Everyday Fitness Preview

Introduction

In this post I will be introducing you to the type of content that I will be covering in my blog posts.  My goal is to educate you on the strength training, ways to become stronger, and I want to help you understand the many benefits of lifting weights, among other things. I will dedicate this post to the person whom got me into strength training in the first place, and his name is Eric Cressey.  Eric Cressey is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist and he offers some of the best content on the internet on an array of fitness related subjects.  His blog post, which features many posts about fitness, diet, and his own personal stories, can be found here.

Not only is Eric Cressey incredibly smart, but he can also back up his knowledge with his amazing feats of strength.  Cressey is not just a coach and a writer, but he was also once a competitive power lifter.  Basically, power lifting consists of three particular lifts.  These lifts include the bench press (lowering a weighted barbell to your chest and pressing it back up), the squat (squatting with a weighted barbell on your back until your thighs are parallel with the ground, and standing back up), and the deadlift (picking a weighted barbell off of the ground, locking it out, and then lowering it back to the ground).  In a competition, you are to choose the most weight you can do for these three lifts and you have to try lift the most weight you can.  Each lift allows for three attempts at.  For example, you may start with a bench press of 315 pounds, then the next lift you may try 320 pounds, and then finally you may try 325 pounds, and your highest lift will be counted towards your total.  Eric Cressey's best competition included a 540 lb squat, a 402 bench press, and a 650 lb deadlift.  His total was 1532 at a body weight of 165 lbs, which is impressive to say the least.

I played baseball in high school and this is how I originally came across Eric Cressey.  I wasn't very big in high school. I only weighed about 160 pounds and I wanted to find something that would help me get bigger and stronger, so I could throw harder. This is when I found Eric Cressey and the work that he had done with a guy named Tim Collins.  Tim Collins is a 5-5 professional pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, and with the help of Eric Cressey he was able to go from throwing in the low 80's to throwing in the low/mid 90's.  From then on, I knew that Eric Cressey was the real deal and he knew what he was talking about.  I decided to buy a book from him called "Maximum Strength," and the book was a great starting point for me into the world of weight training.