WHAT I WOULD TELL MY TEENAGE SELF: PART II

 

Continuing on from last week’s post, here are some final bits of wisdom I’d pass on to my teenage self.

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* BUY AND READ “SUPER SQUATS”

This was my "Catcher in the Rye"

I’ve written many MANY times about Super Squats the program, and it is absolutely an amazing program that everyone, regardless of goals, should run at least one time.  However, the book is ALSO incredibly valuable, equally so to the program, such that, those who try to run the program without having read the book pretty much always short themselves out of any real growth. 

 

Here’s why I’d tell my teenage self to read the book: the author, Randall Strossen, makes excellent use of his degree in psychology by writing one of THE most motivational/inspirational books on training I’ve ever read.  I got the book in Christmas of 2006, purely as a fun read based off the recommendation of a friend.  I read it Christmas day, and by the evening I already had my first day workout planned for my 6 weeks of the program.  I had ZERO intention of running Super Squats, but Strossen got in my head and had me hooked.  And, of course, running that program was my first taste of real “hard work” as far as training went, and was transformative for me, physically, mentally, and otherwise.  Those assets have lasted me my whole training career, and extended well beyond the realm of physical transformation.

But beyond that: it’s the perfect book for a teenage lifter.  It’s short enough that it can be read in an afternoon, it offers a few different programs (giving the teen a roadmap for training for a while), it covers basic nutrition in a manner that is perfect for teens (minimal cooking required, simple, brutal and effective AND enough food for a young metabolism to be able to crush), and goes over basic exercises in a vivid enough manner to have all the tools required to train.  It’s a fantastic “all in one” training manual that EVEN takes time to discuss the history of training to give an appreciation for the iron game.

 

Are there other training books I love?  Absolutely.  Paul Kelso’s “Powerlifting Basics Texas Style” is still my FAVORITE book on training, and Marty Gallagher’s “Purposeful Primitive” is one of the most comprehensive tomes on all manner of physical training out there.  But I also know my teenage self would have zero appreciation for these books.  Super Squats has the necessary bravado to entice the teenage lifter, the brevity to hold their short attention span, the right lessons AND a program that SHOULD be run at the early stages of one’s lifting career in order to correctly orient their perspective of hard work and obsession.

* DON’T STOP CONDITIONING

No matter what gets in the way!

This is a case where my 14 year old self was SO much smarter than my 24 year old self.  I trained like a MANIAC when I was a teenager.  I ran 8 miles a day, every day, on top of regular weight training, martial arts training, rope skipping, swimming, or anything else I could do.  I ran with ankle weights on (also played Dance Dance Revolution with ankle weights, because I was THAT guy), had a chinning bar across my door frame that I’d hit as I walked through (parents were none too pleased when they discovered I drilled into the door from the secure it), a heavy bag for boxing work (I worked at a sporting goods store when I was 19 and spent most of my paycheck on the gear we sold), was hitting 200+ push ups a night before bed on top of ab work, etc.  I’ve told the story of how I was running 16 miles a day one summer in a quest for abs, trying to burn off the belly fat with a run in the morning and a run at night.  I KNEW that I had to train hard to get results, and that’s what I did.

 

I got older and got “educated” and learned that you could “overtrain” and that it was better to use approved programs of 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps and never strain and that strength was a skill and to use the bare minimum effective dose and blah blah blah.  I got fat, I got in bad shape, I got injured, and ultimately I lost my way.  I legit thought about quitting lifting at the age of 24, and the only thing that saved me was a powerlifting meet that was held 10 minutes away from where I lived that got me hooked back on training, and eventually got me to re-discover the things I knew when I was a teen.

 

Hard work works.  All those things we use to convince ourselves otherwise are just rationalization.  If I could tell my teenage self something on this topic, it would be to never stop doing what I was doing.  I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing: building a VERY broad base of athleticism, strength, speed, agility, and physical preparedness.  It was taking total advantage of my youth and enthusiasm, and the worst thing I ever did was stop and question it.

* EAT TO RECOVER…AND STAY AWAY FROM CHEESE

And "cheese" for that matter

I’ve written about this SO much and I’m going to try to avoid beating this horse to death, but a lesson that took me WAY too long to learn is that food supports training: not the other way around.  “Bulking and cutting” is backwards, because there food is driving the training.  Instead, we have hard periods of training, and during those hard periods we have to eat more to recover, and those two things make us grow.  Once the hard training stops (which WILL happen, because hard training is not infinitely sustainable), we don’t need as much food, and that’s when fat loss happens.  My very first time “bulking”, all I did was eat more food than I was eating before.  I gained weight, then lost the exact same amount of weight during the cut…and nothing changed.  Up until that point, I had put on plenty of muscle by just training hard and eating to recover from it.  Once again: I was SO much smarter when I was dumb.

 

The last bit is personal, but might actually apply otherwise.  I discovered I was “abusing” cheese.  It had become a dietary hack that I was way too reliant on.  I’d throw it indiscriminately onto everything I ate, in my mind thinking it a “free” food.  Since I like low carbs (which I’d tell myself to stick with), cheese was no carbs, just fat and protein.  Well, it’s a LOT of fat, and often not from the greatest sources unless I go out of my way to secure it, so there are some health concerns there AND it’s just adding unnecessary calories that COULD have been replaced by something with more tangible benefits for my goals.  It’s so calorically dense that it’s easy to get out of hand, yet so pervasive that I could add it onto things and not even really realize it.  If I were one of those dudes that struggled to gain, it’d be one thing, but as a growing kid, if I just NEVER used cheese and, instead, focused on meats, eggs/egg whites, avocados (we had a goddamn orchid of those when I was growing up and I never ate them…so stupid), nuts, nut butters, greek yogurt and cottage cheese as my only cheese, I would have done myself some serious favors. 

 

As an aside, when I got to college, our dinning hall was awesome.  I ate there all 4 years.  Tuesdays we had deli sandwiches and Wednesday were burgers.  I always got them without bread, lots of cheese.  Yet again, if I had avoided it then, I’d be far ahead.  …but man do I miss that college dinning hall.

 

* TRAIN TO GET BIGGER

Yeah, that'll do just fine...

This comes down to my lifelong love of strength and how that very love bit me in the butt as far as my pursuit of it went.  I bought in HARD into the idea that “strength is a skill”, which meant strength only existed at low rep ranges, which meant the only way to get stronger was to train low reps ALL the time.  I did 5 rep sets of curls and French presses, 5 rep sets of lat pulldowns, everything was sets of 5.  When I ran Super Squats, it was legitimately one of the first times in a LONG while I trained outside of the 5 rep range, and I essentially asked permission to do so from someone that had run the program before (basically asking them if it was stupid to train everything OTHER than the squat in the 5 rep range and being told that it was). 

 

It wasn’t until much MUCH later, after stalling out on a 500lb squat my second time in a meet, that I FINALLY began to appreciate the benefit of using higher reps, getting in volume, and building MUSCLE.  In my teenage mind (and older, shamefully), building muscle was “bodybuilding”, and my goal was to be strong, so why would I do that?  I wasted SO much training time AVODING the very thing that would have gotten me to my goals.  Yeah: I did a great job maximizing all the muscle I had built through my insane training as a kid, but once I started “training right” for strength by ONLY using low reps, all I did was rapidly reach my potential…and never increase it.  I just kept hitting the same lifts over and over again, backing down, starting over, hitting the same ceiling, repeat. 

 

If I had a chance to talk to my teenage self, I’d explain to him that big is strong.  We know this in nature.  We’re afraid of big animals BECAUSE we know they are strong.  The heaviest weight classes in combat sports and strength sports have the strongest athletes.  WSM competitors are BIG dudes.  The BEST thing you can do, especially as a teenager, is train for SIZE.  Use that time in your life to really prioritize getting big.  We covered the eating part, but this is the time to really go crazy with quality volume and just blow up.  It will lay down a fantastic foundation for any physical endeavor that comes our way.

 

And how would I do it?  Super Squats, 5/3/1 BBB Beefcake, 5/3/1 Building the Monolith and Deep Water.  Simple, effective, brutal, and sustainable.  When it was time to backdown and rest, THAT would be the time to keep reps low and go for big numbers.  Satisfy the teenage ego, then get back to grinding.  I am JUST now figuring all that out at age 36.  I can only imagine where I would be had I known it as a teen.