Purposeful Primitive roots: simplistic ways for simplistic times
3 November 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I took up weight training in order to add size and power for football. Being a young and voracious reader, I found a treasure trove of how-to-do information in Strength and Health, Muscular Development and Muscle Builder magazines. It was said at the time that the way to add muscle was to lift weights often and eat a lot of food. Back in the early to mid-sixties, science and sophistication lagged way behind where things are at today. The information of the day was antidotal and informal, champion athletes earnestly told what they did to build all that muscle. I discerned a common tactic for building muscle: lots of take-it-to the limit weight training and lots of calories. I went from 145 to 205 in six years while lowering my body fat percentile in the process. The absolute best time for a male to be introduced to weight training is in conjunction with the onset of puberty: suddenly the young male body (not all that different from a girl) begins manufacturing and secreting testosterone by the bucketful and dumping it into the young mans bloodstream. What a perfect time to start slamming iron, running, leaping and jumping every spare moment of every day and supporting all this manic physical activity with indiscriminate caloric overkill. Eat everything. Of course, at the time, nutritional dos and dont were non-existent and since no one told us any different, we took our calories in any and all forms.
Stupid is as stupid does. said Zen Master Gump in his typical idiosyncratic pithy way and his phrase could have been applied to the footballers that gathered in my widower dads unfinished basement to lift weights. Being young unsupervised males, we didnt just lift, we competed. Every day, boys being boys, we sought to outdo one another. Since we only had two barbells, a pile of plates, a squat rack a bench and a homemade dip rack, and because Olympic lifting was popular, we spent our time doing squats, bench presses, deadlifts, clean & press, snatch, clean & jerk, curls and dips. And not much else; we couldnt no leg press, no leg curl, no leg extension, no machines, no cables for pulldowns or pushdowns or cable rows, no Smith machine, no fixed dumbbells. Yet every one who trained there excelled and transformed. We didnt have the distractions or head-spinning options todays athletic youth are faced with. It wasnt all just lifting weights: because we were ballplayers we ran for miles outside, we played organized ball every daysprinting, resting, sprinting, restingrun a play rest, over and over. We jumped rope for agility and grappled and boxed because thats what athletic boys do when they spend a lot of time in each others company. It morphed into a regular Lost Boy Tribe of Pirates over time. Our group-think consensus was to morph ourselves into physical giants and beat the living dog-piss out of opponents on the field. We were lifting maximum weights more often than the Bulgarian Olympic team. We ran the near equivalent of a marathon every day. We got lots and lots of sport-specific and sport-related game training. We lifted like animals, ran like gazelles, ate like pigs and slept like hibernating bears. And it worked!
We were ravenously hungry all the time every day world without end. My Irish father, thankfully, thought it funny and took some measure of pride in my ever-expanding eating capacity. I learned how to prepare my own food and got good at it. The idea was to eat as much as possible every day every time you were presented an opportunity. It turned out to be a mass-building theory that history eventually exonerated at least partially. We lifted therefore we ate. As it turns out, we were doing a lot of things right. Our primitive weight training consisted of nothing but free-weight barbell exercises: sweeping compound multi-joint movements taken to the limit and beyond. Our daily training sessions accustomed us to work hard and often. Over time we trained our bodys to deal with the incredible stress of maxing out in some lift or another 5-6 days a week every week. Not all that different from the 1998 Bulgarian training hall tapes Randy Strossen filmed a few years back. We had our cardio bases more than covered with the incredible amount of aerobic activity we subjected ourselves to. I was outside a lot; we always had more than enough kids to create a pair of baseball or football teams every single day. When I got older, the high school was the place to congregate for a pickup game of baseball, football or basketball. The track was there, so were the bleachers which we used to run competitively against one another. Plus we’d throw and catch, jump and shoot, pitch or hit, thousands and thousands of times with one another. My next door neighbor and I would pitch and catch a baseball for a hundred pitches every night after diner. Kids used to be told to, go outside and play. It was a different time and place.
On the eating we only had it half right. Eating plentiful is great but we were too indiscriminate in our calorie selection. When a person is seeking to add serious amounts of muscle the energy balance equation must be tipped to the caloric surplus side. If you are burning off more calories than you consume on a consistent daily basis than it is a physiological impossibility to build new muscle tissue: you lack the raw material necessary to construct additional muscle. How many calories do you suppose a pack of wild-ass boys burn off in the course of a day? A lot. Eating lots of food was (and is) a good strategy for super-active athletic kids. We inadvertently and unknowingly built our metabolisms as my nutritional mentor John Parrillo would say. We developed metabolisms like an industrial blast furnaces by continually engaging in limit-equaling athletic activity. We built our metabolism by being active and then feeding the soft machine often. Consuming protein caused the metabolism, the bodys thermostat, to elevate in order to break down, digest and distribute this tough nutrient. Eating lots of protein often over the course of the day and exercising hard and often teaches the body how to utilize ever more calories without getting fat. Whereas a 400-pound sedentary obese person might have a caloric set point or break-even of 1,400 calories, a 150-pound super athletic kid might need to eat 4,000 calories a day just to keep from losing body weight.
Eating a surplus of calories ensures positive nitrogen balance and this is the fertile field required for muscle building. As a man-boy Id wake up ravenous and eat oatmeal and whole egg sandwiches washed down with whole milk. This was before they had warning labels on cigarettes or seatbelts in cars. School lunches were .35 cents and a pint of milk was .3-cents.Give me a dollars worth! Plus the cafeteria workers were all football fans and would extra-load my two lunches. Like Belushi in Animal house, other students would silently drop off uneaten extra food at the athletes table in the cafeteria, their small contribution towards you beating the snot out of a rival school come Saturday. Diner was always some sort of beef. My father was a steak, potatoes and peas kinda guy and good cuts were cheap. Various girlfriends would always invite me over; I was a regular Eddie Haskell and ingratiated my way into households according to the quality of their meals. I became so close to one family that after I broke up with their daughter I still got invited to Thanksgiving and all special events. (Why is he here all the time at dinner? She used to complain to her parents) Nowadays things are different and kids have options and alternatives. Nowadays being made to play outside by a chain-smoking, 3pm martini-drinking parent might get the parent locked up for child endangerment. Kids dont gather together to play organized sports on their own. Video games, TV, web surfing, homework and other time commitments cut into wild outdoor play. Throw a bunch of bored kids together in an outdoor setting and they will end up in some sort of game situation. At least it used to be that way.
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