Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Benchpress milestone!

That's pretty inspirational Ring. I was right about where Salmonella was when I was in college. I was 6'3" then and 240 but could bench 380.

I went to the gym the first time in a serious way at age 23 and could barely bench at all. I was a big guy but never lifted before just did hard work. My roommate who took me to the gym was my size but was on the football team and had lifted for years. He repped 225 19 times that day and I couldn't do one rep. He always wanted to compete with me so he loved telling everyone how much stronger he was.

I took a weight lifting class that semester and didn't tell him. I studied a lot of different ideas people had about adding muscle and found some things that worked. Drank lots of water, gave different muscle groups time to recover, and tried to get 8 hours of sleep per night. Took weekends off and ate more good protein.

My bench max started going up an avg of 5 pounds a week with some plateaus at times. I found that if I did one set of 10 at a lighter weight and then a 5 rep set of medium weight to warm up I could then go for my 1 or 2 rep max, always trying for more than last week. It gave me a chance to go for a heavier weight each week while I still had energy. I'd then take 20-30 pounds off and do the next set to failure, and then repeat that all the down until I was completely wore out.

I got the idea from a south African friend that owned a gym when I lived there. He said if you want to increase your max you have to push for the heavier weights as soon as your warmed up. He also said if you want to increase your reps you have to push yourself as many reps as you can at lesser weights. I just figured out a way to do both at the same time.

Five months later I returned to the gym with my football player roommate and I 26 repped 225 and pissed him off so bad he didn't talk to me for a few days. I was also up to over 300 max. I kept going to the gym for years on and off after that but hit a hard plateau at 380 I could never get passed even on into my thirties.

I'm having a lot of health issues lately and my autoimmune disease is causing problems with my pituitary and messing up everything as far as thyroid, LH, FSH, etc goes. I was just thinking how much I missed my younger stronger days and feeling discouraged and I saw your post. Pretty inspirational to see you working above your own body weight at 74. Maybe I still have a few workouts left in me.

Thanks,
Bb