My Strength Training Biography - Part 1

I see around 40 - 80 middle and high school kids per week at the gym. It has become very easy for me to identify the teen who has been training poorly and eating poorly. Why? Because I was the same kid. Hell, I was that guy up until the age of 24! How did I get to where I am now? Lets take a look at a chronological history of my strength training.

From the ages of 5 - 13, I was a good athlete. Whether it was baseball, golf, football, basketball or tennis - I picked it up quickly and was usually better than all my friends at it. I played so much that there was no way that I was eating near enough calories to grow muscle. I was skinny and my lack of strength caught up to me at 14. My diet of Poptarts for breakfast, God knows what for lunch and Bob Evans sausage for dinner was not quite putting the mass on me.

My parents didn't let me play football, so being skinny was not a huge deal in junior high basketball or baseball. In fact, my dad DISCOURAGED any form of strength training. He is a great man, but taking strength training advice from an accountant is like letting a strength coach do your taxes. I can remember him telling me, " That muscle will just turn to fat. You don't want to lift weights it is bad for you." Hmm. I didn't believe it and I decided to take matters into my own hands. This is where it all started for me. A wooden chair, my dad's 14 pound bowling ball and anything else that had some weight to it. I would put the chair upside down against a wall in my basement and then would stack the bowling ball and other stuff on the bottom of the seat. Then I would lay under it and press it - pretty much a terrible version of a floor press. Oh well, I was getting jacked! I would then take the bowling ball and curl it a few times. Forget the legs, I was all upper body!

I can vividly remember playing football in my friends yard the summer before my freshman year in high school. This is when it call caught up to me. I was usually the best player on the field - we won't get into why my parents didn't let me play actual football. On that day, my knees felt like someone was jamming knives into them. I couldn't run. I couldn't even jog. What the hell happened to me? I was worthless athletically. With a few months before freshman basketball tryouts, this became a concern. My mom took me to a doctor and he basically said I was weak and it was time to start strengthening my legs. Now this was 1992 so strength training information for youth was very limited. The doc told me to start lifting 1 lb soup cans for leg extensions! Even to a 14 year old, the thought sounded ridiculous.

At the same time I made the freshman basketball team by wearing neoprene knee braces and running up and down the court like Patrick Ewing, I also decided to join the high school football weight lifting club. BIGGER, FASTER, STRONGER baby! I paid my 10 bucks and got my book from the football coach. It worked out great because basketball was at 430 so I could lift and then go to practice.

The first day I headed down to the weight room with my friend and had no idea what to expect. There were about 40 other kids, most of them varsity football players. We started with bench. I did 65 for 10 reps. I felt pretty good about that because my only other benching experience was with the chair in my basement. At some point that first week, we also squatted and cleaned. I am sure it was ugly as I could not have possibly possessed the hip mobility and strength necessary to do those exercises correctly. Soon after, I started to shy away from those exercises because I knew I wasn't doing them right and my back was hurting.   Nautilus leg extensions for me  - no soup cans!

Here is where it gets weird. My freshman basketball coach came down into the weight room and said " Kozak, you are not to be lifting for football during basketball!"

Me: I don't play football

Coach: It doesn't matter, you are not to be lifting before practice. You are benched.

That's right, I was benched for trying to get stronger in my free time before practice!!

Now I didn't play much anyways, so it really wasn't a terrible punishment. My mom got a note from the doctor the next week and I gave it to coach. He then apologized to me in front of the team and started me the next game! Great coaching huh.

Basketball passed and I began to solely focus on the lifting. Testing was done on a monthly basis and I was all about the bench. I got my freshman max up to 145lbs by the end of spring. The football coach used to say, " Kozak, you are gonna be the world's strongest golfer." (I was also on the golf team and there is no reason to elaborate on that pitiful experience.) When it came time to max on clean and squats, I was nowhere to be found.

When summer came I began to freak out because I could not go to the high school weight room with the football team. I begged my mom to let me buy a weight set from the store up the street. I had an adjustable bench, a 25lb bar, about 100lbs in plates and small bars that I could make DBs out of. Of course the bench had a leg extension/curl attachment on it. I hit those weights hard. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was getting stronger and a little bigger. Sometimes I would have my little sister spot me - talk about serious training! By the fall, I had to go to the store to by 2 more 25lb plates.

After my sophomore year of basketball, I emerged from my basement and returned to the high school weight room with a vengeance. My bench max was 205! What! I could dress for the varsity football games if I actually played. Yes, sadly benching over 200 was the only factor used to determine who was on JV and who played under the lights. I tried to go back to squatting but I still sucked.  I had skinny legs and no ass and no hope of learning how to squat properly.  My pride and joy was that was my top 10 rating on pound for pound bench (bench press max / body weight).

Junior year went on in the same fashion except I no longer played hoops. Sadly, I was golf only. Our golf team was so bad that I was our best player and often times the team we played had 6 guys better than me.

In Part 2 we will look at my post high school lifting until I actually learned how to lift.