Years ago, I reckon it was 1996 or so, I was 29 years old at the time, coaching football and teaching weight training at a high school in Florida after coaching in college for 5 years. I didn't last long coaching high school – too much parental involvement. One time a senior skipped weight training, so I told him to make sure that he didn’t ever ask me to go into a game again. I said, “Don’t be tugging on my shirt in the fourth quarter, begging me to let you play. No lifting, no playing.” I guess he ran home and told his mommy all about it, so she made a scene at practice about her little precious son’s feelings being hurt. He still didn’t play.

I was always in a quest for strength, especially in the squat. I disliked bench press, probably because I wasn’t that good at it. I was never a “natural” at bench pressing. I really hadn’t deadlifted much before so it was a new lift for me, but I was always a squatter, and loved it. It seemed to me that the squat took more balls to be good at than the other lifts, so I always got my squats in. My best squat at the time was around 575 pounds. Respectable poundage, but nothing earth-shattering.

I decided that it was time to really push the squat poundage and see where I could end up. I had always run a lot, both for football and for fun. I wanted to find out how strong I could get by just lifting and eating and not tapping into my recovery with all the running.

The goal was to squat 600 pounds, and I got to work on it. The first step was to eat more. I was weighing around 245 pounds at the time. In 2 months of eating pasta and beef combined together, and plenty of tuna sandwiches, I gained 20 pounds. I squatted 600 after those two months and thought I was hot stuff, that is until I found out I wasn’t.

I was aware that the sport of powerlifting existed at the time, but I really knew nothing about it. I read all the bodybuilding magazines growing up. I knew that Powerlifting USA was the magazine with all of the top lifts of the year in it, so I bought a copy. My 600-pound squat didn't even put me in the top 100 in my weight class. In fact, I believe I had to go all the way down to the 148-pound division to even crack the top 50.

Now I had some goals. I needed to squat 700. I wanted to do it in a meet, but I wanted to do 700 in the gym first. I put the feedbag back on: 8 tuna sandwiches a day, each loaded with mayo, chicken and rice with chicken soup mixed in it like a casserole, fast food, milk, whatever I could get my hands on. I carried one of those big Igloo coolers everywhere that I went. After a solid 6 months of eating that brought me to 285 pounds, I was ready for 700. I completed the lift in the gym and then did 700 in a “squat only” powerlifting meet. Once again, I thought I was Big Time.

In the back of Powerlifting USA magazine was an advertisement for Powerlifter Video Magazine. VHS of course. It couldn’t arrive fast enough for me. And when it did, I once again found out that I was just a small fish in a big-ass pond of strength, because on the tape was a video of Kirk Karwoski squatting 800x5, and also 1000x2. Now I was depressed. I had a long way to go to get even close to Kirk’s level. I knew that the fastest way to get strong was to eat my ass off, so I bumped the calories up even more.

My belly was huge, and my blood pressure was up, but I was getting stronger. I even deadlifted and benched some, too. I conserved as much energy as possible, sitting around when I could, never running when I could walk, and never walking when I could sit down. It was becoming an obsession to me. It was all that I thought about. My next goal was to compete in the USPF Nationals a few months away, and after looking at the year-before numbers at the championships, I needed to squat in the mid-700s to be competitive in the squat in the heavyweight class.

I quit my fancy Gold’s Gym membership and made my way to a place called The Power Pit, in Cocoa, Florida. If I wanted to get really strong, I needed an old school atmosphere. Plus, Gold’s had rules against chalk, and it was just too fancy and clean. The Power Pit? Now, this was a gym. It was owned by some police officers, I believe, but we never saw any owners in there. Sometimes there would be a man behind a small desk where we signed in. He was pleasant, and never said anything but “Good morning.” This place was just right: old carpet that was frayed in places, no air conditioning, rusty bars, old York plates. I loved it right away.

I had 3 training partners joining me for my journey to the Nationals. Two of them were linebackers on the football team at the high school where I was coaching, Jason and Derek. Both of them were strong and motivated. Jason ended up deadlifting 700 years later and Derek squatted 600 pounds in a meet while still in high school. Think back to when you first started and remember your enthusiasm for lifting and your motivation for getting bigger and stronger. You probably had freaking motivation pouring out of you. That’s the way those two were. Both of them ended up following me to Charleston Southern University when I left high school to get back into college coaching, and they were my training partners there also.

The other partner was Bill the Wrestler, a powerlifter that I met when I was still training at Gold’s. He was trying to start a pro-wrestling league on the side, and was an insurance adjuster for his full time job. He had plenty of powerlifting experience in meets, and I hung on every word he said. He wore a big handlebar mustache, and he was just a big strong guy. He weighed about 220 and his squat was over 650. Bill was just getting back into heavy training, and being around us gave him the impetus to push top weights.

We trained at 9 am on Saturdays. I would make the rounds, picking everyone up at their respective houses. We would all ride together, with Bill and I jacked up on caffeine and ephedrine, and the kids jacked up on youthful enthusiasm. I enjoyed the ride to the gym almost as much as the training session itself. We would crank up some heavy metal music and discuss the weights to be lifted that day. It was around a 20 minute drive, and by the time we got to the gym, we were champing at the bit and ready to go.

I was using a squat program that I learned from Dr. Fred Hatfield – “Dr. Squat” – very smart man and a great powerlifter. The program was extreme in its effectiveness, and just plain brutally hard. Hatfield called for the lifter to squat 2 x a week, but I never recovered enough when doing that, so I decided to squat once a week. Notice that Hatfield has a “constant” day at 80% for 5 sets of 2 reps, and the heavier day began at 85% for 5x3. Each week, you added a rep to the 85% day, until you completed the 5x6 day. But here is the real kicker: Hatfield said that you should add 5 pounds a week to both the lighter day and the heavy day. He felt like you got that much stronger each week. I rounded up the numbers some when I got to 90 and 95%. On the 80% days, I wore wraps and a belt, and on the 85% days and above, I wore a squat suit, belt, and wraps. I set my max at 700 pounds. This was the most productive routine that I ever used.

• Week 1 80% 5 sets of 2 reps 560
• Week 2 85% 5x3 595
• Week 3 80% 5x2 565
• Week 4 85% 5x4 600
• Week 5 80% 5x2 570
• Week 6 85% 5x5 605
• Week 7 80% 5x2 575
• Week 8 85% 5x6 610
• Week 9 80% 5x2 580
• Week 10 90% 3x2 650
• Week 11 80% 5x2 585
• Week 12 3x3 95% 695
• Week 13 5x2 80% 590
• Week 14 3x2 100% 730

The most memorable day of that squat cycle was when I had to squat 610 pounds for 5 sets of 6 reps. It was the hardest squat workout that I have ever done. I remember it being especially hot that day, even for Florida. At that time, I was weighing around 285 pounds, so I began sweating immediately just walking from the car to the gym.

Time to squat. We set up movable benches to both sit on and also to block the path of anyone who didn't understand the gym etiquette of not walking into the area where folks are squatting. (World champion Rob Wagner used to put caution tape to block people off from walking in front of him when he was squatting.) After warm ups, I was ready to go. I barely got through the first set. I remember sitting down and taking off my wraps and thinking that this workout was going to be a bitch. The second set, done after about a 10 minute rest, was difficult as well, but I got it done. I finished the third set, but just barely. I had a bad habit of losing the tightness in my upper back at the bottom of the squat – that made the bar roll down my back and made some of the squats look like a goodmorning.

During the sets, the pressure in my head made me feel as though it would explode. When I finished the third set, I sat down and began to dry heave. Jason ran over and got me the small trash can from the front desk, which I promptly filled with vomit. Then I walked outside and vomited some more. Two more sets to go. The fourth set was more of the same with one more challenge added in: my squat suit ripped in the crotch area in the middle of the set. I was so paranoid about washing my squat suit and weakening the material that the dried sweat from previous training sessions and the sweat from the day caused it to split.

So there I was, puking with a ripped crotch and one more set to go. That last set was the ugliest, hardest, gnarliest set of my life. I finished it, with all three of my partners encouraging me, I remember Jason yelling in my ear, “Don't You Quit, Don't You Quit!” over and over. I can hear him in my head to this day. With all of the sets completed, I laid down on the gym floor for awhile afterwards. I was completely, utterly spent.

My partners pushed me through that squat workout, and I'm glad they were there. I was sore for over a week from that session, and was sore even during the next 80% squat day. But the week after that, I felt great, smoked 650 pounds, and ended up a few weeks later squatting a new max of 730 pounds.

I squatted 755 pounds at the Nationals, and ended up a few years later hitting an all time best meet squat of 820 pounds, but I will always remember that 610-pound session down at The Power Pit in the heat in Florida. Pushing through that day taught me a lot about myself and how to dig down deep.

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