The Skinny Kid Who Picked Up a Barbell
In the fall of 1968, I started my senior year of high school at 6 feet tall and 140 pounds. I was an average athlete who had given up on team sports. Like most 17-year-old boys, I was trying to figure out who I was and where I fit. I had rejected the religion of my youth and was bored in school, although I continued to perform well. On the surface, I appeared to have it together. Beneath, I was lost. What I didn’t understand yet was that the barbell would shape not only my body, but the way I tried to manage everything I was carrying inside.
I had become friendly with one of the football coaches who also served as the advisor to the school newspaper. He was the one who introduced me to strength training. My high school didn’t have a weight room- few schools in the Northeast did at the time- so he brought me to a nearby YMCA to learn how to lift weights. Along with the exercises, I was introduced to a gym culture I never knew existed. I remember a former boxer repeatedly dropping a leather medicine ball onto his student’s midsection, and another man doing bicep curls with an unlit cigar clenched between his teeth. I was hooked.
Bringing It Home
I took what I had learned to our basement, where my father helped me to set up a modest home gym with a bench, barbell, and dumbbells. I recruited a friend to be my training partner, and together we embarked on an adventure that transformed my body. I trained chest, back, shoulders, and arms primarily with dumbbells. If I worked on my legs at all, it was with the flimsy attachment on my bench for leg extensions and curls. Over the course of a year, I gained 20 pounds of lean body mass. It was the classic “guy workout”- a big upper body perched on a pair of chicken legs.
I had no idea what functional training was, and no one was talking about it then. I favored dumbbells because they were safer when lifting alone. At the same time, I regularly performed lat pulldowns and behind-the-neck military presses. I lacked external rotation in my shoulders and already had a forward rounding in my upper back. The result was predictable: chronic shoulder pain, diminished range of motion, and 50 years later, a shoulder replacement. As I used to tell the athletes I trained, “When I say that you’re doing an exercise wrong, you can be sure of one thing. I did it that way.”
Decades later, after paying the price for those early mistakes, I found myself writing a column for the Boston Globe on how to train effectively at home. New tools- the Swiss Stability Ball, BOSU, and balance pads- combined with body weight exercises and dumbbells formed the core of my recommendations. Experience had become a teacher I could no longer ignore.
Taking It to the Gym
In my twenties and thirties, I was strength training with machines and free weights while also practicing martial arts. Externally, I was stronger and more capable. Internally, not much had changed. In my mind, I was still that skinny kid searching for something solid to stand on. I had yet to replace the spiritual anchor I had cast off years earlier.
I trained for two hours a day and gave little thought to recovery, physical or spiritual. I became a father at 28 and struggled to balance exercise with the responsibilities of raising my daughter. Eventually, an uncomfortable truth emerged: no amount of training could outrun what I was avoiding. Strength alone could not quiet my inner unrest.
What I ultimately learned was that training without recovery, without balance, only deepens the imbalance you’re trying to escape. I needed a new approach, not just to exercise, but to discipline, meaning, and inner life. That journey is the one I’ll explore in my next blog.