Heavy Weights
Jared was hurt. He had taken a bad hit from an odd angle from an opposing teammate in the final three minutes of the fourth quarter in the last game of the regular season (our town’s high school had advanced to playoffs), then landed even worse on his right shoulder. I don’t find it surprising at all that many of the injuries incurred by football players are virtually identical to what happens to people in automobile accidents. It’s true that you may not have two tons of steel smashing into another vehicle (or a tree) at eighty miles an hour, but you do see human bodies colliding as fast as their feet and muscular hips and thighs can propel them across a field. The padding helps, as well as the fact in the case of Jared that these kids normally don’t get much heavier than 200-220 pounds at the high school level. I have never been brutally tackled by a 350-pound NFL lineman and I plan to keep it that way. I’m scatterbrained enough as it is.
An X-ray showed that Jared’s bones were intact, but an MRI detected torn ligaments. He was all done for the season. Luckily, he had the resiliency of youth on his side. At fifteen years old, you could probably get your ass pounded to a pulp by Brock Lesnar and be ready to take your best girl to the school dance a few hours later. I think teens actually have several rows of teeth much like a shark, so that if any should get knocked out another one from the next row back moves forward to take its place. In any case, teenagers definitely heal faster than a dude pushing forty like me. When I get an injury, I know it’s going to be hanging around for a while. Just to be polite, I will ask my injury if I can get it something to drink, or if it wants me to change the channel to watch something different on TV. You can’t ask when it might be moving on or act like it’s being a burden. You have to be nice – the last thing you want to do is aggravate an injury.
Jared was pretty upset about not being able to continue on in the playoffs, even though that could only mean another game or two anyway. We had a few surrounding towns and cities with schools that had both much larger student bodies and much more generous athletic department budgets, which served in tandem to make for better football teams. I know it’s a movie cliché to see the scrappy little underdog team of kids from the trailer parks or housing projects win the big game, but that’s about as common in real life as talking Chihuahuas or surfing penguins.
The kid was also not thrilled that the doctor had been very clear about doing no weight training for at least a month. I would even say he was bordering on depression after a week, as physical activity was such a big part of who he was. I had seen him in the midst of a pack of teens on ‘Early Thursday,’ a monthly day where school lets out early so teachers can have conferences and students can terrorize the local fast food joints and parks. The others had been laughing and joking around, but he looked morose and distant. As soon as I got home, I sent him a text message telling him to meet me at the gym at six PM. My wife would have simply texted while driving, but I personally feel that’s about as safe as driving while being stumbling, slurring drunk and doing a Sudoko puzzle at the same time.
“? Can’t train” was his reply.
“Just b there,” I shot back.
I was waiting for him, and the gym was nowhere near as crowded as it would have been earlier in the week. I’ve always found it amusing that the gym traffic is heaviest on Mondays and gradually fades as the week goes on. This is no doubt because a lot of people indulge all weekend long in bad foods and alcohol and feel compelled to get back to the gym out of guilt once the binge is over. Jared hadn’t changed out of his school clothes. He was still in jeans and an enormous T-shirt, as he was not planning to touch a weight. His doctor had been clear on that, and this was a kid that actually listened to what the authority figures in his life told him. Now another authority figure, his trainer, was going to ask him to go against the doc’s wishes, but I knew what I was doing.
“Want to hit some biceps?” I asked him. He looked at me askew, certain that this was some type of test.
“I can’t lift right now, at least not for another three weeks.” He probably had the day circled on his calendar. Oh, who am I kidding? It was noted somehow on his phone/camera/wireless internet/PDA/MP3 player, more likely. The thing probably woke him up in the morning and cooked his breakfast, too.
“I know, just humor me on this one.” I led him over to the rack of pre-loaded straight and cambered barbells and handed him a 20. “Keep your form tight and give me ten reps.” He knit his brows and did as he was told.
“It’s super light, but I don’t want to go any heavier,” he cautioned me.
“You won’t have to,” I assured him as I took it away but held on to it. When I figured about thirty seconds had passed, I handed it back over.
“Ten more reps,” I said. This was repeated for a total of ten sets. It was comical to watch his expression change from bored, to determined, to a grimace as the sets went on. I made sure he wasn’t cheating and involving his shoulders, and grinding out the final few reps of his tenth set was pure torture for his biceps. I replaced the bar on the rack as Jared shook his arms out, attempting to get the blood circulating again as it was currently packed tightly into his biceps. I didn’t have to ask him to roll up a baggy sleeve to know those puppies were pumped to high hell.
“What was that?” he asked.
“That is German Volume Training,” I answered. “And it’s what I have been doing for my chest and shoulders for about a month now while my own messed-up shoulder has made it temporarily impossible for me to handle my usual weights on presses. The first time I tried it, I did ten sets of incline dumbbell presses with 60’s – half the weight I can normally get for a good set of ten. And I was thinking it was a joke too for the first few sets. By the end I had come to the conclusion that it was no joke at all.”
“But does it work? I mean, the weights aren’t that heavy.”
“Heavy weight is one way to stimulate muscle, but volume is definitely another one,” I began. “John Parrillo has preached for years that bodybuilders need to train hard and long for best results. A few sets ain’t gonna do the trick for most people. And even if you’re not necessarily going super heavy, the cumulative effect of fatigue and pumping when you keep your rest periods short is pretty amazing – you get the burn from hell and the muscle pumps up like a freaking balloon.”
Jared tried to straighten his arms and found he still couldn’t. “You can say that again.”
“If you train like this, with a lot of sets and short rest periods, you are going to have a really rough time making it through. You should drink plenty of water and sip a nice big container of 50/50 Plus™ over the course of the workout so you have all the glycogen and amino acids your muscles need when you hit them like this.”
“You mean I can start training again right away?” Jared asked, his eyes growing wide with excitement.
“I would still give your chest and shoulders another couple weeks to let those ligaments heal up a bit, but you should be able to work your back, arms, and legs with a volume approach. We can actually go heavier on the legs as long as we stick to certain things like the leg press and leg curls. I’ll train you if you want.”
“Definitely!” he exclaimed, smiling broadly. I wasn’t even worried about charging his dad for a few sessions. I was still wearing the heavy Tag Heur watch Jeff had given me last Christmas as a token of appreciation for doing a good job training his son.
Hi-Protein Cake
I led Jared through ten sets of very strict cable pushdowns so his triceps could also get in on the good times. After only about fifteen minutes of actual training, his guns were so swollen that they were actually almost tight around the sleeves of his XL T-shirt. And what teenage boy doesn’t feel better when his arms are properly pumped?
Hopefully Jared wouldn’t have to deal with injuries too often as the years went by. But at least now he knew that even though they might keep you out of a rough contact sport like football, bodybuilding was something you can almost always do if you know how to work around various issues. My own recent ‘discovery’ of volume training had been out of necessity. I was beginning to accept that although I could still train very heavy occasionally, attempting to do so all the time was simply not possible. My beleaguered joints and connective tissues simply wouldn’t tolerate it. But luckily, there was more than one way to get the job done when it came to building muscle mass.