Why Just Perform Training?
3rd Grade
6th Grade
7th Grade
Senior Year
Welcome to the first ever Just Perform Training blog post!
To get things started I would like to tell a more in depth version of my story and give context for the mission of Just Perform Training.
Like I have shared before I wasn’t always as fit as I am now. The earliest picture I have is from 2008 when I was just beginning to pile on the extra weight. I believe I was in 3rd grade right around this time. I hadn’t really been picked on much up until this point for my weight until this one day I got called a fat girl by my “friend”. This has still stuck with me to this day.
Fast forward to the 4th grade where I was at my all time heaviest of around 150 LBS at around 4’10'“. My papa had tried to help me lose weight before this point, one time he even offered me $300 one summer to lose 20 LBS, but I hadn’t had any success. This all changed one afternoon on the playground’s track…my friends and I were walking around the track and somehow the topic of losing weight came up and my friend said something along the lines of if you do 50 sit ups every night you’ll lose weight. To this day I don’t know what it was about that sentence, but it lit a fire within me that allowed me to drop 20 LBS over the next coming months. I did not miss one evening of sit ups. I was obsessed with the process and wanted to lose weight so badly I was going to do whatever it took to make it happen.
Looking back knowing what I know now I was heading down a dark path. I was going to bed hungry at night, punishing myself with exercise, feeling guilty to the point of crying because I was eating more food than what I had normally been eating. Fortunately, my situation never escalated to the point where I had to be hospitalized for an eating disorder, but for sure was a possibility if I kept going down the path I was on.
I got to around 130 - 140 LBS and chilled there all through middle school. Thankfully I found baseball and that kept me active, so I didn’t relapse and gain all the weight back. The only issue being at the 130 - 140 LBS range now was I was EXTREMELY skinny. Great! I just keep going from one extreme to another.
I played baseball all through middle school and high school. Baseball was the first time I found a sport I enjoyed and was decent at. The summer before 9th grade was the year I started to exercise again after my initial bout of exercising back in elementary school. The only difference this time was I began using a barbell…
My initial drive to lift weights began with wanting to improve my performance for baseball. I started doing the stereotypical workouts most people do when they start out in the gym. My workouts consisted of lots of push ups, bicep curls, skull crushers, rows, and even legs…Believe it or not I did train legs when I first started lifting, I know shocker, but for some reason I always prided myself on having well developed legs.
After a couple months of winging it I finally decided to hop on YouTube and see what I could find on lifting weights…it was at this moment that the obsessive behavior came back and I spent hours on top of hours watching any and every video there was from the likes of…Scott Herman, Scooby, Mike Chang, Chris Jones, Christian Guzman, Matt Ogus, Steve Cook, Omar Isuf, and others. I also found myself on the Bodybuilding.com and T-Nation forums reading and researching anything and everything I could get my hands on.
My passion for baseball slowly faded and my passion for lifting weights took over. I was cut from the baseball team my 10th grade year and that was the turning point for me to go all in on lifting. I started to dial in my nutrition and training more and more over the next couple of years. For awhile I ran from the idea of pursuing a career in the fitness industry, but no matter what I did I always found myself back here. I finally decided to go all in on my passion and make it my career and I haven’t looked back since.
Just Perform Training is more than just building muscle and getting stronger. Mike Rashid, a very successful fitness entrepreneur, once said that what we do in the gym translates into life. The tough sessions we do inside the gym prepare us to handle the “difficult” times in everyday life, so that when we are presented with adversity we’re better equipped to handle it.
Those words have stuck with me and been a big part in the development of the mission of Just Perform Training.
So what does Just Perform Training mean?
Just Perform Training is the idea that no matter what life throws at you you’ll always show up and give it your all. Just like we do in the gym with a heavy squat trying to pin us to the ground and we drive back up and not let it keep us down.
“Just Perform In and Out of The Gym”
As a thank you for checking out my first blog post I want to give you a free copy of my one week at home training program.
