[quote]LoRez wrote:
Kind of a question from a different direction, but, when you were playing ball, did you go through the same force-feeding type of eating that a few others have mentioned? I remember reading where someone mentioned that the coach would have regular weigh-ins to make sure people were eating enough, as well as daily team meals (or daily breakfasts or something like that) to do the same. Basically your standing with the team was genuinely tied into how successful you were at gaining weight in the offseason.[/quote]
Ha, no, I never experienced that.
I was a chubby-but-strong-ish kid in junior high (had started lifting with my dad when I was young). I was 5’10" and 180 pounds in eighth grade, then grew another inch or so in 9th grade and have been 5’11" ever since. Year-by-year weights with a few notes:
10th grade: 225 (pretty soft)
11th grade: 240 (still pretty soft)
12th grade: 240 (a little better body comp)
In HS, there was no real tracking of weights or eating. I went to a pretty small HS (with a very good football team, but still, we were small) and I was always one of the bigger guys on the team. I started as a 10th grader on the offensive line and then both ways as an 11th and 12th grader. During this time, I ate whatever I wanted, and I always just ate a lot. Big appetite and active kid, I guess. My parents did cook a lot, so meals at home were generally at least some kind of protein and vegetable, but I did eat the occasional fast-food meal, and going out I pretty much had free reign to devour anything. I was the kid who always went full appetizer, entree, dessert any time I went out to eat.
College is where it gets a little more interesting, and that’s the reason I wanted to reply in so much detail here. I cut to 215 as a HS senior for wrestling, the first time I ever had anything even PRETENDING to resemble a “cut” physique, and then put the weight back on a little better.
Freshman Year: 235.
I started the last two games of my freshman season and (mistakenly) thought I had to get bigger, although the coaches had NOT said anything to me about it. That would have been a good idea, if I could have done it while getting stronger (yes) without sacrificing speed and agility (whoops). I ate like shit, lifted really hard, and got strong…and fat. I guess that the double bacon cheeseburgers and takeout Chinese might not have been the smartest way to bulk up.
Sophomore Year: 260.
Oops. I had gone way too far. I got benched after four games; too fat, too slow, was starting to have ankle problems. Didn’t play more than a few snaps in any game the rest of the season.
I went on a bit of a soul-searching trip after that. I was so disappointed in myself; I was a kid who really had self-esteem pretty much tied to sports, because I was always a pretty high academic achiever and that never really came hard to me. I didn’t want to be the “smart” kid, I wanted to be the kid who was really good at sports!
So, of all things, that winter I started coaching wrestling at a local HS, working out with their big guys, dropped my weight from 260 all the way to 215 pounds and wrestled in a few offseason tournaments (and did quite well).
I spent the summer rebuilding myself into a better-built 230-something pounds. I look back on this with very fond memories because what I did was so simple and so brutally effective. Sunday was squat day with my dad: 5x5 heavy back squats and then 5x2 box squats with a lighter weight for speed (I started the summer with 5x5x220 pounds and added 10 pounds per week until I did 5x5x330 the week before leaving for fall camp). During the week, I got in a heavy bench session, a heavy Oly session with my dad one day after work, and usually a second upper-body-focused day. I was in really great shape when I reported that fall around 230. Still a bit light for OL, but honestly…
Junior Year: 230
…I don’t think the coaches even cared. Maybe I just played a little bigger than I was. We had a great team that year (11-1, made NCAA D3 playoffs) and I started every game. I did actually lose some weight during the season, maybe because I’d started paying more attention to what I ate the year before, and then lost a little more as I again coached the wrestling team (although I didn’t intentionally go down to 215, I probably was down around 220-something).
Senior Year: 235
Getting my weight back up actually DID take a little bit of force feeding. The summer between my junior and senior year, I lived on campus with a couple of football buddies. Our house was a dump with no AC, so it was freaking hot, and I probably didn’t eat all that well for breakfast and lunch every day. But at 6 PM, after leaving our respective summer jobs, the dozen or so upperclass football players would congregate in the weight room, and we would go at it. There was some really great training going on there, for our ability level (I always keep in mind that my “big lifts” are only “big” by my own standards). I cranked out bench sets with 315 (three wheels!) and power cleaned 275 for reps. Big stuff, I thought. We’d work pretty darn hard in this sweltering weight room for 60-90 minutes between warming up, lifting, plyos or conditioning, and abs (of course, we all thought we had to do abs at the end of every workout).
So I would go home and drink half a gallon of full-fat chocolate milk. Every. Single. Day. And then I would eat a full dinner of chicken, spaghetti, sausage, and sauce (we had an industrial-sized freezer, so we went to Costco and loaded up with four of those 10-pound bags of chicken breasts almost every week). No scheduled feedings from the coach. Just a bunch of hungry dudes going home after lifting and eating until we were useless.
Anyways. Longer answer than you probably cared for. But that’s what my football weight and eating experience was like.
