In my inaugural blog, I think it makes sense to tell you all a little about myself and what lead me to M&F in the first place, so here goes...

I started high school as a 5-foot-11, 130-pound beanpole of a wide receiver who ran the 40-yard dash in 5.7 seconds (which means I was getting lapped by O-linemen). I was pretty much a weakling in the weight room. Some of my lifting PRs as a freshman: bench press, 95 pounds; power clean, 75 pounds; 3 dips; one, maybe two, pull-ups. (Hold the applause for later, please.) I was fairly ignorant about lifting weights too. Example: On the wall of the weight room, there was a stenciled list of students that had achieved a 300-pound bench press or a 500-pound half squat, and I thought nothing of it that guys were actually rewarded for horrible range of motion when training their legs. My senior year, I finally broke 200 pounds on bench (215, actually), but I was just as skinny as before -- 6'5", 170 pounds. Frankly, I was tired of being skinny, and I liked the thought of girls actually finding me attractive.

I went off to college in Colorado and played football at a D-II school (Western State College). That's when I started lifting obsessively and gained over 30 pounds of muscle and actually got up to 215 pounds or so. Back then, the term 'overtraining' didn't register with me. Lifting six days a week for two hours a pop seemed perfectly normal. And maybe my social life suffered a bit because of it, but oh well.

Long story short, I arrived at M&F in 2002 and have since stopped overtraining, thanks to the tutelage of guys like Jim Stoppani and the infamous former Flex magazine science editor Jim Wright, who was always happy to dispense his One Golden Rule of Bodybuilding: "Everything works, nothing works forever." If any of you ever figure out what that means, please let me know. 

I can't say exactly what direction my blog will take going forward. If I happen to stumble across a cool gym or find a good workout, I'll probably write about it. I'm a fairly obsessive sports fan (Bears, Cubs and Univ. of Illinois mostly), so I'll probably blog about ballgames every so often too. At this point, it's wide open, but please feel free to drop me a line with any questions or to comment on any recent article I've written.

Thanks for checking out our new M&F blogs. Talk to you later.

Joe