I have been recently working my way through the anime Baki The Grappler (great anime btw) and being the highly suggestible person that I am it made me want to get big and lift some weights. So I did one set of dumbbell curls and now feel like the most buff motherfucker on the planet.
I thought what I'd mention today is my history of fitness / unfitness. I have mentioned before that I used to do martial arts but I also did competitive swimming. Up until I was 17 I trained Monday to Saturday, sometimes multiple times a day. I would train swimming with my swim club in the morning before school and train Taekwondo in the afternoons. I even trained twice on Saturdays.
I could literally swim before I could walk and I started Karate not long after I started walking. I left Karate for Taekwondo because I wanted full contact competition. In Taekwondo I became state champion five times and national champion twice. In swimming the best I did was make it to the state championships for 100m backstroke and 100m butterfly. I made it to the finals for butterfly but did not place. I made the school cross country team every year and made the school swim team every year.
I was one fit motherfucker.
when I was 17 I first injured my ankle and weakened the ligaments in my ankle which put me out of any sport for a while, when I finally got better and was about to start training again I injured my knee badly. I was at the BMX track and stacked it, dislocating my knee and tearing my PCL (a ligament in the back of the knee). This took me out of action for a long time. I was on crutches for months and it took a lot longer to recover completely, although it is an injury which will never be completely fixed without surgery, which I do not plan on having.
After that I moved with my family interstate and started TAFE (similar to college for you Americans) and did not get back into training at all. After a while I put on a lot weight. When you train as much as I did your calorie intake is much higher than a normal person because you require immense amounts of energy to burn during training. When I suddenly stopped training it is nearly impossible to also suddenly cut your food intake at the same time. I was eating 4+ times the recommended calories for a normal person. So obviously I put on a lot of weight.
At my peak I hit about 125kg (metric system motherfuckers... it's about 275 pounds) The weird thing though is, when I was way overweight like that I had no problem getting girlfriends, and I'm not talking girls my size, I'm talking hot girls that even at my physical peak I would have considered out of my league. The other thing is at this point, although I was not 'fit' I was way stronger than I was when I was training. I could lift things that I could never lift before and can not lift now. I had big arms and a massive chest, even if they were covered with fat.
After a while I made a decision to loose the weight. I immediately cut my food intake by half, completely stopped eating all the junk food snacks, and at the same time try to speed up my metabolism by basically eating many times during the day but in small, low energy portions. After a few weeks of much stomach pain I think my stomach actually shrunk and I would become full with much less food. After a while this just became the way I lived without thinking about it and I started loosing a lot of weight without even realising it. Over time I began eating more and more but the weight kept coming off and I didn't realise because I never actually weighed myself during this time. (and it was also the time when I kind of stopped having any normal type of social interactions with people)
When I finally realised I had actually lost a lot of weight was when someone got me a new t-shirt for Christmas and it was a medium and I put it on and it actually fit me. I looked at myself in the mirror thinking 'WTF?' and then decided to weigh myself to see what I weighed now. Last time I had weighed myself I was about 120kg... when I got on the scale it said 85kg. I actually thought there was something wrong with the scale and tried again. I had lost 35kg without even realising it, mostly because by this time I was back to eating whatever I want and it no longer affected me.
So now I am... actually I have not weighed myself recently... but somewhere around the 77kg-82kg area. The thing is now I feel so weak. First I was super fit, then I was pretty damn strong when I was fat, now I am neither. I want to start trying to do something again but I don't know what. There are a lot of weights at my house that I can use at any time to bulk up and get stronger, but at the same time my real passion is doing martial arts and getting fitter. But to train martial arts I would need to join a club, which means paying them money and taking up a lot of my time which even now I feel I do not have enough time to give. I don't even have enough time to choose between playing a game and watching a movie or some anime. I literally had to completely stop gaming for the last few weeks to find the time to watch Baki The Grappler (which I still have not finished).
To overcome the time restraints at the moment I have taken a pair of dumbbells and some extra weight up to my room and I just do some sets while watching shows at the same time.
So what is your opinion on this? Should I just keep doing what I'm doing and just lift some weights in my room while watching shows? or should I cave in, join a club, start training again, and have even less / almost no time to do the things I love like gaming and watching anime and movies?
I guess there is also the social interaction that comes with being in a club, and also the possibility that some day down the track I could become a better fighter than I ever was before and one day be a champion again...
... that post turned out way longer than I expected.
TLDR; gaming, anime, and doing weights in my room? or join a martial arts club and have no time for shit?
At the moment I work for the local government and I really like where I work. I have been working there for nearly two years in an IT Support (helpdesk) position. But I do not actually work for them directly, I am employed by an employment agency and work for the local government under contract that gets extended every few months or so. Because of this I don't get any benefits such as sick pay and RDO's (Roster Days Off) and paid holiday leave etc. Also my job is actually not supposed to be permanent, I am filling a roll that is actually filled by an existing staff member that is just currently working on a big project so I may loose my position at some point. But at the same time there is also a high chance that I will eventually become hired full time and get to keep my job permanently, or fill another of the many new jobs that are becoming available at the organisation.
At the same time my boss, who is a pretty awesome guy and always looks out for me, brought to my attention that the local University has two Service Desk positions advertised that I would be perfect for because they are the same kind of job I have been doing for the last two years and I am pretty damn good at. These positions will be directly employed by the University rather than through an employment agency which means that I get all the benefits and job security etc. But on the other hand it means that right now when I have the opportunity to get into a more technical roll, I will be instead moving back into the same experience level I have been in over the last two years.
