Question of the Week: At What Age Did You Start Exercising and Why?
April 24th, 2008 Posted in Question of the Week
We all know how beneficial exercise is to maintaining a healthy body. Kids do not usually know this and teenagers do not usually care. Therefore I must ask, at what age did you start exercising and why did you start exercising? I don’t mean at age 6 when your parents enrolled you in little league or mighty mites soccer. I mean, when did you really make an effort to start training your body for a specific reason?
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Did you lift weights for football in high school? As a kid, did you start training outside of Karate class so that you could be faster and stronger than the rest of the kids in the class? Perhaps you started walking / jogging / running for the first time ever at age 45 because you grew tired of the spare tire?
The Beginning
For me, it was when I was 16. From age 12 or so I messed around with weights in my dad’s garage, doing bench presses and curls of course. But when I turned 16 and got my license, I got a membership to Worlds Gym in Plaistow, NH and started doing… well, bench presses and curls… but that’s not the point. That membership lead me to examine the ways in which I could really start to fill out my clothes develop increased muscle size and definition all over my body.
By age 17 I had learned how to train my full body. I was using a small variety of exercises including leg presses, stiff leg deadlifts, bench presses, lat pull downs, triceps push downs, curls, and crunches. At this time I investigated a crazy program by some professional bodybuilder that included 2 workouts per day, 6 days per week. I attempted to follow the program for several months, but ended up overtraining, seeing minimal gains, and getting burnt out. In desperation I finally asked the resident personal trainer Ted for advice.
Ted the Personal Trainer
He scoffed at the crazy program I was trying to follow, muttering something about professional bodybuilding, steroids, and overtraining. When I returned a gaze of complete bewilderment, he sighed and brought me out onto the floor for a bit of tutoring. Ted put me on a 4 day split, training 2 or 3 muscles per day, and emphasized proper form, proper weight progression, proper nutrition, and proper supplementation. Ted introduced me to creatine and enlightened me with the knowledge that I can build millions of different kinds of workout programs. The rest, as they say, is history.
Why I Started Lifting
I have one word for you… girls. My build was what I would now call ’skinny-fat’. I still had a layer of baby fat, with nasty love handles, a slight double chin, and tiny ass arms. My hair was long, I had acne, and quite frankly, girls were scared of me. In order to remedy this, I decided at age 16 that I would go on meds for the acne (thank you Accutane), cut my hair, lose some weight, and pad my bones with sculpted muscles. I had hoped that doing this would land me a girlfriend. Well guess what? I was right!
Before I graduated high school I dropped about 40 pounds of fat and gained about 20 pounds of muscle. I scored myself two girlfriends, started to make friends with some of the kids in my class, and eventually by senior year I had somewhat of a normal social life. Thank you Ted, thank you Worlds Gym, and thank you free weights!
So, what is your story? When did you start? Why did you start? How did you start? What were your results? Let us know by voting and leaving a comment.
Written by Steve HansonDiscussing Conditioning, Weightlifting, Powerlifting, Strongman Training, Nutrition, Diet, Recipes, Martial Arts, and Healthy Lifestyle Ideas
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Tags: fitness, Personal, Question of the Week
