I grew up playing almost all sports like every kid where I grew up. I found a fond interest in soccer and kept with that all the way through high school. I absolutely dreaded the conditioning, running was never a really strong suit of mine. I was okay at running a long time without stopping but I had no top end speed, I was so slow. I remember being happy when i wasn’t last during sprint drills. Playing in the games was what made me keep playing. So I wasn't really into exercising early in life.
I graduated from high school in 2008 and weighed only about 120 pounds at a towering height of about 5 feet 8 inches or so. After graduating I started working construction as a plumber. I was working long days digging ditches, carrying heavy pipe and using tools that I could barely lift. At this time I was not very strong at all. The long labor intensive days would absolutely crush me. I would get home from work at about 4 pm or so and be asleep on the couch by 6 pm, most days. I was struggling, all of those years of neglecting exercise to prepare for soccer season was catching up to me. Deep down I knew I had to do something or my wellbeing and social life was going to be in the toilet. This made me start looking into ways to get into better shape.
First thing that I started doing was prison style bodyweight workouts, from a video I found on YouTube. I would get home from work and force myself to do the bodyweight workouts. I noticed huge improvements in strength right away. Work started to become easier and I wasn’t so drained at the end of the day, and I started to look forward to my workouts. Over the next 3 or 4 months I would slowly start buying more exercise equipment and incorporating into my home workouts. I also found myself with more energy after my workouts that I would then go for runs along the countryside. Slowly over the next year I built up to doing a strength workout, then follow that up with an 8 mile run most days. At this point I had formed a new healthy habit.
After about one year of my home workouts I purchase a gym membership. Once I got my gym membership I started focusing mostly on trying to put on muscle, mostly for vain reasons like most young men and the fact I had nasty shin splints in both legs that lasted about 2 more years, but that's another story. At about year 2 I weighed about 155 pounds. 2 years before I was 120 pounds, I packed on 35 pounds of muscle in about 2 years. I continued lifting heavy, eating like a horse and putting on muscle. Then at about 3 years after starting, I was 170 pounds, this was definitely the most I have ever weighed.
Year 3 is when the sh!t hit the fan. I had a nasty back injury, the one that I talked about in my last blog, the one where a doc said I had 3 herniated discs...ya that one. At this time I was still recovering from my shin splints as well. So I couldn’t run, couldn’t lift, really couldn’t do much to tell you the truth. So I started educating myself on my mistakes as well as how to get better. Now I want to help people not make the same mistakes and help them once they have already made those mistakes.
