Come train with me

I’m Aaron Wolf

For about eleven years I have been involved in some form of physical training or another. Like many guys it started in high school with sports. I started playing football my freshmen year of high school and as a result was introduced to weightlifting. I began wrestling my sophomore year and was introduced to much more endurance training, long runs and long stints of calisthenics and sparring. At first I was just doing the training because that’s what I had to do to be part of the team and I wanted to be able to wrestle and play football. As time went on however, I began to realize that I could be good at this sort of physical training and started to realize that I could become a much better athlete through training off the field and mat and began to really enjoy it. I began spending the off season training with calisthenics and running when I didn’t have a weight room available and the summer after my junior year we got a new weightlifting coach with a different program.   At this point my strength training took off.   After high school I didn’t really have anything to train for so I got into body building.  I grinded away at this endeavor for about two and a half years then I decided to join the navy.  In getting ready for boot camp, and what I anticipated to be a very physically demanding military life, I switched from weightlifting to body weight training and increased my running to four to five  four-mile runs a week.  I continued with this training regimen of body weight only exercises for about two years with good results. I was always at the top when it came to the navy physical fitness assessments and did much better than the people who did little running and focused their energy  in the weight room.  After two years of training with body weight I had sworn off all weight training because the only results I had seen from it were big slow muscles that couldn’t move in any other way except what the hammer machines and bench presses would allow.  I had a few friends that were into Crossfit and tried to get me to do it for awhile but I wouldn’t because they use a lot of weights in their workouts.  I eventually tried it and loved it and as a result I began to use some weight lifts and got into kettlebells and gymnastics rings training. 

For the last year I’ve incorparated a nice mix of body weight training, gymnastics rings training, kettlebells and weight lifting (always low weight, always high reps).  This has been working out very well for me and I’ve seen some great results in the way of strength and conditioning (especially conditioning).  Lately I’ve been doing a lot of research on strength and conditioning and I’ve found a lot of articles on stepping outside your comfort zone.  I’ve realized that I’ve done a lot of criticizing of  the body builders and powerlifters, accusing them of setting themselves in a comfort zone that limited the amount of athleticism that they could enjoy.  Along with this I realized that I had set myself in a comfort zone and was unwilling to step outside that.  I was comfortable doing a lot of high repitition/low weight training, something that most people wouldn’t do,  and completely neglected the advantages of low rep/high weight training.  I’ve decided to step outside my comfort zone by taking on a few new goals and retrain myself on many exercises that I’ve been doing for a long time. 

Here are my new goals: 315 lb bench press (by Aug 31, 2009), 350 lb squat (Dec 31, 2009), 350 lb dead lift (Dec 31, 2009).  These are exercises I have not done consistently in over 3 years.  I have neglected these exercises for so long for two reasons, one is that they weren’t part of my goals, I wanted to build a lot of strength endurance, and I didn’t understand how these could play a part of this goal.  The second is that I was not good at these lifts.  To correct these deficiencies I recently made a visit to my first weight lifting coach and spent an entire Saturday morning talking about the squat, and the deadlift. I got a ton of good information and made huge improvements in both lifts.  We also got to talking about pullups.  He showed me how I could create much more power with my lats by focusing on using them instead of using my arms.  This got me to thinking that I could probably do this with more exercises. Therefore for the next month I will be retraining myself to do better pushups and pullups then I’lll get back into a regular routine.  I will keep you all updated on my training and progress and will be adding much more information on many different modalities of training.