Getting Started
When I was about 10 or 11 years old (so that would put us around 1994-95), my dad brought home some weights that he had bought at a rummage sale. I was pretty much completely sports-obsessed by that age, so it was a given that I was going to play every sport that I could for my small school in Norway, Michigan, the home of the Norway Knights. My friends and I were already playing organized sports, including basketball and Little League baseball. Now, this was a small town, so when I say organized sports, I do not mean anything like what I see in 2019 near a major metropolitan area like Philadelphia. We did not have “travel teams” or “A” and “B” squads. Our area just was not populous enough for that, but we played other small nearby schools and the wins and losses (yes, score was always kept) meant the world to us.
If you are reading this, it stands to reason you probably have a passing interest in training, and that means you may have seen something similar to the weights my dad brought home. The weights themselves had a plastic exterior, were filled with sand, had a standard 1” hole, and attached to dumbbell handles or a super skinny 15-lb bar that was about six feet long and had no knurling. The free weights came with a bench with two attached uprights set about a foot apart and a set of squat stands coming off the back. There was some kind of attachment to the bench for doing leg extensions but it did not connect very well and it got set aside and forgotten. My friends and I would go downstairs to the concrete-floored furnace room with laundry and winter coats hanging everywhere and go to town. Now, I have read and listened to a lot of other people say they started out with this kind of basement setup and that they had no idea what they were doing. Well, what those other people were doing probably looked like a world class strength program compared to what my friends and I invented down in my parents’ basement. It cannot be overstated how clueless we were, but that did not stop us from benching, curling, squatting, and even power cleaning (well, trying to power clean). The power clean area was strategically placed between the end of the bench and these huge shelves that held all kinds of random junk that is still there, untouched, 25 years later. There was a floor drain there so no matter what way you stood, you had a foot in one drain. Even at that age, my mathematical reasoning brain demanded balance, so I would alternate the direction I faced each set. That way, I would get as many sets with my right foot sitting lower in the drain as my left foot...genius.
One time my friends and I were down in the furnace room getting after it and my buddy Hammer was benching. Grant was “spotting” him, and when Hammer got to a rep that he could not finish, rather than helping him, Grant just stood there offering informative coaching cues like, “Come on, pussy,” and, “Don’t drop it on your face.” I was no better as I just stood there watching as Hammer fought the bar as it slowly came down directly onto his teeth. Grant finally pulled it off of him and Hammer got up, understandably, pissed at both of us. With that kind of training, it is amazing we all didn’t turn into Mr. Olympia
Another time I was in the basement weight room by myself when my sister Stacy and her boyfriend Tim came downstairs. I was doing cleans when they wandered in and Stacy asked what the heck I was doing. At this time I was probably in eighth grade, and I knew a lot about cleans because I had seen pictures of three different phases of the clean on a Bigger, Faster, Stronger poster that was on the door of the high school weight room. I mean, I was basically an accomplished olympic lifting coach after that experience. Stacy wanted to give it a try, so I did my best to show her how I set it up and worked around the drain as best I could. I remember her trying a few reps and Tim jokingly yelling, “EXPLODE!” at her whenever she got the bar to her mid-thighs. Shockingly, Stacy never got the chance to represent the United States in weightlifting at the Olympics.
Quick story about Tim...I am not sure how much my parents liked him, but, despite being several years older than me, Tim always treated me fine. I played high school sports with Tim’s brother Paul, who was phenomenally athletic and went on to play wide receiver in college. My friends and I always watched the Saturday afternoon varsity football games (the field didn’t have lights yet, so “Friday Night Lights” wasn’t an option) from up on the practice hill that overlooked Ronberg Field at the high school. Well, actually we half watched and half played our own game of tackle football and tried to flirt with the girls in our grade. One game, when Tim was playing defensive back on varsity, he intercepted the ball around his own 25-yard line. He had nothing but daylight in front of him as he took off for a long sprint at a pick-six. Tim was doing great until about the opposing 30-yard line when dammit if it didn’t look like someone put a piano on his back. You could almost feel the whole crowd somehow both cheering Tim on and holding their breath as opposing players slowly gained on him. Tim’s progress slowed and he was eventually dragged down inside the 10. The fact that I still remember that play so vividly speaks to how cool I thought Tim was and how badass I thought it would be to make a play in a varsity game.
That basement weight room was terrible and awesome at the same time. It was really cool of my dad to buy that equipment and lug it downstairs for us to use, and it was at least partly responsible for my lifelong obsession with lifting. It turns out, the limited exercises we had available to us were really all we needed to get strong, but we pretty much just squatted, benched, curled, and cleaned. Hell, I didn’t even know what a deadlift or row was, or I probably would have added those into the mix too. There is much more to come about my love for the weights, but that weight set in a basement furnace room in a tiny town in Michigan is where it all started.