Why Do You Train?

Musings on Lifting, Life, and the Reasons for Training

(with a few workouts thrown in for good measure)

     Why do you train?  It’s a question you must ask yourself and it’s a question that only you can answer.  To help you with the question, I can only tell you why I train.  But to do that, we have to go back to the past a little bit.  Why did I train?  What got me started in the first place?  What kept me going?  Why do I train now and why will I continue to train long into the future?

     I started training when I was pretty young, around 13 years old.  It might have been 14.  I’m not really sure, though 13 sounds about right.  It would have been in ‘86 or ‘87, when my father bought me one of those cement-filled DP weight sets for either my birthday or Christmas.  I think it was my birthday, because I remember first training in the summer, and I was born in May.  My sister is about seven years older than me, my only sibling, and she left the house when she was 18 or so for college.  I turned her room upstairs and down the hall from mine into my makeshift gym.  My dad didn’t believe in using much air-conditioning.  He probably thought that it made you soft or something, so he kept the house around 78 degrees even in the heat of the Alabama summer.  I put a box fan in my new “gym”, but I still sweated quite a bit.

     I quickly fell in love with working out.  I wanted to look like my idols, mostly stars of ‘70s kung-fu movies such as Bruce Lee (of course), and the Shaw Brothers actors Gordon Liu and Lo Mang.  Mang was often called the Chinese Hercules for a reason—lean, hard, muscular, and awesome to my young mind.

     When I first began, I didn’t train “properly.”  I did a lot of bench presses (of course).  I did even more curls (most teenagers want big arms, let’s admit).  I bet I did about the same thing any kid my age did when they first encountered the barbell.  Kids still do it, I think it’s fair to say.  The one thing that I did have going for me is that I loved to read.  Before long, I was reading every bodybuilding magazine that hit the magazine rack at the local drug or grocery store.  At first, it was just Muscle & Fitness but then I encountered Ironman and MuscleMag International.  I learned that if I really wanted to transform my physique, I needed to do some squats and some back training.  I didn’t have a squat rack, so I’d just pick the bar off the ground—probably loaded with no more than 25 to 30 pounds total—and press it over my head until it rested on my traps.  I started doing some rows, too.  I learned about this thing called “overtraining.”  The writers in Ironman assured me that if a scrawny little kid such as myself wanted to make gains, I needed to just train 2 days a week with a limited number of exercises, maybe no more than 3 or 4.

     I liked lifting because it was just me and the iron.  The only thing I had to rely on was myself and my own effort.  I liked those kinds of things.  It was the reason I loved martial arts in the first place, which I had been training in since I was around 10.  I was never much of a team player.  I suppose I could have been a good high-school athlete—small but “compact.”  But I had given up on team sports after my first year in middle school, when I played for my school’s football team.  We were so bad that not only did we not win a game, we didn’t manage to score a single point the entire season.  Maybe if we’d had a decent field-goal kicker, we could have scored something, but it wasn’t to be.  I returned punts and kickoffs because I lost the least yards among my teammates when doing so, but I still lost yards.  You need someone to block you, after all, before you're swarmed by the opposing defense.  We didn’t have blockers.  I’m pretty sure that experience soured me toward team sports for the rest of my life.  But maybe not.  Perhaps that didn’t really have anything to do with it.  Maybe I was just a loner who liked doing solitary stuff.  For some folks, their heroes have always been cowboys.  I like cowboys, being Texan and all, and come from an entire family of them.  But my heroes were lone samurai ronin and kung-fu fighters training deep in the woods during the Qing dynasty by a solitary master who drank plenty of wine and made his pupil undergo grueling training sessions.

     Martial arts and lifting have that individuality in common.  I liked both of them.  I still like both of ‘em.  Even though I didn’t play any team sport in my adolescence, I competed in Karate tournaments and then powerlifting meets after that for the next 20+ years.  I loved competition.  Even when I competed on “teams” in Karate tournaments, I didn’t really care if my teammates lost their kumite match so long as I won mine.

     But there’s more to lifting than just competition.  In my mid 30s, I had to hang up my Titan powerlifting singlet due to injuries.  I think I was 34 when I had surgery for herniated discs in my neck.  After surgery, I’m pretty sure that it was the longest I ever didn’t train in my whole life, to this day, which was about 6 months.  (I even thought, very briefly, that I might end up living as a “normal.”  For more on that, read my essay Living as a Normal that I wrote around 13 years ago.)  I thought maybe I’d be able to return to powerlifting competition after that, but the injuries were just too much.  My body—my neck, my back, my arthritis pervading the entire rear of my frame—wouldn’t allow it.  From that point on, up to my mid 40s, I poured myself into getting as big as I possibly could.  I loved training too much to ever stop.  I don’t stop now, even when there are days when I struggle to raise my left hand over my head or get out of bed because of chronic pain and herniated discs.  I still train in martial arts, too.  Where there’s a will, there’s a way.  You just have to find the stuff that you can still do and do it.

     Back to my youth.  When I was 15 or 16, my sensei at the dojo where I trained decided he could make more money if he opened a commercial gym, too, something to compete against the Gold’s Gym across town.  There was also the local YMCA—a place I would start training at a couple years later and really fall in love with power bodybuilding—but nothing else as far as I can remember.  The gym wasn’t huge, but it had all one needed.  Looking back on it, it had plenty.  It had treadmills and bikes and a “StairMaster” or two, but it also had a squat rack, a couple of flat bench presses, an incline bench, a rack of dumbbells going up to at least 100 pounds—weights I could only dream of lifting at the time—along with a few machines, such as a leg press, leg extension, leg curl, and whatever-the-heck you call the cable machine with a lat pulldown, low-cable row, cable crossover, cable curl, and tricep pushdown getup.  So, yeah, plenty.  I wanted to try all of the shiny new machine stuff like the proverbial kid in a candy store.  I did.  And didn’t really see any results, so I got back to what I read in Ironman about following an abbreviated program.  I was particularly intrigued with the whole 20-rep breathing squat idea, as it apparently was capable of packing on a whopping 30 pounds in 8 weeks on my scrawny frame according to Dr. Randall Strossen.  I could only do around 135 for my set of 20 reps, but I decided to give it a go.  I gained a little muscle off of it, but not much.  Looking back on it, that was likely because I had trouble scarfing down the necessary calories and the fact that I was doing Karate for a couple hours at a time, sometimes longer, at least 5 days a week, 6 when we had Saturday classes.

     I was also conflicted back then.  I wanted to be big and strong ever since my dad took me to see Conan the Barbarian back in ‘82—my mother and he got in an argument about him taking me to a violent, sex-filled movie but I loved it—but I also wanted to kick ass and take names like Bruce Lee.  Before long, I watched Bloodsport, though, and thought maybe I could look like Van Damme.  Bigger than Bruce.  Smaller than Arnold.  Van Damme could still kick like nothing else.  Besides, I could do splits between chairs just like him so maybe I could look like him, too, my teenage mind reflected.

     Knowing what I know now—I had yet to discover the wisdom of Bill Starr—if I could go back in time, a basic heavy-light-medium system of 5x5 workouts and only 3 or 4 exercises would have worked great for me.  A teenager who competes a lot in some kind of sports but also wants more size and strength would do well with a program like this:

Monday - Heavy

Squats: 5x5 (5 progressively heavier sets, working up to one hard set of 5 reps; same thing for the other heavy day movements)

Deadlifts: 5x5

Bench presses: 5x5

Wednesday - Light

Squats: 5x5 (work up to the weight used on the 3rd set of Monday and use that for sets 3, 4, and 5)

Power cleans: 5x5

Military presses: 5x5

Friday - Medium

Squats: 5x5 (work up to the weight used on the 4th set of Monday and use that on sets 4 and 5)

High pulls: 5x5

Bench presses: 5x5 (same formula as the squats)

     If the kid eats plenty of protein and gets sufficient sleep every night—no late-night playing video games—he’ll be in good shape for his sport in no time.  Oh, and he might do better with just 2 days of training, a heavy and a light day or a heavy and medium one.  One could even alternate between the two from week-to-week and get great results—one week of 3-days-per-week training followed by a successive week of 2-days-only.

     Fast-forward to the mid ‘90s and I had stopped competing in martial arts tournaments, got married, and fell in love with my 2nd love after Karate: powerlifting.  In between, I did love bodybuilding.  When martial arts were my primary thing, I still wanted to look like a bodybuilder.  And when I started powerlifting with full force, I wanted to look good, not just be strong.  Let’s be honest.  Aesthetics is the reason that most people train.  There’s nothing wrong with it.  Not at all.  I’m not a fan of size above all else, but I also don’t really consider that to be very aesthetic.  In fact, there’s nothing wrong whatsoever with aesthetics being your sole goal.  It has an artistic, almost poetic, quality to it.  If that’s the reason you train then great!  Stick with it.  Discover all that you can about building a physical masterpiece.  Arnold was right in Pumping Iron.  It’s similar to a sculptor carving a Greek god out of marble.  It’s just that you are the marble.

     I loved strength, though.  I have to admit.  There’s just something about being able to perform well, not just look good, that has always driven me in my training.  Also, I love the training itself.  I love the kind of training that you have to do in order to become so strong that it shocks others that a guy your size is even capable of lifting that amount of weight out of the rack, much less bench pressing it, pressing it over your head, or squatting it deep.  I loved going to powerlifting meets and surprising everyone by being the strongest guy at the competition, when I still looked more like a fighter and was half the size of most of the other competitors.  And to do that, you have to put strength, power, and even speed first and foremost in your training.  But if you don’t like that sort of training in the first place, it’s not going to be for you.  Besides, if you really love getting a pump and training with high reps and seeing just how gargantuan you can blow up every one of your various muscles, then that’s exactly what you should do.  Your training is for you, anyway, no one else, so do what you love doing.

     So, why do you train?  Hopefully, it’s because you love training.  If you don’t love the training itself—that should be the goal, when it comes down to it—then you have to love the results that it brings.  If you get results, then perhaps you will fall in love with the training.  Do you love the idea of being strong, being big, or just looking good?  Do the training that will bring whatever goal you seek.  But if you love a specific type of training, all the better.

     You can also fall in love with multiple ways of training.  This can be both blessing and curse.  It’s a blessing because you have a lot of different kinds of training that will help to keep you motivated and going to the gym.  A curse because you may not really ever get great at anything.  It’s that whole jack-of-all-trades but master of none thing going on.  If you can program it properly, however, it’ll help.  Even if your primary aim is powerlifting or strongman or bodybuilding, you’ll get even better results if you incorporate some elements from one of the others.  Gene Mozee, the great bodybuilding writer of the previous century, was fond of what he called “power/pump” training.  You train for the power first to build boatloads of strength and then you train for the pump to build large, sculpted muscles.

     When training for different goals, don’t do everything all at once in the same workout session.  Split up the training.  You might bench heavy with triples, doubles, and singles on Monday and then come back in the gym on Thursday for multiple exercises to hit all of your chest muscle’s “angles” with higher reps.  It worked in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s—it still works to this very day.  If you’re training for strength, size, and symmetry, a week of chest training might look like this:

Monday - The Power

Bench presses: 8x5,5,5,3,3,3,2,2

Thursday - The Pump

Incline dumbbell flyers: 3x10-12

Incline barbell bench presses: 3x10-12

Cable crossovers: 3x16-20

     Do a similar workout for the rest of your muscle groups.  You might train chest and back on Mondays and Thursdays, shoulders and arms on Tuesdays and Fridays, and legs on Wednesdays and Saturdays.  Or train on a 3-on, 1-off schedule if you know your body could use that extra day of recovery.

     Like I wrote, if you love a workout then do it.  If you love the training and you’re good at it, all the better.  I might have been “good” at powerlifting—or at least squatting and deadlifting; bench pressing not so much—but I also loved the kind of training that went with it.  If I had to pick my favorite method of training that I utilized, it might have been the “Hepburn method” of multiple singles.  Even though I wasn’t a good bench presser (though I did end up with a double-bodyweight bench press in competition), I did love doing that kind of training for my bench, so it kept me motivated and kept me consistent.  Sometimes, I did a program as simple as this:

Once Every 5 Days:

Squats: 6-10 singles.  Select a weight where you can get around 6 to 8 singles to begin with.  Do as many singles as you can at each session.  Once you are capable of 10 singles with that weight, add weight at the next workout and repeat the whole process.

Bench presses: 6-10 singles

Once Every 7 to 10 Days:

Deadlifts: 6-10 singles

     That’s correct.  That is all that I did.  Did it work?  Well, I competed in the 165 lb class and squatted 510 raw.  It was the first time that I’d squatted over 500 in a meet and also the lightest that I ever competed at, so I was doing something right.  I eventually stuck with the 181-pound class and got my squat over 600 after several more years of training.  One method I used during those years—before I moved on to much more voluminous “Russian” styles of training—was to combine the Hepburn method at one workout with dynamic effort training at the next.  I still think that works just about as well as anything you can find, more complicated systems be damned.

     I think training for a competition is a good reason to train, be it powerlifting, bodybuilding, strongman, weightlifting, or even Highland Games.  Competing keeps you motivated.  It ensures that you stick with your training and your diet.  Having a date for a competition in your head makes you train even on days when you’d rather just relax on the couch and binge a Netflix show.  Motivation means consistency.  Consistent training trumps all.

     You can’t compete forever, though.  Some guys can do it for longer than others, but eventually the competitions stop and you have to find another reason for why you train, especially as you get older and you lose muscle, the injuries pile up, and you find it harder (and harder) to keep going.

     Health is a good answer as to why to train.  Staying fit is important.  There will come a time when size and strength, especially immense amounts of both or either, doesn’t come like it used to.  You can try to keep going longer by taking anabolic steroids or other performance-enhancement drugs, but they come with their own risks.  At some point, you’ll need to downsize and find ways to train that don’t amount to as heavy and as hard as you can all the time.  In my mid 40s, when my own injuries started really piling on, I found it depressing.  I could no longer train the way I used to and my size added to all of my aches and pains.  I got lean, though, and that helped a lot.  After I stopped competing in powerlifting, I ballooned up to 220 pounds (on purpose) and I liked being that big.  My body didn’t.  So, I renewed my martial arts training, went to a local Korean dojang and got a black belt in ITF-style Taekwondo when I was 49.   I got down to around 160 pounds.  My cardiovascular system and heart health thanked me.  My joints, well, not so much.  This year, I had to dial back the martial training somewhat.  But I still do something each and every day that God grants me another day of living and breathing and loving.

     I still train these days, my 3rd year into my 5th decade on Mother Earth.  But I train much the way my original strength mentor Bill Starr recommended for “old guys.”  I train with primarily full-body workouts, high reps, and really frequent training.  I take my dogs for evening walks for a couple miles most days, when the sun is setting, and the heat of the Alabama summers becomes at least somewhat bearable.  We walk the local trails and the parks.  I stay trim and so do they.

     One thing I didn’t cover here, and even what I did cover was only brief reminisces, was my “bodybuilding years” from the early to mid ‘90s, before I took up powerlifting and pure strength training in full force.  In a future essay, perhaps I will discuss that time of my training life which I look back on with the most delight.  Though much of that joy was the love I had for my training partners Josh and Dusty.  It involved just as much beer, women, and drugs as it did moving the heavy iron.  Dusty eventually succumbed to the drugs and his own inner demons and died of a drug overdose—opioid addiction can do that.  I miss my dear friend.  The ‘90s were the time when I gained the most muscle, too, even though I wasn’t as strong as I would later become from powerlifting alone.  I worked for a couple of the major bodybuilding magazines and also met, and even trained with, some of the top bodybuilders of the day.  It was a heck of a time.  I also didn’t cover any of my training in Texas with my Uncle Kirk and other old-school powerlifters and Olympic weightlifters older than he.  If you want to talk insane amounts of volume, then it’s my Texas workouts.  Everything’s bigger in Texas, as they say, and apparently that goes for workouts, too.

     I could never not train.  That’s one of the reasons that I did it.  It’s most definitely the primary reason why I still do it.  Why do you train?  You have to answer that for yourself.  The joy is in the discovery of that answer.  And that is exactly as it should be.

     Got comments? Questions?  Leave them in the “comments” section below or send me an email if you prefer a private correspondence.

     If you enjoyed this essay, and want to read other, similar ones, then consider purchasing my book Ultimate Mass and Power Essays: A Collection of Essays, Thoughts, and Ideas for Getting Massively Big and Incredibly Strong.  It also contains my “Living as a Normal” essay linked above along with 21 additional ones.  For more information on it and all of my books, go to the My Books page of the blog.  Until my next rambling piece of lifting wisdom, keep training and stay at it!