In the Beginning …, by Lou Schuler

(View entire post here)

The New Rules of Lifting, a book Avery released in paperback last week, is the product of a lifetime of mistakes.

I started lifting weights in 1970, to the best of my recollection, and it's entirely possible that I started off with the worst workout program ever designed.

I began lifting for the usual reason someone took up exercise back before it was fashionable, at a time when the cool kids started smoking at 12 and the first faint whiffs of second-hand cannabis smoke occasionally drifted over to our postage-stamp suburban outpost. Something was wrong with my physiology, and I wanted to set it right.

I was a skinny kid - painfully, remarkably skinny. And when I say "remarkable," I mean that literally; total strangers would feel compelled to comment on my extraordinary lack of contractile tissue. The weights were my path to normalcy, the tool that would help me become big enough, strong enough, and fast enough to play sports without embarrassment and remove my shirt at the pool without shame.

Given that powerful urge toward self-improvement, you'd think I'd at least figure out how to do it. Didn't happen. The two staples of my workout program were shoulder presses and biceps curls, with no exercises for my back or, indeed, my entire lower body.

Balance came to my training program in my middle teens, thanks to a primitive Universal multi-station gym my high school purchased and placed in a former storage room adjacent to the gym. I was one of five or six students who used it. To my credit I used it a lot, with special zeal for the lat pulldown and leg press stations.

Again, it was an ill-advised program, but because there was no one to give me advice, and because I was too trusting in my own instincts to ask for it, it represented a substantial improvement over my original workouts.

I joined a commercial gym for the first time shortly after graduating from college, and bought my first strength-training book a few years later. The knowledge I picked up sustained me until, by pure luck, I landed a job at Weider Publications, the center of the fitness-publishing world, in 1992. Ten years later, I published my first book, The Testosterone Advantage Plan, and three years after that began working on The New Rules of Lifting.

The irony here is that just about everything I wrote in New Rules should be the first things a novice weight lifter learns, if not before he picks up the weights, then soon after. But strength training is one of the few pursuits in which no one learns the basics until they're years past the beginner stage, which will be the subject of my next post.