Living Your Dreams: Original Strength Style
Oct 20, 2013
A post by Geoff Neupert:
Today was a great day.
I would have to say that it was one of the better days of my life, actually.
Why?
Because I got to live one of my dreams.
And it was amazing! Better than I imagined, actually.
Before I tell you about it, and how Original Strength played a major roll in it, I want to tell you about another day - the day the created this one. It was around 11am on a Thursday in late September, 2010. I had just flown to Philadelphia from North Carolina for the second weekend in a row for yet another three-day workshop. This weekend was different from the weekend before: I rented a car and drove from Philly to northern New Jersey - West New York, NJ - to see my weightlifting coach, who’d I’d known for almost 15 years.
As I was getting on the NJ Turnpike I reached into the passenger seat to get the map. I felt a couple of pops in my lower back, which I thought were just the usual adjustments after a medium-length plane ride.
No such luck. After about 15 minutes, my lower back started getting sore, along with my left hip. I knew what that was going to mean.
And I was right. My left hip had effectively “shut down” from all the sitting over the past two weekends, and my lower back had rebelled.
It wasn’t a whole lot of pain per se, just stiffness and some soreness, with accompanying loss of range of motion. Of course it figured, I had been training again for Olympic Weightlifting and things were going well. Of course, it always seemed like I could only ever get so far - just about 85 or 90% of my previous bests and then something like this would happen. Every time.
I was seriously hoping this time would be different. I was seeing some pretty amazing and quick results in my training thanks to the restoration work I was doing - something we called “bulletproofing” at the time: Lots of rolling, neck nods, rocking, and crawling in my back yard.
Even though I was routinely feeling great - much better on a daily basis than I had been over the previous 8 to 10 years, it wasn’t enough.
As I sat in the seminar the next day listening to three great strength coaches talk about
program design, it hit me:
My wife had just gotten pregnant and I was going to become a dad for the first time, which was great, but I was going to be 39 years old and busted when my son was born. The first I had no control of, but the second I did. I decided I didn’t want to rob my son of a father and more importantly, his childhood. I didn’t want to be that “old dad” - the one who sat on the sidelines, gray and decrepit, not being able to play due to his athletic injuries.
And it was at that moment I quit one of my greatest loves - Olympic Weightlifting. Then and there I decided it was a cruel and expensive mistress and I was done paying her dues.
I also decided I was going to go full on into “bulletproofing” - Original Strength - and see how far it could take me.
Not only that, but I was going to turn my life upside-down and do things - everything - differently.
My training consisted primarily of bodyweight and OS. No heavy barbell work. No kettlebell work - especially not ballistics. Definitely no Olympic lifts. And I would walk the dog once a day. And that was it. (And I drastically changed my diet.)
And that’s pretty much all I did for the following two-and-a-half years.
And that brought me to today - or more specifically from 1230pm to 2pm today. My son, who is now two-and-a-half, and I went to the park. Just the two of us. No Mommy. She stayed home to put her tired seven-month pregnant feet up.
Michael and I played. In the sand at first, then, he wanted to run down the hill onto the playing fields, where they hold practice and games on the weekend for youth sports.
“Da-da! Da-da!” he said, pointing to the field.
“You want to run down the hill and on the field?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
So we did. And did. And did.
The field is about 100-150 yards across and he and I ran back and forth on it about 8 to 10 times.
And we ran, and skipped, and sprinted. And I ran around him. And planted and cut, and jigged, juked, and jived, and of course, chased.
I even got down on all fours and we played horse, with him riding on my back as I crawled, first on my hands and knees, and then on my hands and feet.
It was exhilarating.
With rain clouds rolling down the mountains and looming in the distance, I put the boy back in his stroller and headed for home, but not before I noticed something sad, yet validating.
Earlier I had noticed sitting on the hill, a father, engrossed in his cell phone. His kids, a girl and a boy, were rolling down the hill below him and playing with a football. They were probably 5 and 7 respectively.
He and his kids were also leaving, yet he was having a hard time keeping up with them and his wife. He was literally walking from his shoulders - he initiated each step by shrugging a shoulder. He had the physique of a college football player who’d been off the grid iron about 15 or 20 years. You could tell he’d been athletic at one time or another. And yet, he could barely walk. I could almost feel his pain watching every step he took.
There, but for the grace of God, go I.
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