225 Is a Great Number

on January 03, 2011

I have a few longer posts that I’m working on for the coming weeks, so I’ll keep this one short. Indeed, it deserves to be as short as possible, since it amounts to what is essentially a lot of bragging. But as far as bragging stories go, I think this one is marginally acceptable because it’s also one part “comeback kid.”

I’ve probably mentioned this on the site a few times, but my senior year of college (2008-2009), I got it into my head that I would try to win the 2009 Teagle Bench Press Competition for my weight class (whatever would be closest to 150). This was great and all, except at the beginning of senior year, my bench press max was a measly 175 lbs. I would need at least 250 to make a decent showing and not embarrass myself.

I was “all about” the gym my last couple of years of school, so it would have meant a lot to me to see my name next to something awarded for physical prowess. I feel like only nerds will understand what I’m about to say next, but if your entire life has been filled with only academic accolades, at some point you really want an accomplishment that flaunts some kind of physical beastness. In 2005 I got a varsity letter for volleyball in high school, but that doesn’t feel like it should count. What I needed was to be able to say that I had a monstrous bench-press, and witnesses to back it up. If only I could do this, I would graduate a pretty happy guy with a magna cum laude in not only Linguistics, but also Bench Press.

So from August 2008 to April 2009, I would have my eyes set on one goal: Get to 250 on the bench press. But putting on 75 lbs on anyone’s bench press max is no small feat. And so I went looking for bigger weapons—no, not anabolic steroids—and I found Max OT. I’ve written a good deal about Max OT in the past, but I always try to caveat it with a warning about joint health. More generally, I should start warning people about the nutritional and rest requirements of Max OT-style workouts, but that’s more like a recent realization, so it didn’t apply back then. Yet I thought Max OT was the bee’s knees because it legitimately worked. I was seeing new maximums nearly every week and consequently getting a lot bigger. Six months later (in February 2009), I was hitting 220 on a good day.

But around this time is when the wear and tear started taking its toll. The accident happened during a night workout following a prelim; in the one negative motion of a t-bar row where I lost my focus, I felt (and heard) something tear in my right wrist. Being the self-proclaimed “hardcore” guy that I was, I actually finished the workout—which was retarded, in retrospect, since I probably piled on some serious damage afterwards. After a few days of denial, pain, and ibuprofen, I ultimately accepted that my dreams for bench press glory were on thin ice. It wasn’t until I stupidly tried to return to the gym 3 weeks later and re-injured my wrist that I finally decided that I would have to graduate with no physical accomplishments whatsoever, laying to rest any delusions of grandeur I had been fostering.

I spent the rest of 2009 recovering slowly (Paleo note: I recovered slowly probably because of the constant inflammation induced by a gluten-filled diet). In my attempts to spare my right wrist of overuse, I actually hurt my left wrist in a similar way. To make matters worse, I had actually started to get carpal tunnel syndrome symptoms in both wrists. I was a mess, but didn’t want to admit it. When 2010 finally rolled around, despite these glaring problems, I decided it was time to march back to 220 from a regressed maximum of 185, and to top it off by hitting 225, as a matter of in-your-face, of course.

Not surprisingly, the first few months were slow and without much progress. But in May of this year, I discovered the Paleo Diet and the primal lifestyle. You can probably guess how the rest of this goes, so let me just jump to the good news: On December 31st, 2010—that’s the last day of 2010—I hit 225 lbs on the bench press, weighing in at just 148 (145 in the morning). I tried 230 afterwards and failed, so 225 is my true max. What’s more, I haven’t even thought about my wrists since about last July; they simply haven’t been a problem since I realized that gluten was messing up my health.

At least on this count, 2010 ends proudly, but in 2011, I’ll be looking to get to 255 without gaining any bodyweight. Along with the one-arm pull-up that I’m actually getting pretty close to these days (you know there will be a blogpost and YouTube video when it actually happens), I’ll literally have blown my previous notions of “genetic potential” out of the water (well, not literally). 225 sounds pretty good these days, but I’m thinking that 255 will sound even better. Happy New Year, everyone!