Recently I came to the conclusion that most public workout facilities do not have what you really need to make consistent strength and size gains for athletic perfromance in equipment and atmosphere. I first started seriously lifting weights when I was a junior in high school when my parents got the family a membership to the local YMCA. When I went off to college I thought I was in weightlifting heaven when I walked into the student Rec Center and saw the huge weight room full of weight lifting equipment. For two and a half years that is where I worked out and I made average gains for myself. Through reading books and internet articles I mainly used the H.I.T. (high intensity training) method and still gained 10 pounds going from 170 to 180 pounds. In my junior year I made the A&M football team and although I was ecstatic about being a part of the Fighting Texas A&M football team I was even more excited to learn the style and methology of how the football team lifted weights. I was fortuante enough to learn for a year under Mike Clark and his staff and for a year under Ben Pollard and his staff. The concepts and ideas I learned from all of the different strength coaches is priceless. Their knowledge helped shaped how I will train for the rest of my life. Their ideas also helped show me what works when you want to gain strength, speed and size and what does not work. They showed me how to seperate fact from fiction. During my time I was training under them I also researched other ways of training. There are some people involved in the weight game who through their articles have contributed greatly to my little but growing knowledge. They are Dave Tate, Louie Simmons, Jim Wendel, Chad Waterbury and Joe Defranco. There are many others who have provided valuable information but those five are the ones that first come to my mind. The internet is where I have received the majority of the information on the weight game. There are some great sites that are free that provide invaluable information. The three sites that I have found that are my favorites are:
www.elitefts.com
www.testosterone.net
www.defrancostraining.com
What I love about these sites is that all of the information they offer is FREE! They offer other services and products but all information they have posted is FREE. They have bigger fish to fry than charging access to what they post on the internet.
All of this is a round about way of how and why it has been a dream/goal of mine to open my own gym at my house. Let me tell you a little more about the story as to how I came to opening a weight room at my house.....................while I was on the A&M football team I gained 20 pounds! In the 4-5 previous years of lifting I gained 10 pounds and while I was on the football team for 2 years I gained 20 pounds. I knew that the style, equipment and atmosphere is the only way I will train for the rest of my life. Well, after my football career was over I took off the whole spring semester from lifting. I needed it, not just for my body to recover but for my mind to recover. I lifted less than 10 times the whole semester as I recovered and invested my time and energy into other projects I had wanted to do but never had the time while I was playing football; such as the stock market, real estate and selling on ebay. When I completed my classes at A&M in the spring I moved back home. I had some friends who worked out at 24hr Fitness so I decided to join. After about a month and a half I could not take it anymroe. The place had a couple of decent machines but the two main problems was the money I was paying each month and the atmosphere, or lack thereof. After coming from an atmosphere where everyone is lifting their hardest and working as a team to an atmosphere of corporate fitness is just rediculous. I had to start over at my place and not in the corporate fitness world. It had also been a dream/goal of mine as I said earlier to start my own weight lifting facility so that's what I did. I cancelled my membership and bought a bar, 300 lbs of weight and a 6 X 12 connecting rubber mat from Academy..................to be continued
Part 2 Coming Soon!