My Strength Training Biography Part 2

I can sum up my early years of lifting pretty quickly.

I was skinny and weak but I played a lot of sports.   My knees started to hurt.   I tried to squat, but I sucked at it and my back hurt.   I benched a lot and mixed in some leg extensions.

To read the full version of Part 1 of My Strength Training Biography,  click here

Fast forward to 1996 as I was closing out my less than impressive high school career and getting ready to be a college "student" at Ohio State.   I can easily sum up my training regimen in between 1996 - 2002 with a few sentences.

Monday  - chest , arms
Tuesday -back
Wednesday -  legs..... no squats.   Leg press and my staple leg lift  - leg extensions.
Thursday - chest again
Friday - arms again and maybe back

I am sure I mixed in some spinal crunching from time to time.

As I started to earn some money from working, I began to venture out of the cavern that was Larkins Hall  (OSU rec) and headed out to Gold's Gym.   WOW, my mind was blown by all the beautiful machines!   I could do chest every day and still not use all the machines in the gym.  Surely, my training was going to reach a whole new level and at one point in 2001 it did when I picked up a medicine ball in the aerobics room.  I am going to hold this and do abs because that's what boxers do  - for some reason I thought that and I have no idea why.  I looked at the ball and it had a website on the back.......www.jumpusa.com.

I headed to the computer lab on campus and searched for the website.   Jumpsoles?   Plyometrics?   Add 8 inches to my vertical leap?  Holy Shit!   Where was this when I was in high school?   Of course I ordered the $80 pair of Jumpsoles and within a week, they were delivered to my campus apartment.   I began to do the jump program that was included with the shoes on a twice per week basis.  The program even included lunges and step ups which was a dramatic increase in leg training intensity for me.   In a few weeks, I was jumping off two feet and grabbing the rim with 2 hands.   I was never able to do anything more than touch the rim with one hand.   These shoes are miracle workers!

The timing of this jump miracle was impeccable because I began doing some basketball instruction with my student teaching mentor, Demond Dubose.   The company was called G2 (Grades and Game) and we used his Columbus middle school gym to do the instruction.  I started to incorporate some agility and foot quickness drills in conjunction with the Jumpsole training.  The kids seemed to be benefiting from the training so I began to buy some more books and study the craft of training athletes further.

From 2001 - 2005, I was an elementary PE teacher in Columbus Public Schools and continued to coach basketball.  In 2002, I formed Soar of Columbus with my college classmate/post college roommate Nate Fugitt.   Nate had lot of personal training experience in commercial gyms, so it made a lot of sense for me to team up with him.  Our mission:  To bring Jumpsole training to all of Columbus.   We decided that we would rent space at one of the Columbus Park and Rec gymnasiums and we would just load up our cars with equipment.  We used a PO box as our official mailing address and put an add in local This Week News publications.   In the summer of 2002, I remember getting our first ever check at the PO box.  In total,  we had 3 athletes registered for our 8 week camp.  Three weeks in, Columbus closed us out of the facility and we were left to do training outside in a park. 

Between 2002 and 2004, we began to pick up some more clients by exhausting all of our resources.   We were mostly using Power Shack Gym in Hilliard as our main training location.  It was at this point in time that my training regimen shifted from body building machine lifting to extreme core training.  If it didn't involve sitting, laying, kneeling or standing on a stability ball, I didn't have any use for it.  In addition to the circus style lifting, I had added many new tools to my speed and agility training.   Jumpsoles, agility ladders, cones and bungees were now part of my weekly regimen with myself and my clients.  Even though Nate and I did not fully understand progressions, we were becoming good speed coaches and learning by the day.  Both of us became certified through the National Strength and Conditioning Association and we both had plenty of teaching and coaching experience.   Even I was beginning to gain an understanding of squatting!

Late in 2004, I split off from Soar for a while and took a personal opportunity to work with high level Tae Kwon Do athletes at Team Players in Hilliard.  This was my first official experience with designing and implementing strength and conditioning programs for larger groups of athletes.  It was at this point that I began to read the works of Mike Boyle, Lee Taft and Mark Verstegen.   My goodness was I way off with my strength training!   I studied Boyle intensely as I found his books simple and very easy to read.  I also subscribed to an online training forum which was once called SportSpecific.com.   I was obsessed with obtaining all of the training knowledge that I could so I asked tons of questions on their online forum.   I was starting to gain confidence that I actually knew what I was doing.  Soon after, I became a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist.

In 2005, I reunited with Nate and moved our training show to Ohio Sports Plus Academy in Worthington.   We had an area for speed training and a pretty nice weight room that we built a wall around.  This is when we really got it clicking on all cylinders.  Most of the training programs in the area were solely focused on SAQ training  (Speed, Agility, Quickness).   Obviously, Nate and I were big on SAQ, but we were also learning that strength training was just as important, if not more important.  Most of our clients only did two 1 hour SAQ sessions per week while a few added 1 or 2 strength sessions per week.  We began to notice that the kids who were strength training in addition to the SAQ were blowing the SAQ only kids away.    This is when and where our current set up was born:  The 90 minute session  - 45 minutes of speed and agility, 45 minutes of strength.  If you trained 2x per week, you were still getting enough speed training and enough strength training to make a significant difference.

In 2006, I decided to leave Columbus Public Schools after 4 years of teaching and put all my focus on training athletes full time.  It was a tough decision, but ultimately I knew that I did not want to be a teacher for 30 years.   I learned a ton from my student and professional teaching work and I am certain I would not be where I am today without those experiences.  Teaching is coaching and coaching is teaching.   You can have all the training knowledge in the world, but it is meaningless if you can't instruct.  Looking back on it now, coaching 6 - 15 athletes in my facility is nothing compared to teaching 25 inner city second graders with minimal equipment in a gym that was also the cafeteria. 

It was late in 2006 that Nate and I opened our first official facility in Lewis Center.   We have done nothing but grow and evolve since.   I still spend a part of every day researching the best methods for training athletes.  My personal workouts look nothing like my workouts did in 2002.  Mike Boyle says it take 10,000 hours of research and coaching to become an expert.  I am proud to say I surpassed that mark in 2011.  No, I never played Division 1 college football.   No, I never squatted 450 lbs.   But, yes I have coached/taught people from every possible background and level of ability.

Evolution is a beautiful thing if you take the proper steps and apply what you have learned along the way.  I wonder where I will be in 2022?   Perhaps back to pressing a chair in my basement.