I Feel Like Ramblin’
Do you ever sit back after a workout and think about the evolution of your training? Think about all the screwball things you’ve tried and the extremes or lows you reached? I do sometimes and I always get a kick out of it.
Back in high school I used to hang out with this group of senior guys and Troy (we’ve been best friends since the fourth grade) and when we weren’t playing sports we lifted. There wasn’t sh*t else to do in this town. It was sports or working out for us. We were such victims of over training. We used to lift in P.E. then after school until four. Then we figured out that we could get back in the gym after the coach had closed it and went home. So we would break back in and lift. lol.
I remember one time I took some Ultimate Orange and trained for three hours straight. Man I screwed my self up back then. The thing is we were all young and beginners so no matter what we did we made gains. I can’t imagine where we would have gotten if we knew what we were doing… I benched 315 at 200 when I graduated from high school. But now… might as well rip muscle off and throw it down the toilet if I did that much. We ate a lot too by the way. That was the third thing we did.
In college I figured out what the hell was going on, but still for the most part trained very high volume, 25-40 sets per part 1ish times a week (I thought I was Arnold- nope). It wasn’t until I started training in the summer time after my sophmore year that I learned less was much more in terms of volume. During the summers in college (and after) I worked for the USDA Forest Circus…uh I mean uh…. Service…. haha just a little joke…if you work for them you may know. I was on a trail crew and we hiked and worked 2-7 miles of trail a day at 7500-9000 feet above sea level. My station where I lived during the week is at 8156 and that’s where I lifted 4 days a week. I needed to maintain mass (205ish) and gain strength so that I wouldn’t be too far behind when fall track training started, and I found that short, high intensity workouts followed by mass food worked very well for that situtation. Man, my workouts at 2500 feet were awesome in those days, oxygen for days. I continued the short intense workouts into the fall and that is when I first benched 375 and weighed 218. I managed to get to a kinda fat 238 while at Claremont, but after I graduated I stopped lifting for 8 months and dropped to 195. If I don’t train I just get "thin". At the time I just didn’t want to do it any more. I missed it though; so 3 decent years training later, here I am. Can’t wait for the next lift.
Anyway I hope I didn’t bore anybody too bad, and maybe somebody can get something from this. Laters.
May 31, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Just checking in, good post. 7500-9000ft, that is awesome training.