Embrace Your Genetics... And Gain Like Never Before, Part One

If you are starting out in strength training, and interested in some sort of competitive strength sports, how do you know what strength sport?  Have you ever wondered why you're stronger than other guys your size?  Or why you can gain muscle, but have a very hard time building strength?  Then read on... this is YOUR article.

Embrace Your Genetics... 

And Gain Like Never Before!

Part One

 

Many athletes, fighters, lifters, and bodybuilders don't succeed because they don't learn to embrace their genetics.  For a long time, I didn't embrace my genetics, and it cost me.  When I was a young man, for instance, I was very skilled at martial arts, but always small.  At some point, I decided that I wanted to look more like Arnold and less like Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee was always the look I had "went" for when training, and this was actually smart if I would have been mature enough (I was only a teenager) to pay attention to my skills, and internal clues that would have helped me understand the kind of athlete that I could be based on my genetics to succeed in strength sports.  But I didn't pay attention.  Even though I could have naturally had a physique very similar to what Bruce Lee had built, and, conversely, also the sort of wiry strength that goes along with that kind of build, I wanted to look more like Jean Claude Van Damme. 

So I took up bodybuilding.

But that, of course, wasn't actually a mistake, which is the sort of paradox here.  The way I was eventually able to discover my genetic potential in powerlifting was by (sort of) failing at bodybuilding.  However, I also think this cuts across many modalities - or, possibly, all modalities - for gifted athletes and artists.  For instance, as a martial artist, you might love Thai boxing, but the honest  truth, based on your size, speed (or lack of), and Mack-truck-strength is that you would be best in Sumo wrestling (or some sort of grappling sport that relies on slow strength instead of the sort of strength that relies on a finely tuned nervous system).  And, yes, I realize that's an extreme example, but it still holds true, extreme or not.

Which brings up the next - and obvious - question.  How in the hell do you go about embracing your genetics in order to succeed at a strength sport (or, well, other crap)?  To get there, we will have to backtrack a little bit, to the early to mid '90s, when I was madly in love with the sport of bodybuilding...

It was late 1994, and I trained with a couple of older, more successful bodybuilders (one of whom went on to win Mr. Alabama, which was pretty cool, but I will try my very best to not digress, so back to my tale).  I weighed probably 185 to 190 at this point, but my partners were quite a bit heavier than me, but just as lean, so they had a compreciable amount of muscle mass.  And I just couldn't figure it out!  We had all been training in bodybuilding for the same length of time.  Why were they so much bigger than I was?  But, conversely, why was I stronger than them on most exercises we did?  Especially back and leg exercises, where I could often outlift my partners by more than 100 pounds on squats!  Even though, and here was the really crazy part, my legs were by far the smallest of my muscle groups in proportion to the rest of my body.  Weird, I thought, right?!

In '94, I "looked good" (for whatever the hell that is worth) - people at the gym would call me "Pretty Boy", or something of a similar ilk, but that was only because I had a "good" bone structure, and it didn't mean that I was somehow meant to be a great bodybuilder.  And because I had that structure, I did think I would be great at bodybuilding.  I came to the conclusion, sometime around then, that it must simply be because of my small bone structure.  But I was not entirely correct.  Sure, there is no doubt that bone structure must pay a part in how large you get.  Okay, not to get off track, but when I was a little kid, there simply weren't very many - as in virtually NO - overbese kids at school.  But if I was ever out in public with my mother or my grandmother (East Texans, for whatever that's worth to give you the idea of the women of my family), and they saw an obese kid my age, they always chalked it up to the undeniable fact that the child was "big boned."  So as a young man lifting weights, I thought back to my childhood and the "big-boned" kids and thought, well, that's it.  I must have always just been a "small-boned" kid!

(By the way, we will save my take on obesity - America's true epidemic - for another post.  I have a unique take on that, as well.)

From '94 until '97 I kept at it, however, and eventually got up to a very solid 205 to 210 pounds of lean muscle.  But it was hard, and my two workout partners from '94 were now even bigger than I was and they were even leaner than I was weighing 210.  During this time, as well, I was writing a lot for Ironman and MuscleMag International magazines, and so my workout partners and I were constantly trying out new programs and experimenting with different programs to see what worked, and what didn't. (This was also the point when I realized I was a good coach or trainer.  Even though I wasn't that good at making myself big and massive, I was better at training other bodybuilders than they were in training themselves.)  That helped me to attain the physique I had, but I was also burned out with the constant meal prepping, eating, and training my ass off, but just not developing the physique that I thought I should have by that point.

I was always strong, and always built muscle the easiest with what might be called "power-bodybuilding" training - the very sort of training that I wrote about all the time back then.  So I already suspected something of what was going on with my genetics.  I knew that being the pound-for-pound strongest bodybuilder in the gym had to have something to do with it.

In '97, I married my first wife, and we moved to another state.  I took a very brief break from training - I was burned out - and, after much soul-searching, decided I no longer wanted to be a competitive bodybuilder, and I let go of my goal of becoming a state champion.  Sometime in '97, when I began training at a local gym, a guy at the gym gave me a copy of Dinosaur Training by Brooks Kubik, and I became enthralled with old-time strength training, and, very quickly, other strength sports such as strongman and powerlifting.

Within a few months, I was training for a state powerlifting meet, and my writing career took off when I shifted it to "lifting" instead of "bodybuilding."

But something else happened.  I got smaller (around 170 pounds, give or take a few pounds, depending on the day) but I also got even stronger.  By the mid 2000's, I could squat over 600 pounds, and I could deadlift just over 600, even though I still weighed almost the same as when I first got married.

I think this was 2003.  I only weighed 175, but I squatted and deadlifted over 550 at the meet where this was taken.

In 2004, at the WABDL souther regionals, I deadlifted 585 at 173 pounds.

Sometime in 2007, I was getting ready for a powerlifting meet - well, I think it was the WABDL Southern States (or whatever-the-hell it was called, but I think that's right), so technically it was a push/pull meet.  But something was just off.  Even though I only had to deadlift and bench at the meet, I still trained just like it was a full powerlifting meet (squatting greatly helped my deadlift, I believe, and I didn't want to change that just because I was deadlifting, and somehow it affected my strength).  But I just wasn't getting stronger, and, in fact, was getting weaker.  What the heck was going on?  Well, it didn't take long to figure it out.  Very soon, I suffered a "herniated disk,"as the doctor said, but it was more like 2 herniated disks that had been crushed, and just to top it off, he told me that I had the worst arthritis he had "just about ever seen on a man my age."  Well, mother-effin' great!

At first, I honestly thought I could heal myself.  I had, after all, been training very close to "Sheiko-style", and if you don't know what the hell that means, it means I was bench pressing 4 days per week, squatting 2 days per week, and deadlifting 2 days per week - the squats and deads are done on different days, so you still train your legs and back for a total of 4 days-per-week.  So, I thought, it must be the insane amount of training - no telling how many people had told me, after all, that I was crazy for training with the kind of intensity and volume I trained with, but I knew that it was exactly the kind of training I needed to dominate a meet.  Anything less, and I could shave a few pounds off my lifts.  But with the wise doctor's advice, I went down to just 2 days of training per week, one day for benching and squatting, and one day for benching and pulling.

My neck didn't get any better.  Despite all training attempts at rehab, I had no choice but surgery.  (By the way, I am very opposed to surgery for most disk issues, but with mine, I couldn't even sit down without being in pain, which meant the only relief I could get was to stand all day.  Odd.)

Six months after surgery, I tried my very best to get back to heavy powerlifting training, but the injuries kept coming.  So I knew it was time to change my training.  I hung up my powerlifting suit for the time being, and just got back to the kind of training I always loved to "play with" - heavy power-building, but with more rest, and a little more sense.

I weighted about 210 when this picture was taken, which you can find on my book cover, which was - I think - in 2014. I was bigger here but not as strong as when I was competitively powerlifting.  I could squat and deadlift right at 500, but not much more.

Within a few years, I was once again large and muscular, the largest I had been since almost two decades before, even though I was still doing power-style training.  I had also become an evangelist for HFT, so some could argue - and I think they would be correct - that part of my size was from all of my frequent training, more frequent, overall, than either my bodybuilding or powerlifting days.  In fact, at this point, since I did understand genetic-influenced training, I would often tell myself (like some old man), "if I only would have known then what I know now, I could have been a successful bodybuilder."  But that's not entirely correct, so we need to unpack this a little.

In Part Two, we will discuss the lessons to be learned from my training and lifting over several decades, and we'll discuss ways to figure out your body type, and some strategies based on your type and your chosen strength sport.