My fitness journey began in 2016, around my 30th birthday. I had gained around fifty pounds during my twenties, and I was tired. Tired of feeling weak. Tired of feeling overweight. Tired at the of the day. I knew that I wanted to make a change, but I wasn’t sure where and how to start.
It was around this same time when the school where I teach English completed a construction project. This project, among many things, included a new fitness center, open to the public. I convinced myself to join, which took care of the “where”. I wasn’t really sure what to do when I went to the fitness center, though, so I asked the fittest people that I knew: students.
It’s a fairly humbling thing as a teacher to ask students for help. At the time, I taught younger grades, so these were former students, which helped somewhat. Over the course of a year, I lifted with them, learned from them, and taught some of them a thing or two that I learned on my own. Eventually, on my 31st birthday, we tested our “triple lifts” together. Here are mine from April 20th, 2017:
| Bench | Squat | Deadlift |
| 190 | 265 | 345 |
After that proud moment, a lot of things happened rather quickly: bicep tendonitis paused my lifting for a while, I married and had two kids, I earned my Masters in Instructional Technology, I became the technology coordinator for my school district and lead play director for three shows a year, and we moved out to the country, all of which led to my life getting much busier. Something had to give, and that something was time in the fitness center.
Nearly nine years after those triple lift records, I started again. I’m not spending several hours a week in the fitness center like I used to, but I am finding a few minutes here and there during my lunch or during my prep, and I’m lifting once or twice a week in my garage gym after my children are in bed. After a few months of this, I re-tested my triple lifts around my 40th birthday:
| Bench | Squat | Deadlift |
| 165 | 205 | 245 |
Before my 41st birthday, my goal is to increase those lifts. I’ve read somewhere that, if your bench is >1x your bodyweight, you are doing well. For squats, it’s >1.25x. For deadlifts, it’s >1.5x. Looking at my lifts from 2017, I have reached those bodyweight-to-lift goals before (I weighed 185 then). I’m roughly 200 pounds now, so my goal before my 41st birthday is to hit the following:
| Bench | Squat | Deadlift |
| 225 | 275 | 325 |
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