Growing up I was the youngest in the neighborhood. In our neighborhood, there were about eight kids in our crew. We were all athletic kids, spending our entire days playing sports outside. We would play basketball, baseball, football, street hockey, you name it and we would play it. We even had an empty lot next to our neighborhood that we turned into a sandlot ball field. Those were the days roaming the neighborhood, from house to house, playing sports every day during the summer and after school.
As the youngest in the neighborhood, I was also the smallest. Having an older brother in the same crew of kids, I would get picked on quite a bit. Even though I was small, I was scrappy, and not afraid to throw a punch if things got to a point I could not take. Growing up though, if we got in the fight, we threw a few punches and there would be a winner and loser. The next day we would be buddies again, playing in the streets, having sleep overs, and trading baseball cards. I think, like all kids in this situation, I was insecure with being small and picked on. As a kid, my friends called me Craiger, but what most people didn’t realize is this nickname came from the name my brother made up, which led to everyone in the neighbor picking on me. The full name my brother made up was Craiger McGreger Misss Dipplemier, this would drive me crazy. Even after I accepted the Nickname Craiger, it was still a reminder of the full name my brother made up.
My parents are almost hoarders, they keep and pick up things they don’t always need from yard sales and thrift stores. They had an old school weight bench with plastic weights filled with sand. The bar weighed probably 10#, and the biggest weight was probably 7.5#. It also had a leg extension/ham curl attachment and some dumbbells too. I remember starting middle school, 7th grade, being so small and wanting to play basketball (I did make the middle school team). So my thought as a 12 year old was to move the weight set into my bedroom, because I was going to get jacked. Like any kids bedroom, I had a twin bed, dresser, chest of drawers, and a BENCH PRESS and DUMBBELLS. I guess you could say this was the start of my fitness journey, although I probably only used it once a week because I had no idea what to do.
Let’s fast forward to Freshman year of high school, I walked through Woodstock High School, at 5 foot 3 inch tall and a body weight of 95#. But remember, all the kids in the neighborhood were upper classman in the school. Now the tides have turned. Even though growing up I was the little kid getting picked on, as I entered high school I was the little kid that no would mess with. Because I had friends in 10th, 11th and 12th grade, if someone messed with me, they would be messing with them too. I actually rode to school with a senior as a freshman. Let’s set the example…first pep-rally of the year, all the freshmen were worried because they heard the seniors were writing on the heads of the freshmen with markers. So as we are walking in, my freshman buddies get targeted and I get high fives from my senior friends. This was a good place to be in as a little guy.
Second semester of freshman year, I sign up for weight training as a class. We do upper and lower body splits in weight training. From memory we would do cleans, squats, bench, deadlifts and other accessory work in weight training. This was the first time I started to see what any kind of structured programming looked like, good or bad. This was designed for the football players.
Over the summer, between freshman and sophomore year I didn’t know what was I would do to train, I could not drive and by the end of the year the plastics sand filled weight were not going to cut it. My brother’s friend, Joe, said he would be going to gym 3 days a week over the summer and he would take me with him if I wanted to go. At 14 years old, I got my first gym membership at Stacks Gym. This could not have been a better gym to get plugged in to. I will write another post about Stacks Gym in the future.
Training at Stacks Gym over this summer with Joe showed me a new picture of training. We did body building splits, Chest and Tri’s, Back and Bi’s, Legs and Shoulders. I probably fell in love with training over this summer. I saw huge gains, and I started to not be a little bitch any more. I walked into 10th grade at 120-125#, a 30# gain in 1 year. I started getting accused of juicing over the summer, which was not true. I just put in the work and ate everything in sight. Sophomore year, I could not continue to train at Stacks Gym because I still couldn’t drive myself, and I could not do weight training as a class because I was a huge nerd and took extra science classes as electives. I decided to talk to the weight training coach to take weight training during my lunch. I would bring food and eat all day in school. I found wrestling as my sport of choice my sophomore year, I found that I was not amazing at the sport but I was stronger than most. Technique is everything in the sport of wrestling, but having strength was enough to give me a winning record.
The summer after sophomore year, I was back at Stacks Gym, on my own now and not having a great plan of attack. This is where my first real coach comes into the picture. Bobby Pauley, owner of Stacks Gym takes me under his wing to teach me how to train. I will save this for another day, but this is beginning of “The Method”.
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