Entering The Big Time
It was Friday March 6, 1998. That was the day all my rowdy friends and I were allowed in the high school weight room for the first time. I can’t name every single person who was in the weight room that day, but I know my core group of friends were there. Hammer, Poike, Tony, Jake, and Grant. These were my ride or die friends, the guys I could always count on to have my back. When it comes to how I felt about these guys, I think George Costanza said it best: Even if [they] killed somebody, I wouldn’t turn [them] in. This was spring of our 8th grade year, so we needed to start learning how to lift so we could train over the summer in preparation for freshman football. We were all sports-obsessed and every season brought new uniforms, games, coaches, smells, and rhythms. Football, basketball, and baseball dominated our thoughts and dreams. My dad got me a subscription to Sports Illustrated for Kids and I had pictures and posters all over my wall. I eventually graduated to regular Sports Illustrated and the tradition of using magazines for interior decorating carried on all the way through college. I may have been the only college kid in America to have pictures of Vlade Divac and Dikembe Mutombo on the wall in my dorm room. It’s amazing I didn’t get more ladies. Anyway, other than screwing around with the plastic weights in my parents’ basement and doing the Presidential Fitness Test in gym class, none of us had any experience or knowledge about lifting and training. We were finally going to get to lift in the high school weight room and enter the big time.
Earlier in the week, word had gotten out that we all needed to meet Coach Madigan in the weight room at 3:30 on Friday, and your ass better not be late. Mr. Madigan was intimidating as hell to a bunch of 13-year old boys. We had heard stories from older brothers about how tough he was as a football, wrestling, and track coach, and how he had played college football at Michigan Technological University. In our small world, he may as well have won the Heisman playing for Alabama. We all ended up spending a ton of time with Mr. Madigan over the years, and we loved him. There was never a dull moment with Mr. Madigan, but that’s for another time.
After school let out for the day, my friends and I showed up in the weight room, all a little bit nervous but trying to act cool. The weight room was located on a balcony that overlooked the high school gymnasium on the north wall. That entire “wall” was actually a chain link fence, which gave the room a really badass feel, and looking down on the basketball court with conference and district championship banners circling the gym, a huge medieval Knight on the wall, and the school track and field record board in plain view made me think about hardwood glory in front of a packed house with the high school pep band playing Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2. The wall on the west end had a door that led into the wrestling room, the east wall was lined with three squat racks, and the south wall had big poster boards with guys in the 200, 250, 300, 350, 400, and 450 pound club for various lifts. Our school’s lifting program, very much in its infancy, used Bigger Faster Stronger (BFS) as the template for training athletes. This program, or at least the way we ran it, consisted of four-week cycles using the following sets and rep schemes.
Week 1: 3x3+
Week 2: 5x5+
Week 3: 5, 3, 1 +
Week 4: 10, 8, 6 (light/deload weights)
If you have ever read or used Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 program or any of its variations, this scheme will look very familiar. The program was constructed around big lifts that we would work through on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Monday: Box Squat, Towel Bench (like a board press), Auxiliary Lifts
Wednesday: Power Clean, Trap/Hex Bar Deadlift (we always called it the trap bar), Auxiliary Lifts
Friday: Squat, Bench, Auxiliary Lifts
For the auxiliary lifts, we did curls, lat pulldowns, dumbbell bench variations, box jumps, and sit-ups. At the start of each four-week cycle, we got these hard cards where we could record our lifts. We certainly could have done a lot worse as far as programming was concerned, but we also could have used a lot more work in the form of sprints, sleds, and loaded carries.
For our first day in the high school weight room, Mr. Madigan had planned on getting us all squatting, but instead of using one of the big power racks lining the east wall, we used one of those gun rack style racks with the angled uprights and fixed spotter bars on the side. Coach Madigan showed us how to put the bar on our traps/shoulders, not our neck, walk it out, and squat. I did not know it at the time, but Mr. Madigan was about to utter some words that would influence the rest of my life. “When you squat, you squat to below parallel. Squatting above parallel is not squatting.” There was no excuse for not squatting parallel in the high school weight room, and my friends and I were all over each other if someone dared cut a squat high.
After observing some basics from Mr. Madigan, my friends and I started rotating through, starting with the bar and getting a feel for the movement. We each did a set at 45, 65, 95, 115, and finally 135. I will never forget my set with 135. I unracked the bar, walked back, set my feet, and banged out eight reps. After about three reps, I heard Mr. Madigan say to no one in particular, “This kid has strong legs.” Whoa! Did Mr. Madigan just say that? About me? I was hooked. I finished my set, racked the bar, and knew, KNEW, that this was something I was going to be doing for the rest of my life. I was in love with the iron. It turns out my legs weren’t really that strong, nor did I have a build for being particularly good at lifting. By the start of freshman year, I was 6’5” and weight about 170 pounds. I was not built for lifting, but I knew that it made me feel strong and powerful and full of energy and life. Twenty-two years later, it still feels the same when I get under the bar. I could be having a shitty day or stressing about one thing or another, and all of that melts away after a good session in the weight room. It is not something I can explain or describe to anyone who doesn’t lift themselves, and I feel sorry for people who go through life without experiencing this feeling of strength. I truly believe that if everyone was required to lift and get stronger on a regular basis, the world would have far fewer problems, real and make-believe, than we do currently.
It turns out that March 6, 1998, was also the 14th birthday of Tony, one of my best buddies. He had a sleep-over at his house that night with a big group of our friends. I should note that we had an NBA Jam Sega Genesis tournament and I was the winner. I could really play that game well. The next morning, Saturday, I woke up on the floor in Tony’s living room and got up to go use the bathroom. At this moment I experienced something for the first time in my life…extreme soreness on every inch of my legs. What was this feeling? I didn’t really know, but I liked it in some kind of sadistic way. It felt like a badge of honor. My legs were sore as heck because I had worked hard yesterday. It was the first time I had this feeling, but certainly not the last.
Getting Started
When I was about 10 or 11 years old (so that would put us around 1994-95), my dad brought home some weights that he had bought at a rummage sale. I was pretty much completely sports-obsessed by that age, so it was a given that I was going to play every sport that I could for my small school in Norway, Michigan, the home of the Norway Knights. My friends and I were already playing organized sports, including basketball and Little League baseball. Now, this was a small town, so when I say organized sports, I do not mean anything like what I see in 2019 near a major metropolitan area like Philadelphia. We did not have “travel teams” or “A” and “B” squads. Our area just was not populous enough for that, but we played other small nearby schools and the wins and losses (yes, score was always kept) meant the world to us.
If you are reading this, it stands to reason you probably have a passing interest in training, and that means you may have seen something similar to the weights my dad brought home. The weights themselves had a plastic exterior, were filled with sand, had a standard 1” hole, and attached to dumbbell handles or a super skinny 15-lb bar that was about six feet long and had no knurling. The free weights came with a bench with two attached uprights set about a foot apart and a set of squat stands coming off the back. There was some kind of attachment to the bench for doing leg extensions but it did not connect very well and it got set aside and forgotten. My friends and I would go downstairs to the concrete-floored furnace room with laundry and winter coats hanging everywhere and go to town. Now, I have read and listened to a lot of other people say they started out with this kind of basement setup and that they had no idea what they were doing. Well, what those other people were doing probably looked like a world class strength program compared to what my friends and I invented down in my parents’ basement. It cannot be overstated how clueless we were, but that did not stop us from benching, curling, squatting, and even power cleaning (well, trying to power clean). The power clean area was strategically placed between the end of the bench and these huge shelves that held all kinds of random junk that is still there, untouched, 25 years later. There was a floor drain there so no matter what way you stood, you had a foot in one drain. Even at that age, my mathematical reasoning brain demanded balance, so I would alternate the direction I faced each set. That way, I would get as many sets with my right foot sitting lower in the drain as my left foot...genius.
One time my friends and I were down in the furnace room getting after it and my buddy Hammer was benching. Grant was “spotting” him, and when Hammer got to a rep that he could not finish, rather than helping him, Grant just stood there offering informative coaching cues like, “Come on, pussy,” and, “Don’t drop it on your face.” I was no better as I just stood there watching as Hammer fought the bar as it slowly came down directly onto his teeth. Grant finally pulled it off of him and Hammer got up, understandably, pissed at both of us. With that kind of training, it is amazing we all didn’t turn into Mr. Olympia
Another time I was in the basement weight room by myself when my sister Stacy and her boyfriend Tim came downstairs. I was doing cleans when they wandered in and Stacy asked what the heck I was doing. At this time I was probably in eighth grade, and I knew a lot about cleans because I had seen pictures of three different phases of the clean on a Bigger, Faster, Stronger poster that was on the door of the high school weight room. I mean, I was basically an accomplished olympic lifting coach after that experience. Stacy wanted to give it a try, so I did my best to show her how I set it up and worked around the drain as best I could. I remember her trying a few reps and Tim jokingly yelling, “EXPLODE!” at her whenever she got the bar to her mid-thighs. Shockingly, Stacy never got the chance to represent the United States in weightlifting at the Olympics.
Quick story about Tim...I am not sure how much my parents liked him, but, despite being several years older than me, Tim always treated me fine. I played high school sports with Tim’s brother Paul, who was phenomenally athletic and went on to play wide receiver in college. My friends and I always watched the Saturday afternoon varsity football games (the field didn’t have lights yet, so “Friday Night Lights” wasn’t an option) from up on the practice hill that overlooked Ronberg Field at the high school. Well, actually we half watched and half played our own game of tackle football and tried to flirt with the girls in our grade. One game, when Tim was playing defensive back on varsity, he intercepted the ball around his own 25-yard line. He had nothing but daylight in front of him as he took off for a long sprint at a pick-six. Tim was doing great until about the opposing 30-yard line when dammit if it didn’t look like someone put a piano on his back. You could almost feel the whole crowd somehow both cheering Tim on and holding their breath as opposing players slowly gained on him. Tim’s progress slowed and he was eventually dragged down inside the 10. The fact that I still remember that play so vividly speaks to how cool I thought Tim was and how badass I thought it would be to make a play in a varsity game.
That basement weight room was terrible and awesome at the same time. It was really cool of my dad to buy that equipment and lug it downstairs for us to use, and it was at least partly responsible for my lifelong obsession with lifting. It turns out, the limited exercises we had available to us were really all we needed to get strong, but we pretty much just squatted, benched, curled, and cleaned. Hell, I didn’t even know what a deadlift or row was, or I probably would have added those into the mix too. There is much more to come about my love for the weights, but that weight set in a basement furnace room in a tiny town in Michigan is where it all started.