I explained what Project Physique was all about in the "About" page post. And now, here's the more extended background info of myself so you know where I"m coming from and how I got into this whole business of training and bodybuilding. I'm going to detail my training experiences with losing weight and building muscle over the past 9 years.
I've been at both ends of the body transformation game, both in gaining muscle and losing fat through many experiments, trials and errors over a period of 9 years. Maybe you can relate to some of my journeys and experiences in the quest for a strong, lean, and muscular body.
My Body Transformation Journey
I never grew up being very athletic. I was never really one of those physically fit, muscular genetic freaks of nature, you know, those guys who have never touched a weight in their life and are 200 lbs of rock solid muscle with abs to show for. Nope, I was never one of those genetically-blessed individuals. In elementary school I had trouble finishing 4 laps on the track. That's barely a mile. I couldn't even run a mile. I was an out-of-shape kid. A skinny kid.
I was never a jock. In fact I was very weak. Weaker than the average person for my age at 16. At 16 I weighed in at a soaking wet 124 lbs at a height of 5'9". I could barely bench 100 lbs or curl a 20 pound dumbbell. Embarrassing.
I was Weak
But up until then, the realization never came to be that I was weaker than most people. Then during that summer, as a good student, I enrolled in the NYC summer youth employment program (SYEP for those who are familiar) as a summer job. They paid minimum wage but the experience was golden and looked good on a resume for future jobs.
I was assigned to be a youth counselor/teacher's assistant to a summer school class of 2nd graders at a middle school. And so one day on the job in class, my hands shook obsessively and I had trouble lifting a full tank of water (around 2 gallons) for a science experiment for the kids. As I carried the tank of water from the sink to the table for the kids, I almost fell and tripped over. My arms were shaking and I was swinging side-to-side struggling with the tank. It was embarrassing. And the kids were just laughing because I looked weird.
I think it was that day that I finally came to the realization that I was skinny and weak. I started to become more self-conscious of my strength and body...and my health. I had little muscle or fat on me. I looked like crap. I was so skinny I could shop in the kids section for clothing. I didn't look good in clothes at all. I was in poor physical conditioning. I ran out of breath easily. I even had trouble climbing up 5 flights of stairs.
So right then I knew I had to do something about my awkward body and poor physical fitness level. I also had to do something about my health too. Because after all, if I'm weighing 124 lbs and barely able to run a mile in under 12 minutes, something was wrong and I couldn't be in good health for a teenager. I wanted to be stronger, more muscular, and fitter than my friends. So obviously, I had to do something about it.
Building Muscle and Strength
I began subscribing to a wide variety of fitness magazines and muscle magazines: Men's Health, Men's Fitness, MuscleMag, Flex, Muscular Development. Then I went out and bought books on working out, strength training, and bodybuilding in general. I became somewhat obsessed immediately after the realization. Looking back now, it was unhealthy and unnecessary to consume myself with my body image every single waking second then.
The first book I picked up from Barnes and Noble was Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding" in hardcover format. Other titles I bought included, Dr. Fred Hatfield's "Hardcore Bodybuilding," "Ultimate Sports Nutrition," Joe Weider's "Ultimate Bodybuilding," Stuart McRobert's "Brawn and Beyond Brawn," and Leo Costa's "Big Beyond Belief." Over the years, I've amassed a decent collection of bodybuilding and strength training books in my library.
With those books and magazines, I was introduced to sets, repetitions, repetition maximums, drop sets, negatives, supersets, and all the other bodybuilding and strength training terminology we're familiar with.
So during that summer and for the rest of the year, I must've spend at least 3 hours a day reading all the information I've acquired and another hour working out, training, and experimenting with diets and routines. And I kept my workouts consistent, never missing a workout. It gets easier and easier once you develop working out and training as a habit...just like brushing your teeth every morning.
I worked out a lot for the next 2 years without seeing much muscle gains, very little results. I gained barely 5 lbs. But I was persistent. I was still in that obsessive stage. I had my off days but I never forgot about working out. The internet was also taking off so I started going online. I began "surfing" the web (yes, web surfing was what we called it then) and came upon a bodybuilding site that couldn't be more obvious, Bodybuilding.com. I came across articles by more experienced natural bodybuilders who've gotten better results than I.
And after reading the many articles on bodybuilding.com, I "re-discovered" the importance of calories surplus and what it really means to eat a lot to gain muscle mass. Because of information overload and rushing straight to the workouts without paying much attention to proper eating and muscle building nutrition, I skipped this crucial step of the bodybuilding process. So then I started eating a lot to provide my body with the surplus of calories for building muscle. The way I look at it now, those 2 years weren't wasted as long as I corrected my mistakes. And I did.
I continued training with full body and push/pull/leg splits, the basic stuff. The basic strength workouts that old time bodybuilders and strongman were using. To this day, I still recommend newbies and beginning lifters to start out with basic routines. Build a strength foundation first before prioritizing to build muscle. I got strong...
But I also got Fat!
And in another 18-month period, my weight shot up from 130 lbs to 206 lbs. I also grew an inch at my current height of 5'10". But it was not all 216 lbs of pure muscle. I overdid it. I overdid it on the bulking cycles. I ate too much. I ate like a slob, 5,000 plus calories a day, which was really too much, even for a hardgainer like me. I didn't know the difference between bulking up for muscle gain and pigging out. I ignored the importance of macronutrient ratios and ate all the junk and crap foods I had at my disposal.
So most of the "gains" were fat, not muscle. I had to lose the extra weight right then and there. My friends and parents started noticing my fat gain in such a short amount of time. I mean, I went from being near anorexic to being practically obese in under a year and a half. They thought I had some health condition.
And right then I knew I had to do something about my fat-ness. My second major mistake was getting too fat. Some fat gain is inevitable on a bulking diet to build muscle. But most of my weight gain was fat, not muscle.
And I made the decision to diet down and take action again.
Related posts:
- My Story: A Bodybuilding and Fat Loss Body Transformation- Part 2 This is a continuation of My Story: A Bodybuilding and Fat Loss Body Transformation, I had to lose the weight fast. I didn’t want to spend the next two years losing weight and fat because my goal was to build muscle and strength. So I had to go back to the drawing board and come up [...]...
- The Goals of Project Physique and Body Transformation Hi everyone, this is the first post or article here at Project Physique so let me orient you to this site’s entire concept. If you haven’t, check out my “About” page to get a general idea of what this site is all about. Over the last 60 years or so, thousands of research studies have been [...]...