Once upon a time, I would work out for an hour or more and I know lots of runners and others who exercise for long stretches even though they don't enjoy it because they think they have to in order to reach their goals.  Here's how it went for me...

When I worked out with my dad in the basement we did a few sets of a few exercises (mostly upper-body) with repititions like this - 12, 10, 7, 5.  Not a bad way to go.  When these sets got easier, we added weight.

Somewhere along the way I got Bill Pearl's Getting Stronger which is a great book in its own right with workouts for beginners and up, bodybuilders and every imaginable sport.

The problem with the book is mostly that Pearl is a bodybuilder.  He thinks in terms of individual muscles and individual exercises to target those muscles.  In the end then, the training is less functional and you end up doing a LOT of different exercises in a workout.  

I used to follow programs like this and I would do exercises aimed at "isolating" the muscles I wanted to work.  When you think this way, you have to do a LOT of exercises.  That takes a LOT of time.  You also end up treating all muscles equally.  You spend just as much time on your biceps, which are a very small proportion of your body, as you do on your hamstrings, which are much larger.

I enjoyed these workouts and made some progress, but they just took too long!

Then I entered grad school and had a 2-3 year hiatus from working out.  When I decided I needed to get back into it, I had no equipment and I had no intention of joining a gym.

SO, I go into bodyweight exercises, push-ups, pull-ups, bodyweight squats and crazy variations of all three.  It was really fun and, coming back from a "keyboard-only" workout regimen, I made a lot of progress.  I still like the simplicity of bodyweight workouts.  A person can get incredibly fit without ever picking up a "weight."  One great resource for this kind of thing is this primitively published manual by Ross Enamait.

My only real criticism of this book is that Enamait uses a LOT of equipment in some of his workouts, even if the equipment isn't weights.  But its still a great book, with a ton of great information as well as exercise ideas to get your creative juices flowing.  You really could be "Never Gymless" although I don't know how anybody could go without a good pull-up bar or branch or fire escape or something.

Still, there is something about lifting heavy stuff.  It is hard to chart your progress on raw strength doing bodyweight exercises.  I mean, its awesome when someone can do 100 pushups, but it takes a lot of determination to decide you're going to do 1 arm push-ups and I never got there.  Maybe someday.  Anyway, I cruised craigslist, found a weight set I wanted and made a low-ball offer.  $90 got me 2 Olympic bars, a bench/squat rack set-up and about 380lbs of plates.  I also reclaimed some weights I bought in high school that my dad wasn't using (he's still using a LOT) and he threw in a couple dumbells.  It was time to hit the iron again...

More on that in a future post.