Why everyone should try weight training
My shoulders are numb, and tomorrow my arms and chest will feel stiff, as if my sinews have been replaced with rusted steel wire. I know this because I've been here, or somewhere like it before. The first day is always the hardest.
I've had a lot of first days. When I was eight I ran cross country races at school, struggling round the playing field with a few other lads - getting in shape for the one big race of the term. I think I liked it, I wasn't much good at football, but I'd come second or third in school cross country races, and a respectable middle of the field at big events. So if you trace it right back my occasional bursts of athletic activity probably go back to those windy october nights running round the playing field, desperately trying to make sure I finished ahead of John Wight, while Jonathan Sunderland disappeared into the distance. (he later played football for Blackpool and Scarbrough, the only professional athelete I've ever really known)
My next brush with serious sport came at middle school aged eleven. I got into an argument with another boy and decided that whatever happened I
was not going to lose to him in the four hundred meters. Maybe he'd thought something similar because we tore round the track, but he blew up around 300 meters and I stumbled home first. Mr Slipper the games teacher was sufficiently impressed that three hours later I was running for my school in an athletics meeting. Convinced 400m was a middle distance event I completely misjudged the pace and finished well down the field. It didn't matter though, I was in the team.
The rest of that athletics season was fairly short and our small team did its best with limited training. Dan Bradley turned out to be our star 400m runner, but each school got to enter two runners in what were effectively two races. Dan always won the first one, I won the second one and in the mean time learned to throw the discus. I was starting to like this athletics stuff.
Meanwhile Mr Slipper had plans. Next season he announced that the school would be taking athletics seriously, all boys were asked if they wanted to report for fitness training, three times a week after school. The first session was packed, practically every boy of the right age turned up vague thoughts of body building and playground celebrity in their heads, and I'm sure, the notion that we may well impress the girls. At the time I don't think any of us knew what circuit training was.
An hour later we knew. Half of us could barely stand. Two friends and I resorted to the most desperate measures we could think of and bought a bottle of milk to revive ourselves. The walk home was agony, every underdeveloped pre teen muscle hurt. We'd bench-pressed, press-upped, step-upped and rope-climbed our way to oblivion. I'd just had my introduction to lactic acid, Dave Slipper explaining the science as we exhausted ourselves around him.
The next session was attended by just over half the lads who'd been to the first one, with most of the school's tough guys the first to drop out. By the session after that we were down to eighteen, and those of us who were still there were on the way to something good. That year, following a punishing training schedule of track work, technique and more circuits than we'd have ever believed possible we finished tenth in the country. A massive achievement for a school like ours. I even got my head around the idea that the 400m is a sprint.
That summer, in a cunning sleight of hand Dave Slipper delivered this team lock stock and barrel into the welcoming arms of the legendary Jarrow Harriers. We spent the summer training with athletes like Steve Cram and David Sharp, who'd coach the kids before doing their own murderous evening training runs. Once, I even ended up borrowing the spikes Steve Cram wore when he ran the Golden Mile in Oslo and set the world record. I can tell you now, that man's success owed nothing to his shoes.
The next year Jarrow's under 14 team won promotion to the top division - a fusion of their own talent and Dave Slipper's Gosforth based ringers providing the personnel. (by rights we should all have been running for other clubs) We won every single meeting we went to, bar one, sometimes by massive margins. We even instituted a lap of honor which would end with us collapsing into the water jump. The week we came second was the week we clinched promotion so we did the lap and the dunkings anyway while the bemused winners wondered if we knew the score.
More seasons with Jarrow followed, but the going was harder in the top division and I was spending more time on my schoolwork. I didn't train enough, and when I did I didn't train hard enough. Fortnightly races became ordeals and to make up for under-training I learned to run through the pain barrier. I'd stumble across the line then collapse, my jelly legs needing to recover before they could take me in search of somewhere to quietly throw up. It paid off though, I managed respectable results and finally, after running 60.01 twice achieved my goal of the sub 60 second lap. By the end of the season I'd run 58.8, but it wasn't fun anymore and I stopped - ostensibly to concentrate on my exams.
And that was it for a while. I went jogging occassionally, and continued to swim and coach at the local pool but I wasn't training. No weekly ritual workouts, no targets to attain and no team to keep me going. The new goals were academic, and individual, A-levels and Oxford entrance exams. In my head I was still fit, still healthy, but the decline had started.
When I got to university I made a half hearted attempt at regular exercise, but from the age of 19-23 I let myself decay. One term I did press-ups and sit-ups daily, but I now know that that's almost useless as exercise. Sometimes in the holidays I'd swim, but occasionally is never enough. There was a gradual realisation that I was out of shape, that my body no longer matched the picture in my head, that hours sat at desks and in front of PC's were taking their toll, but I didn't do anything about it.
A few years ago I began trying to fix this and made myself go running. I'd go out a few times a week, then once the next week and then stop. Eventually I moved house and a nearby friend with more willpower than me invited me to join his runs. The first one was murder, the second one better and in the following months we gradually improved our times. Then houses were moved again and once more decline set in - till last year.
Last year was the year I decided - on new years eve - that I was going to run the Great North Run. I borrowed books on distance running, set a training schedule and went to work. Fixed goals clear aims and a knowledge of what I was doing were enough. A month before the race I ran eleven miles in a hundred minutes, well on course for my target of sub 2 hours for a half marathon. A week later I tore a muscle in my hip and that was that, they sent me a T-shirt in the post but I've never worn it.
This year I've been trying again, with a more holistic resolution. No race to get ready for, just a goal to get fit. I bought some dumbells and a book called the 90 day fitness program. This was the introduction to weight training - and it hurt. The pain after that first workout was familiar and I knew I was on the right track.
The 90 day program also called for a fair amount of running, so it was back on the roads - this time by myself. Too cheap to join a gym I made the most of my dumbells, improvising exercises where necessary and finally (120 days later) I finished the program. About six weeks later I finished work, came back to Newcastle and joined a gym. Which is really where this story was meant to start.
For the last five weeks I've been working my way round the lifestyle fitness section of the gym. Don't get me wrong, this is a good workout, tougher than anything I've done before except maybe those early circuit sessions with Dave Slipper. Today though, after fifteen sessions I'd booked myself in for a program review.
They made me say it often enough. I want to 'bulk up', 'I want to develop muscle', you've got to be clear about this stuff. That's because most people who walk into gyms say things like that, and if they put them through what I've just been through most of them wouldn't come back. You can get damn fit without doing this stuff - lose weight, tone up, look good - the real reasons people go to gyms. I want to be bigger, is something plenty say but most don't mean. Well, I want to be bigger, maybe not on the human collossus scale, but I've been skinny for twenty six years and its getting kind of dull.
So I spent today learning to lift heavy weights - something I thought I'd already been doing for five weeks.
My new training program requires me to do an exercise twelve times at about 60% of my maximum lift, and then six times with as much as I can manage. Its a method that drives your muscles to total exhaustion while making them do as much work as possible. Its the reason why, three hours later I still can't feel my shoulders properly.
So you do your set of twelve and its tough. You feel like maybe you could do fifteen if you really tried. By the end your arms are trembling under the weight, and your breathing is getting ragged. Already you can feel the lactic acid washing over your muscles, sapping away your strength, starting to poison. It's the bodies emergency reserve, a devil's bargain. It gives you the energy to work without oxygen, the most potent form of fuel your body's got, but you pay for lactic acid. It really is poison, use it for too long and it kills the muscle - which is why when your muscles have been exposed to it they stop working, to carry on is to die.
Runners talk about going into oxygen debt, because oxygen is what your muscles need to recover from lactic acid. So they plan their training to build their tolerance to lactic acid, flooding their limbs with it and taking just enough rest to go again. I've done a lot of this stuff, and thats just what this first set of twelve is about, its about taking away your reserves, its about ensuring that the next set of six delivers you straight into oxygen debt, your starved muscles ready to give in from the start.
I worked this stuff out quickly. Chest pressing a 50 kilo weight is hard work. Even on the first lift I could feel my strength going, my pace slacking. You're supposed to lift explosively and then slowly return to the start. I wrestled that weight up and then wondered how to stop it crushing me on the way down.
For a while the count is everything. One. Two. Three. Then the weight tells. You don't get to four, you get to three and an inch, three and two inches, you force it up and down and the idea of another lift disappears. By yourself you fail.
But gyms don't let you do this by yourself. So Dave the trainer is telling you he wants one more. Pushing you harder, and because he knows what he's doing you trust him, so you make it to four and start on five. Then he's spotting for you, taking a tiny fraction of the weight, just enough to keep you going - just enough that your shattered arms can push up another inch or two. Now your heart is pounding, and you have to remember to breathe. You can't feel your muscles anymore, they're gone. There's you, and a weight and if you think hard enough, if you dig deep enough inside and make it move some more it will.
But it doesn't. Like Yeats on his deathbed the provinces of your body rebel, and it doesn't matter what you want or how badly. Your non-existent, invisible arms that ceased to matter a few seconds ago are no longer capable of defying gravity and thats it. Five and a bit repetitions.
Time for the next exercise.
While I was working my way round, Dave introducing me to new forms of exercise and their attendent forms of pain one of the gyms' big guys came in. I guess most gyms have these folks, shaven head, tattoos and a physique that belongs in a comic book. For most of these guys the rest of the gym and the people in it don't exist. They look at you then go and lift something heavy. You're just part of the furniture.
Today though, as Dave was systematically breaking me apart I got a spark of acknowlegement. Not so much as a nod of the head and an 'aareet mate' but a definite progression. I'd stopped being part of the furniture and in some small way decided that I wanted in to his world. Maybe this is like some kind of crossing over, once you've been there, lifted the weight, felt the exhaustion, tried again, and then failed you're allowed to exist for them.
Or maybe I'm just knackered. Off to Oxford next week, join the university gym and keep this up. I've got a goal, take a nice wide grip - way out past my shoulders and pull up my own bodyweight. I was hanging there today, feeling my shoulders burn and my biceps melt away knowing that I'd lifted myself maybe an inch - and that its going to feel bloody good when I make it.