A Letter For Heavy Weights
Our ability to build our bodies
As a hardcore athlete in high school with a goal of playing division 1 basketball, weight training was a part of the routine. Especially so as a skinny white kid in Minneapolis who routinely got punked by my older (and larger) brother, the upperclassmen and the OG’s at the gym.
I knew I needed to lift to build my body and strength up but I pretty much hated lifting weights. I was a creative kid who’s mind and attention was racing around and changing directions, so the discipline and routine of lifting just felt so hard and tedious. The waiting in between sets was just boring and I’d get distracted easily - often forgetting to write down my reps and weights.
My biggest gripe though was that I was just weak. I’d watch all these other people in the gym as they pushed around heavy ass weights with glee and all it made me feel was inferior. Suffice it to say, the lifting wasn’t working and I wasn’t very good at it.
Eventually my parents decided the typical weight program wasn’t enough and somehow (we weren’t wealthy) found a way to get us (my brother and I) involved in this training program at a private gym that my uncle Steve got connected to. The trainer had worked with NFL and NBA athletes in the off-season and had his own unique and pretty cutting edge training program.
His name was Jay Schroeder and he was famous for training an NFL safety named Adam Archuletta, who was his sort of guinea pig for his ideas. Jay invented exercises and techniques to train for impact, speed, and explosiveness instead of just strength. It was functional training rather than strength training. He focused on training movements that mattered for the sport his athletes played. His famed paradigm for exercises is that they were “high load and high velocity in the same movement.”
His approach totally changed my perspective because he never really talked about the weights - it was always about performance. Can you run faster? Can you jump higher? Can you accelerate faster? He didn’t care how much you could bench press, he only cared if you could absorb the contact and explode through it while driving to the basket for a layup.
It was transformative for me. The exercises themselves were more fun and dynamic and the workouts flowed better. They were also brutal. Some of the movements/exercises were so fucking hard - particularly the impact absorption ones. My body after 45 minutes was ravaged. There were mornings I’d wake up the next day and literally could not walk or move.
I learned to love that feeling over time, but at first it sucked. As I made my way through high school the functional strength I gained was tremendous. When I finally got to college and walked onto the court with other D1 athletes I was ready immediately. I was the only freshman that played any time my first season and I never really felt overmatched physically.
When I started training with Jay when I was 16 I was probably 6’3” and 165 lbs. By the time I finished my sophomore year I was 6’6” and 215 lbs. I continued lifting weights and training at that level until I was about 25, then I realized I didn’t have to be so obsessed and turned more towards just overall fitness. Then a few short years later, the fall of 2014, I got diagnosed with my tumors and took up cycling as a way to stay fit when I couldn’t run or jump anymore.
That was the end of weight lifting for me for 10 years. Last November I started again. Why? I’m not really sure other than I didn’t feel or look strong and healthy when I looked at myself in the mirror. In my own personal vibe shift, I took action and started down a path to get back to being really strong and fit. I’m about 10 weeks in at this point and today, as I write this at 10:30pm, my body hurts. I moved around some real weight today and my muscles are sore, really sore, and it feels good again.
It’s amazing that our bodies can do this. We can build them. Transform them. Train them. Improve them. How incredible is that? Our bodies can be tuned like a machine. Say what you will about Bryan Johnson but he’s proving that this is true.
As I finished my last set of front squats today I stood and looked at myself in the mirror behind the rack of weights and felt such an immense amount of gratitude for my physical body. It’s an amazing bag of meat that can do incredible things. I’ve got at least 60 years left in this body, maybe 100. I want to be physically capable of the things I can do now for as long as I possibly can. Anything else would be a disservice to my own humanity. I need to cherish this thing.
You need to cherish your body too. That’s not advice, it’s just what you should do. Make it strong and fit, use it to do amazing things, utilize it to experience this world in as dynamic and active of a way as possible. You will not regret it.
With love and deep appreciation,
Andrew