Pneumonia and 5/3/1

In the late fall/early winter of 2009, I attracted a case of viral pneumonia. I was teaching high school in Arizona at the time so I was around kids who were constantly sick and spreading germs everywhere. This bout with pneumonia was the sickest I’ve ever been and the worst I’ve ever felt. Now, I try to keep that in perspective and this is not a woe-is-me post. Many people endure things a thousand times worse than what I did with pneumonia. My buddy Igor survived 10 weeks of chemo a few years back after almost dying from cancer, so I’m sure he wouldn’t feel bad about my little virus. I only mention the pneumonia because of the weakened state it put me in and how this illness led to my discovery of powerlifting.

Looking back, I’m convinced that a major contributing factor to my illness was being in a constantly overtrained state. Now, I know the term overtrain and its derivatives are thrown around a lot in the fitness world, but I don’t have a better term for what I experienced. When I was teaching high school, I had no money, but I could still afford a gym membership, a pair of running shoes, and some racquetball gear. My life before first period and after the final bell revolved around training. I was steadfastly loyal to my bro split and knew if I didn’t lift six days per week I would shrivel up and die. Aside from lifting, I would run in the 100+ F Arizona heat and play racquetball competitively for two to three hours per day. On top of all of this, my diet was horrible. Don’t get me wrong, I ate relatively healthy food, but I just ate way too little of it. Seeing my dad put on weight over the years made me really paranoid about my own body weight, and I was proud of my skinny 6’7” 185 pound frame. This hard training and lack of nutrition compounded over the course of a year and a half until one day, just after Thanksgiving 2009, I started to feel really sick and run down. After about a week, my girlfriend (and future wife Cali) took me to urgent care. An x-ray showed I had fluid in my lungs. They prescribed me some antibiotics but because my pneumonia was viral, they didn’t help in any way. I later asked the doctor how they know if a case of pneumonia is viral or bacterial and he said, “We don’t, but if it’s bacterial, and we don’t give you some meds, you may die.” Again, I’m not trying to be dramatic here, just telling what happened.

Now, I had plane tickets to fly back to Michigan to spend Christmas with my family, but as the holidays approached, I still felt awful and leaving the Arizona sunshine for the brutal Upper Peninsula of Michigan winter weather did not sound appealing. I was thinking of skipping the trip and just eating the cost of the plane ticket, but I eventually decided to go. I spent Christmas day alternating between sitting in a chair in my parents’ sun room and the bed in my old bedroom. My nose was so stuffed up I could barely breathe and I hadn’t trained or exercised in over a month. Mentally and physically drained, I’ll admit I was feeling sorry for myself. I felt like a complete waste of space that was never going to feel strong again. Ironically, I had purchased “The Stand” by Stephen King for the trip. Not to give too much away, but that book is about a virus that spreads and does some serious damage to the human race.

The day after Christmas, one of my friends who was also home for the holidays texted me to let me know a bunch of guys were going over to the high school to lift. Even though I felt like crap, I figured it’d be fun to see the old weight room and hang out with my friends. Two of my buddies, Tony and Andy, were squatting while my pal Hammer was doing a bunch of upper-body dumbbell work. I think I tried to jump a little rope to warm up, but it didn’t go well as I was quickly gasping for air. What a turd. During the general banter and conversation with my friends, Andy made a comment that he likely does not even remember making as he was just running his mouth and goofing around, but it provided a much-needed kick in the ass for me. I distinctly remember Andy saying, “You’re not a real lifter if you don’t deadlift.” Oof! I considered myself a pretty dedicated gym rat, but that statement hit me like a ton of bricks. The number of times I had done straight-bar deadlifts in my life at that point in time, at 22 years of age, was exactly zero. Sure, we had used the trap bar as part of our school’s Bigger, Faster, Stronger program in high school, but it wasn’t something we ever pushed super hard. Now, here I was not even able to jump some rope and I started thinking about what would happen if I added deadlifts into my training program.

A few days later on that same visit to Michigan, I plopped into a chair in my parents’ sun room and busted out my laptop to surf the internet for a bit. I don’t remember exactly how I came across EliteFTS (it may have been linked in an article on T-Nation), but the discovery of Dave Tate’s website and the incredible amount of quality and free content was about to change my life forever. I stumbled across this e-book by a guy named Jim Wendler called 5/3/1: The Simplest and Most Effective Training System for Raw Strength. Reading a description of the book clued me in that this style of training was going to be completely different than the same old bodypart split from Muscle and Fitness that I’d been religiously following for years with minimal results. Rather than revolving around body parts, Wendler’s program is based around movements, namely the squat, bench, deadlift, and press. As I embarrassingly mentioned in a previous post, at this point in my life I had convinced myself that squatting was not a good idea for me. Pair that with having never done deadlifts or standing overhead presses with a straight barbell and this program was sure to be something entirely shocking for my body.

The first time I deadlifted was in a corner of the LA Fitness on Dysart Road in Avondale, Arizona, a western suburb of Phoenix. I loaded up the bar with 135 and started pulling as best I could. Admittedly, my first set of five reps was hard as heck. I felt like a baby giraffe who is trying to learn how to stand up without falling over. Sure, I was in shape for running and racquetball, but this was an entirely different animal. I worked up to a whopping 185 on deadlifts that first day. At the time, I was pretty down on myself, thinking what an embarrassing weight that was for a healthy 25-year old male. It took me a while to appreciate the fact that I had turned a corner on my path for strength, and things would never be the same. I had swallowed my pride and taken the first small step toward a total physical and psychological change for the better. The 5/3/1 program was exactly what I needed at this point in my training. It was simple and effective, just as advertised. I recorded all of my training in a composition book, setting new PRs almost every workout and really having fun lifting. One thing I noticed is that I was now training differently than pretty much everyone else in the gym. Sure, I’d see someone squatting or deadlifting here and there, but that was few and far between, even at a busy commercial gym next to a major U.S. city like Phoenix. I was no longer going into the gym and spending an hour doing seven different single joint exercises that didn’t add up to jack. For the first time in my life, it felt like my entire body was working as a complete system. I diligently kept at the 5/3/1 program for months, and my reward was newfound physical strength and confidence. It was also my first step in gaining some ability to sift through fitness industry bullshit that is so pervasive in magazines, advertising, and mainstream media.

Over the past decade, I have tried a number of different strength training programs, but 5/3/1 always has a special place in my heart because it got me started on the right path. If I am ever confused, in need of a reset, or just want to run a program where I don’t have to think too much, I always go back to 5/3/1. It always works for me and it’s always fun.