The Weighting Game

These first few posts will be an overview of how I got to where I am today. After that I’ll take a deeper dive into specific times and adventures and see what I can unearth. If I’m feeling it, I may even come back and link those to the proper spots in these overview posts.

With my sister Jaye in 1990 or so.

My brother-in-law RJ is quite an impressive guy. He and my sister Jaye have two daughters, one of whom has special needs. While raising them, he worked full-time and got an MBA. And he still managed to keep in phenomenal shape on barely any sleep. I have a hard time working out if I don’t get 7-8 hours one night, I don’t think he got more than 4 for years. 

But, yes, he’s been a workout fiend most of his life. He’s in amazing shape and can do/has done just about every workout style you can think of. In 2007 or so, he offered to help me learn how to weight train, which is something I’d never really gotten into. 

Before that, I’d dabbled with weights here and there, but always been frustrated by my lack of strength. I could barely bench-press the bar with no weight on it, and I thought that made me weak. I didn’t realize all it really meant was that I needed to train.

So, we started. RJ would load up weights and do his reps, then we’d take them all off so I could do mine. He was great at teaching me proper form and getting me past the “I have no strength in my arms, therefore I am weak” mentality. 

One movement he insisted I learn was a proper squat. After my knee surgery, I just assumed that I’d never squat again, that my leg couldn’t take it. When I would bike or play ultimate my knee would ache and I just assumed I’d have to live with it. I was skeptical when he wanted me to take my squat past the 90-degree mark. 

I was surprised and elated to discover that not only did it not injure my knee to do a full squat, it actually made it feel better! Within a week of starting that movement, I was feeling significantly less daily pain in my knee. 

We added weight to the squat, and I learned dead lifts and my leg really started to feel better. You see, I had to build the quad muscles back up in order to strengthen the knee. In my head it seemed counter-intuitive to stress the knee joint with these exercises, but it turns out I wasn’t stressing it. Instead I was giving it full range of motion while strengthening all the muscles around it.

Another movement that seemed completely out of reach to me all my life was pull-ups. And RJ got me doing them within a year through a progression of steps. Now pull-ups are one of my favorite exercises. 

This was life-changing for me, and we were just getting started. It was around this time that RJ started to get serious about this thing call Cross-Fit, and I was more than happy to go along for the ride.