My Wasted Weight Lifting

This is a tale of a misspent youth drowning in the over abundance of information related to strength and fitness.
I am not strong, I like to pretend I am but in all honesty I am not. I wish I could write an article about how a real man trains or about how these pencil neck geeks don’t know what the hell they are doing in the gym.
The simple truth is that I can’t because I am, was and maybe still am a weak pencil neck geek who gets sand kicked in his face by the bully at the beach.
What I am though is completely obsessed with strength training some would call it fanatical with the amount of crap that I have stored in my brain on the topic.
My story begins with my junior year of high school.

In 2005 I discover MMA, I love it and I decide I want to train for it. I get a book called “Superfit” by Royce Gracie my then hero which basically outlines his strength and fitness program.

Before that book I had been against weight training. I was a soccer player I figured that was something stupid football players did.
But once I tasted that steel I became obsessed and started doing as much research on it as I could. Probably like most I got my information from other people I knew who were doing some sort of program.
Next came the forums and then finally I graduated to websites and journals online.

Starting out I wanted to be fit, then I wanted to be bigger and now I want to be strong.

Getting bigger was easy-- just train and eat. Now I am not someone who looks like a bodybuilder but I have consistently packed on size over the years.
I went from a skinny 145-pounds in high school and finished college as a skinny looking 185-pounds.
So you would think there would be some strength gains along the way and well yes there were some but nothing tremendous.
My problem was the over abundance of training information available.

There are two many methods, two many exciting breakthroughs that come out and two much emphasis on bodybuilding.

I flip flopped from one routine to the next every other week and I was never consistent in the weights I was using.
The idea that to get stronger you have to do more led me to become chronically sick from over training and caused me to incur a longtime back injury.
So what has changed?
Well I train less now at least with a lot less intensity, I write things down and I stick to a fairly simple program.
I love the strength game and I will never stop trying to become more knowledgeable but sometimes doing less is doing more for your body.
The strongmen of yesteryear didn’t rely on science to tell them how to train and they were pound-for-pound stronger then most lifters today.
If you are looking to get strong there are three people I have to recommend-- Pavel Tsatsouline, Brooks Kubik and John Brookfield.
Read their books and remember keep it simple and condense the knowledge to your particular training program.

Keep training relatively simple, stretch eat right, train with awkward objects and never burn yourself out lifting.

Those are my suggestions and now after waisting six years of my life in complete confusion I am starting to finally make the gains that I have always wanted.