The short answer to that “how did I build muscle in high school?” is… I didn’t, but allow me to expand on that. As an athlete who played almost exclusively team sports, I was used to focusing most of my time working with my team. Whether it was tennis, baseball, basketball or soccer, you were constantly practicing with your teammates, and even though you can work on skills independently, there are only so many hours in the day. Before the age of social media, you had far fewer influencers in your life (for better or for worse) so you were heavily dependent on your coaches and parents.
Fortunately for me, I was lifting weights at an extremely early age with my mother. She would take me to the gym and we would perform aerobics at home, but I’d never touch anything heavy or load up barbells with plates. I wouldn’t use selectorized strength equipment either, not until my high school soccer coach brought us into the school’s modest weight room to use the leg press machine. My father, who was a very competitive athlete himself, focused more on spending time “on the court.” That could mean hundreds of lay-ups and free-throws every day, lots of batting practice and volleying on the tennis court.
Hungry on the far right
As a result of all of this, the strength and conditioning aspect of my training was almost exclusively contained to my practices. My body developed in a way that was almost strictly the result of what was done during those practices. That ended up meaning a ton of running, push-ups and core work. It ended up meaning being on the balls of your feet for hours every single day, which surely had something to do with my significant calf development and muscular imbalance in my lower legs. It ended up meaning having some form of a six-pack my whole life, being able to jump all over the place and having crazy mobility in my shoulders.
As I hinted before, our first focus on any kind of weightlifting came through soccer. Our coach, who was also a Physical Education teacher at the school, brought us in the weight room for some simple exercises. We wouldn’t go as far in-depth as using rep ranges and sets, but would just take turns using the leg press and mainly doing dips. That was basically all I remember, and we even had dip competitions, which I definitely didn’t win. I fared a lot better with the leg press. It really stopped there though because our coach only gave us one bit of passive homework. He said, if you can’t run your two miles in under 11 minutes, you better go run on your own.
The first bit of “homework” that I was given came from the Assistant Basketball coach for the Varsity team. He was also the head coach of JV at the time, and told me that I needed to do 500 push-ups at home every day to develop some strength and size in my upper body. This was in 9th or 10th grade, and when I graduated, I was probably 6′ tall and somewhere between 155-160 lbs, so yea… he was probably right. It wasn’t that I didn’t eat enough because I ate a ton. I was burning so many calories at practice all the time that it would’ve been really hard to pack on weight. A lot of the football guys only played football, so they were bulking up the rest of the year. I didn’t have that opportunity because I was a “four-season” athlete.
By the time I graduated, I’d done a ton of push-ups, an unimaginable amount of core work and who knows how much running. Still, none of that compared to the sport-specific drills I performed for baseball, basketball, soccer, tennis and martial arts. While I certainly would’ve been a much different athlete (and probably not 6′ tall, 155 lbs) if I had focused on one or two sports, I can’t say now that I would have changed the sport selection. Sure, as someone who now coaches a lot of high school athletes, I recognize the important of a customized strength and conditioning program for young athletes, but that just didn’t happen with me.
If you are a high school athlete reading this, you’re probably already involved in such a program because of the influence of social media and the evolution of sports. If you’re not involved, you should heavily consider it. If you’re a parent with a child who is a young athlete, you need to realize that having a coach or trainer work one on one with them will not only allow them to become much more competitive at their sport, but it will also REDUCE their risk of injury. Most parents/adults are worried about teens using weights because they’re worried that it will lead to an injury, but the reality is the opposite if they have the right trainer working with them. Learning from the past will help you and others stay hungry and fit!
