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This is the story of me physically, going from short thin pale boy to a devotee of weight training.
Personally I’ve never been a sports player on any real level, I used to be a semi decent football (Soccer) player and good enough to play for both my schools and a local private team, but I was never one of the best. The only real reason I took part was because I thought I was a whole lot better than I actually was, I spent most of my time playing for the private team sitting on the bench, well the figurative bench seeing as how we didn’t have a real one, so each Sunday my dad would give me a lift to the match and watch the match as I spent most games standing shivering on the sideline. It was always cold and wet in my memories, I can easily conjure back in my mind just how numb my poor 12 year old fingers and toes were and how my little thin legs would shake. I was a small boy for my age, both short and skinny and quite pale. Granted I was taller than those with special defects, you know the abnormally short person who was the height of someone several years younger, but still I was painfully short and as thin and frail as I was small. I weighed 5lbs at my birth and I don’t think I recovered from this as up until I left school I was feeble, so at 16 I was for all intense purposes I was not of an impressive stature. This is exactly how many people who have never seen me since remember me and rightly so.
I played sports yeah, but I wasn’t one of those athletic types, I struggled to play alongside others of superior stature and looking back on it I only attended to be with my friends. After I left school I went to 6th form college (16-18years old) I have an old fitness test I did when I was 16, it has me down as weighing 59kg/130ish lbs, this was just after my growth spurt I had on leaving school so was standing at my current height of 5’11”. That fitness test was the one I received on joining the college gym, it was at that point in my life when I first entered a gym, it was small and was one of those “multigym” type things with lots of pulleys attached to many different weight stacks. I didn’t have any kind of exercise program and didn’t even know why I would need one, all I knew is that I enjoyed spending most lunch times in the gym. I got to know the sports teachers well as I always appeared at the gym’s reception at the start of lunch time asking for a “peg” (these were given out and only with one of these could you use the gym due to them inserting into the weight stacks).
I didn’t know about eating properly or anything, I didn’t know about overtraining or periodisation or hypertrophy or strength or power, all I knew is that I loved getting away from everything at lunch time and doing my own thing. A year passed and I started my second year of 6th form college, this time I noted that there was a extra curricular course for the gym so instead of doing courses like “Meditation” and “The Tao of Pooh” and other odd and weird courses that I took in my first year I opted for the gym one the name of which escapes me. These were the extra curricular subjects you had to choose several of which ran alongside our normal examined subjects.
The day of the first lesson began and it quickly came around to about 10am when the gym lesson would begin, I got changed and made my way into the gym, it was strange seeing others with whom I studied alongside in gym clothes and in the gym which most of the time there would only be 3-5 people in but now there were about 12 of us. I was a fairly shy boy and stood at the back of the group as our teacher entered, I noted it was one of the gym teachers who I got on fairly well with a woman of about 30 whose name I cannot remember. The group listened to her talk for a while and then we moved on to where she would demonstrate the exercises, to the shock of shy quiet me she chose me to demonstrate everything as she knew I went to the gym on lunch times. I remember the red glow covering my face as she commented on my “good abs” as I had to do some crunches with my t-shirt pulled up so people could see how it should be done. I had put on some general muscle mass in the previous year and I weighed in at 66kg/145lbs ish, some was undoubtedly due to being a year older but I believe the majority was due to my gym time. I spent the year like the prior one working out in my lunch times, finally leaving college at a weight of 70kg/154lbs.
Due to being out of college and not belonging to a gym I did no training. This didn’t bother me as I never went to the gym to look good or for anything other than at lunch times at college it was the most fun thing to do.
The summer passed and I started University, released into the world at last and full of curiosity and energy. I joined a football club and more oddly the universities Kick Boxing club, I just wanted to do something different, something exciting. Kickboxing was boggling, 80 odd people crammed into a small hall on a balcony overlooking the main hall. During the first few weeks all I remember is that we did countless body weight exercises and fitness work, it was difficult and it hurt like mad. Needless to say after a month the kick boxing club now stood at some 20 people as so many dropped out due to just how tough and painful it was on the body, having some big guy stand over you as you desperately tried to stop yourself collapsing as you finished off the set of press ups you were doing and then had to keep yourself held up straining just to hold yourself up with your arms shaking was something I had never experienced. We always worked real hard, in subsequent weeks we actually got to do kick boxing and sparring as well as using bags and other exercises but the vast majority of the time was just physical exercise. The instructors really pushed us to do other physical exercises outside of club time, going to circuit training, the gym and running/swimming were all encouraged. I went to circuit training and noted how it just didn’t have the intensity that Kickboxing had except when others from kick boxing went and we grouped up to go around together.
At the end of my first year there were maybe 15 of us left in the club due to further drop outs and some finishing University in their final year. At the start of my second year I went back to kick boxing and once again there were some 80 people in the area which used to accommodate 15 of us. As now a veteran of a year I was required to lead some of the fitness training and to make it basically as hard as I could go and then some. As before the high numbers dropped to way more comfortable levels.
My third year of University saw me continue with Kickboxing and venture into the gym to a moderate amount, due to the sports I was doing and being that I couldn’t stand the subject I was doing my degree in (Microbiology) I decided I would apply to Masters Degree programs in sports. Luckily for me I was accepted to the University that I held as my favourite choice.
I began my Masters with great enthusiasm, the kind of enthusiasm an active person would have if they had just waved goodbye to Microbiology forever and started learning about Fitness, Health and Sports. It was tough, with only 12 hours contact time a week we had to do massive amounts of work in our own time and it made my bachelors degree look like a walk in the park. But due to how much I enjoyed it, it was completely different from the work I had to put in to Microbiology. During the year I trained just for fitness, lots of running and no weight training, I don’t think I was as physically able as I was in the prior year during kickboxing but I was in decent shape all the same. After a summer of research and then writing it all up and analyzing my results (I researched Pyruvate supplementation on humans at commercial levels) I passed my course and was awarded my Masters. On leaving I weighed about 168lbs which had been about constant for the past two years.
I was now 22 and looking for work, Luckily I landed a job at a college lecturing different aspects of fitness and sports, during my time working at the college I did absolutely no training, no gym work, no fitness work no nothing, this was largely due to a computer game I had started playing which was beginning to take up more and more of my time, the name of this game was Everquest and if anything in this world is truly psychologically addictive then this game is. I spent about two years playing this game, the first year at a very relaxed level, the second I would spend every moment I could outside of work playing this game, sleep took second place, eating properly took second place, even work took second place as I took several days sick throughout my time playing as I was just too tired to go to work.
My weight stayed the same, but my muscle turned to fat (yes muscles can’t physiologically turn to fat but it would have appeared that way from a none scientific point of view). I lost all fitness I’d ever had and was in the worst shape of my life.
This culminated in me playing at the top level of the game, during this time I spoke to several other players about fitness and training, I would always say “I used to…” and would talk about my past be it kickboxing or training in the gym or running. I was living in the past and I was disgusted with myself, I desperately needed to quit playing Everquest and have fun in the real world once more. I weighed a fat ridden 168lbs.
I applied for a job as a manager for an IT company and succeeded in getting the job, I vowed as I started this job so would my life begin again, I would stop playing the damned game and go to the gym and train 10x harder than anyone else I saw there. I also found a website called elitefitness which was instrumental to the changes I was making.
In April of 2002 I stopped playing Everquest and started training at a gym which I worked at (I worked there on some evenings as a fitness instructor after my day at college even though I looked like crap). I didn’t design myself a program, all I did was buy a big calendar and make a vow to myself that for 3 months I would never miss a single day training and would train 3 days a week in the gym.
Amazingly after only 3 months the changes I made were monumental, I looked like a completely different person in stature. I was getting comments from everybody I knew about how I looked, what’s more is I loved working out. After the three months were up I continued to train always circling the days on my calendar on which I trained. In September of 2002 I weighed 195lbs. Unfortunately come October there was a death in my immediate family, I coped with this by turning to Everquest again, I once again stopped training and outside of work I lived and breathed the game. Luckily this stopped in December as I coped better with the tragedy which helped me quit again. Come January and I changed gyms to a much better equipped gym I also bought myself a training log book and wrote myself up a training program based mainly on what I’d read on elitefitness.com’s training forum. I think I finally became a member to post in February.
Since January I quickly got back what I’d lost over two months of not training and made some great gains. It is now November 2003 and I weight train and swim a lot, I’m currently in the best shape of my life weighing 210lbs with too much body fat at 12% but it’s a far cry from where I was.
In the past couple of months I’ve seen several old friends who knew me from my pale short, skinny pre 16yrs old days and they just didn’t recognize me till I introduced myself and then they just stared and commented on how big I was, guys who once seemed twice my size and strength look at me visually impressed. I’ve heard everything ranging from people saying how it’s a waste of time to workout as we all die anyway to people asking me if I’m using steroids. Whenever someone introduces me, they nearly always describe to the other person how thin I was, it’s getting funny each time it happens. It has been 18 months since I really turned myself around and almost 11 months since I became serious about it. This guy who I am still feels skinny but has to acknowledge he isn’t when he has to struggle to find trousers with enough thigh room which don’t have massive waist sizes.
In a nation of sports, where hordes of people are getting fat and watching their favourite sports team on satellite tv, in a nation which is the “Fattest” in Europe I am real happy to see people training for strength and/or fitness alongside health every time I go to the gym. I am at the start of the road, the road which many people before me have traveled down and the thought of everyone on this road inspires me. Getting encouragement from people further down this road and sometimes from those not long begun is great stuff.
I’d like to thank people who post here, I’ve learnt a lot, but with all things the more you know the more you realize you don’t know, so it boggles my mind more now than it ever did. Many on this forum have been a great inspiration, it’s been a great help to turning my life back around and it’s always humbling to read just how much some of you guys lift.
Personally I’ve never been a sports player on any real level, I used to be a semi decent football (Soccer) player and good enough to play for both my schools and a local private team, but I was never one of the best. The only real reason I took part was because I thought I was a whole lot better than I actually was, I spent most of my time playing for the private team sitting on the bench, well the figurative bench seeing as how we didn’t have a real one, so each Sunday my dad would give me a lift to the match and watch the match as I spent most games standing shivering on the sideline. It was always cold and wet in my memories, I can easily conjure back in my mind just how numb my poor 12 year old fingers and toes were and how my little thin legs would shake. I was a small boy for my age, both short and skinny and quite pale. Granted I was taller than those with special defects, you know the abnormally short person who was the height of someone several years younger, but still I was painfully short and as thin and frail as I was small. I weighed 5lbs at my birth and I don’t think I recovered from this as up until I left school I was feeble, so at 16 I was for all intense purposes I was not of an impressive stature. This is exactly how many people who have never seen me since remember me and rightly so.
I played sports yeah, but I wasn’t one of those athletic types, I struggled to play alongside others of superior stature and looking back on it I only attended to be with my friends. After I left school I went to 6th form college (16-18years old) I have an old fitness test I did when I was 16, it has me down as weighing 59kg/130ish lbs, this was just after my growth spurt I had on leaving school so was standing at my current height of 5’11”. That fitness test was the one I received on joining the college gym, it was at that point in my life when I first entered a gym, it was small and was one of those “multigym” type things with lots of pulleys attached to many different weight stacks. I didn’t have any kind of exercise program and didn’t even know why I would need one, all I knew is that I enjoyed spending most lunch times in the gym. I got to know the sports teachers well as I always appeared at the gym’s reception at the start of lunch time asking for a “peg” (these were given out and only with one of these could you use the gym due to them inserting into the weight stacks).
I didn’t know about eating properly or anything, I didn’t know about overtraining or periodisation or hypertrophy or strength or power, all I knew is that I loved getting away from everything at lunch time and doing my own thing. A year passed and I started my second year of 6th form college, this time I noted that there was a extra curricular course for the gym so instead of doing courses like “Meditation” and “The Tao of Pooh” and other odd and weird courses that I took in my first year I opted for the gym one the name of which escapes me. These were the extra curricular subjects you had to choose several of which ran alongside our normal examined subjects.
The day of the first lesson began and it quickly came around to about 10am when the gym lesson would begin, I got changed and made my way into the gym, it was strange seeing others with whom I studied alongside in gym clothes and in the gym which most of the time there would only be 3-5 people in but now there were about 12 of us. I was a fairly shy boy and stood at the back of the group as our teacher entered, I noted it was one of the gym teachers who I got on fairly well with a woman of about 30 whose name I cannot remember. The group listened to her talk for a while and then we moved on to where she would demonstrate the exercises, to the shock of shy quiet me she chose me to demonstrate everything as she knew I went to the gym on lunch times. I remember the red glow covering my face as she commented on my “good abs” as I had to do some crunches with my t-shirt pulled up so people could see how it should be done. I had put on some general muscle mass in the previous year and I weighed in at 66kg/145lbs ish, some was undoubtedly due to being a year older but I believe the majority was due to my gym time. I spent the year like the prior one working out in my lunch times, finally leaving college at a weight of 70kg/154lbs.
Due to being out of college and not belonging to a gym I did no training. This didn’t bother me as I never went to the gym to look good or for anything other than at lunch times at college it was the most fun thing to do.
The summer passed and I started University, released into the world at last and full of curiosity and energy. I joined a football club and more oddly the universities Kick Boxing club, I just wanted to do something different, something exciting. Kickboxing was boggling, 80 odd people crammed into a small hall on a balcony overlooking the main hall. During the first few weeks all I remember is that we did countless body weight exercises and fitness work, it was difficult and it hurt like mad. Needless to say after a month the kick boxing club now stood at some 20 people as so many dropped out due to just how tough and painful it was on the body, having some big guy stand over you as you desperately tried to stop yourself collapsing as you finished off the set of press ups you were doing and then had to keep yourself held up straining just to hold yourself up with your arms shaking was something I had never experienced. We always worked real hard, in subsequent weeks we actually got to do kick boxing and sparring as well as using bags and other exercises but the vast majority of the time was just physical exercise. The instructors really pushed us to do other physical exercises outside of club time, going to circuit training, the gym and running/swimming were all encouraged. I went to circuit training and noted how it just didn’t have the intensity that Kickboxing had except when others from kick boxing went and we grouped up to go around together.
At the end of my first year there were maybe 15 of us left in the club due to further drop outs and some finishing University in their final year. At the start of my second year I went back to kick boxing and once again there were some 80 people in the area which used to accommodate 15 of us. As now a veteran of a year I was required to lead some of the fitness training and to make it basically as hard as I could go and then some. As before the high numbers dropped to way more comfortable levels.
My third year of University saw me continue with Kickboxing and venture into the gym to a moderate amount, due to the sports I was doing and being that I couldn’t stand the subject I was doing my degree in (Microbiology) I decided I would apply to Masters Degree programs in sports. Luckily for me I was accepted to the University that I held as my favourite choice.
I began my Masters with great enthusiasm, the kind of enthusiasm an active person would have if they had just waved goodbye to Microbiology forever and started learning about Fitness, Health and Sports. It was tough, with only 12 hours contact time a week we had to do massive amounts of work in our own time and it made my bachelors degree look like a walk in the park. But due to how much I enjoyed it, it was completely different from the work I had to put in to Microbiology. During the year I trained just for fitness, lots of running and no weight training, I don’t think I was as physically able as I was in the prior year during kickboxing but I was in decent shape all the same. After a summer of research and then writing it all up and analyzing my results (I researched Pyruvate supplementation on humans at commercial levels) I passed my course and was awarded my Masters. On leaving I weighed about 168lbs which had been about constant for the past two years.
I was now 22 and looking for work, Luckily I landed a job at a college lecturing different aspects of fitness and sports, during my time working at the college I did absolutely no training, no gym work, no fitness work no nothing, this was largely due to a computer game I had started playing which was beginning to take up more and more of my time, the name of this game was Everquest and if anything in this world is truly psychologically addictive then this game is. I spent about two years playing this game, the first year at a very relaxed level, the second I would spend every moment I could outside of work playing this game, sleep took second place, eating properly took second place, even work took second place as I took several days sick throughout my time playing as I was just too tired to go to work.
My weight stayed the same, but my muscle turned to fat (yes muscles can’t physiologically turn to fat but it would have appeared that way from a none scientific point of view). I lost all fitness I’d ever had and was in the worst shape of my life.
This culminated in me playing at the top level of the game, during this time I spoke to several other players about fitness and training, I would always say “I used to…” and would talk about my past be it kickboxing or training in the gym or running. I was living in the past and I was disgusted with myself, I desperately needed to quit playing Everquest and have fun in the real world once more. I weighed a fat ridden 168lbs.
I applied for a job as a manager for an IT company and succeeded in getting the job, I vowed as I started this job so would my life begin again, I would stop playing the damned game and go to the gym and train 10x harder than anyone else I saw there. I also found a website called elitefitness which was instrumental to the changes I was making.
In April of 2002 I stopped playing Everquest and started training at a gym which I worked at (I worked there on some evenings as a fitness instructor after my day at college even though I looked like crap). I didn’t design myself a program, all I did was buy a big calendar and make a vow to myself that for 3 months I would never miss a single day training and would train 3 days a week in the gym.
Amazingly after only 3 months the changes I made were monumental, I looked like a completely different person in stature. I was getting comments from everybody I knew about how I looked, what’s more is I loved working out. After the three months were up I continued to train always circling the days on my calendar on which I trained. In September of 2002 I weighed 195lbs. Unfortunately come October there was a death in my immediate family, I coped with this by turning to Everquest again, I once again stopped training and outside of work I lived and breathed the game. Luckily this stopped in December as I coped better with the tragedy which helped me quit again. Come January and I changed gyms to a much better equipped gym I also bought myself a training log book and wrote myself up a training program based mainly on what I’d read on elitefitness.com’s training forum. I think I finally became a member to post in February.
Since January I quickly got back what I’d lost over two months of not training and made some great gains. It is now November 2003 and I weight train and swim a lot, I’m currently in the best shape of my life weighing 210lbs with too much body fat at 12% but it’s a far cry from where I was.
In the past couple of months I’ve seen several old friends who knew me from my pale short, skinny pre 16yrs old days and they just didn’t recognize me till I introduced myself and then they just stared and commented on how big I was, guys who once seemed twice my size and strength look at me visually impressed. I’ve heard everything ranging from people saying how it’s a waste of time to workout as we all die anyway to people asking me if I’m using steroids. Whenever someone introduces me, they nearly always describe to the other person how thin I was, it’s getting funny each time it happens. It has been 18 months since I really turned myself around and almost 11 months since I became serious about it. This guy who I am still feels skinny but has to acknowledge he isn’t when he has to struggle to find trousers with enough thigh room which don’t have massive waist sizes.
In a nation of sports, where hordes of people are getting fat and watching their favourite sports team on satellite tv, in a nation which is the “Fattest” in Europe I am real happy to see people training for strength and/or fitness alongside health every time I go to the gym. I am at the start of the road, the road which many people before me have traveled down and the thought of everyone on this road inspires me. Getting encouragement from people further down this road and sometimes from those not long begun is great stuff.
I’d like to thank people who post here, I’ve learnt a lot, but with all things the more you know the more you realize you don’t know, so it boggles my mind more now than it ever did. Many on this forum have been a great inspiration, it’s been a great help to turning my life back around and it’s always humbling to read just how much some of you guys lift.
