On Weight Lifting

If you read my massivityman.livejournal.com postings, you can tell I’ve been pretty serious about weight lifting. I don’t just lift, I wear a stop watch to time my rest periods, I read books (mostly Mark Rippetoe) and blogs about lifting (T-Nation.com is a favorite of mine), and I even get annoyed when people hog the equipment I need for the next exercise I planned to do, because I plan carefully and don’t do things out of order. At my age, staying healthy has to be more science than art.

I’ve learned a lot over the years, and being a writer have a desire to share. My focus when I was a college kid in martial arts was on increasing my punching power, so I benched a lot. My bench reached 300 pounds and my leg press 500, which I thought was cool because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was young and any program could make me stronger. Then the chaos of adult life interfered and I lost most of that muscle. When I decided to get serious again, the Internet made information freely available. I started doing squats and deadlifts. I read about so many different exercises that I was driving myself crazy trying to fit them all in, then decided to ‘keep it simple stupid’ and my focus is back on the classic compound exercises.

Once I decided to work every muscle group every day just to see which muscles gave out. The shoulders gave out first, I suspect because the shoulders are so complicated; they have to move our arms in so many ways that they can only dedicate so many fibers to any particular direction. The chest gave out next, but the back muscles had surprising endurance. I suspect this is because we do use our back so much more often than our chest. Our back holds us up and lets us pick things up, and let’s face it, picking things up is what strong men are asked to do the most often.

But the legs have even more strength and endurance, being big, simple muscles with the primary purpose of carrying us around all the time. I performed the 21-day squat challenge one month before a fall semester began and lost 8 kg in those three weeks while my legs got stronger. Walking up stairs got easier. Back in college, I had a “leg day” but now I was squatting on Mondays, doing power cleans and leg press negatives on Wednesday, and dead lifting on Fridays, and the numbers for all three went up.  Today, my bench is only 275 pounds, but thanks to all those squats, my leg press is 750. It’s not that I think the leg press is more important than the squat, quite the reverse, but it’s instructive to compare the forty-something me to the twenty-something me and realize I’m over all stronger now than then.

The dead lift verses the squat is a matter of debate among serious lifters; I’ve realized that if your bench is your priority you don’t really know what you’re doing, just as I didn’t long ago.  As far as I can tell, the advantage to the dead lift is that it exercises the greatest number of muscles, basically every muscle behind your body. The great disadvantage is how long it takes to recover. Guys with heavy dead lifts might only practice the lift every other week. The advantage to the squat is more biochemical. It’s longer range of motion and its being equally, if not more, difficult on the way down as up, stimulates your heart, lungs, and hormones more than other lifting exercises, but it stresses the muscles less so it can be practiced more often than the dead lift. I do both, of course.

A couple of years ago I did have the goal of lifting my own weight over my head. At the time, I weighed 275 pounds and my overhead press was only about a hundred. So I did a lot of Olympic training lifts (not the stuff on TV, those are the competitive lifts) and lots of squats, hoping my weight would drop and my strength increase until they met somewhere around my college weight of 210, preferring 200. I lost 45 pounds while increasing my strength to lifting 165 pounds over my head. That brought me over a hundred pounds closer to my goal, but then my leg muscles started growing faster than I was losing fat, so I gained ten pounds back and now my weight keeps bouncing between 240 and 250.  Somehow I doubt I’ll ever lift 250 over my head, but I’ll make do with this progress for now.

There’s a lot of advice about lifting out there in the world and on the Net, and most of it is for people who aren’t very serious about it. The important thing to remember is that most of that advice worked for someone, which is why they are passing it on, but everyone’s genetics, goals, and gumption are different. You are your own experiment in health. Even if you don’t take care of your health, you still get results, just the results of too much sugar and sloth. It’s hard to be healthy in this world, when everyone is trying to sell you junk and steal your time, but all acts of individuality are acts of will to empowerment.