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Thank you for a heartfelt story from real life that does not segue into the opening rap of The Fresh Price of Bel-Air. I have been reading too much Reddit and am ashamed to say I got suspicious halfway through.

Agreed, getting into shape is the best thing a person can do for their life. The self confidence it gains you, will open you a lot of doors.

And it's not like its a huge time commitment, an hour a day is all it takes to be in the best shape of your life

Yup, and eating right. What kept tripping me up in my 20s as I tried to get back into shape time and time again was learning that I couldn't eat like a teenager any more. I have to be really careful what I eat. I eat nutritious food now wherever possible. I throw in 3 1-hour visits to the gym during a busy week and 4 if I have the chance.

It does give me self-confidence. It also helps me think more clearly, handle more stress under pressure, and since most of my friends are at the same gym we get time to socialize during the week. It beats spending money on booze to socialize at a bar with friends during the week. Save that experience for the weekend :-)

What I like the most about your story is how you framed the solution to your problem subjectively. You improve yourself instead of destroying them. Everybody wins.

Very interesting experience. Though I have no real comparison, my question is: Was getting in shape an easier solution than cracking down on the bullies?

I ask because of the original post, personal experiences and general thoughts. While bullying should not be tolerated by school administrations, does the individual not have a role to play in developing social skills and physical health to avoid being ostracized? You know, become the change you want to see.

The school administration could offer a 'self-improvement' class to students - targeting bullies with education on why it is bad and offering social and physical development tips to socially inept kids (who are often the brightest).

Perhaps courses such as these would help avoid disasters like school shootings, long term trauma and the jock culture that is so prevalent in the states.

"...does the individual not have a role to play in developing social skills and physical health to avoid being ostracized?"

imo, the individual has a role to be who they want to be.

In other words, his working out, eating healthy, etc., should be because he thinks its a good idea; not because others bullied him into it one way or another.

Ideally, you are correct. But every society has their preset view of normal. To skate too far outside of that view will, inherently, cause a reaction.

Right or wrong, this is the way our society works.

>Was getting in shape an easier solution than cracking down on the bullies?

I think it solves a different problem in the first place (health, energy, self-confidence, with the possible side effect of stopping bullies, vs. just stopping bullies).

What I think most geeks don't understand is most bullies don't hate you. It's done to show dominance and amuse themselves, but it's got little to do with the target. Granted, there are a few sociopaths out there, but mostly it's unfocused aggression that ends up focusing on people who don't or can't defend themselves.

If you watch young friends you see a lot of put downs and aggression, but with the right feedback it get's defused and everyone laughs. When you lack social skills and strength you are constantly on the wrong side of that aggression and it never let's up. But, change the interaction slightly and you are now part of the gang.

Yes. I was a geek growing up, but thanks to my size I was also an offensive lineman on the football team.

I was perfectly happy to pound on any obnoxious bully picking on a geek during PE class since the football coaches could keep me from getting into trouble. Not once did I get one to stand up to me. They really are cowards.

I'm in a verbose state of mind right now so bear with me. You're right in some twisted way, I owe these people for making me who I am. But let me explain.

I've looked at pictures of me when I was a toddler and while I wasn't a scrawny kid, I wasn't fat. Somewhere along the line I started getting labelled the fat kid and teased. Each school photo shows me progressively heavier than the last. Somewhere along the line, I internalized the idea that I was a fat kid and lived up to it by, well, being fat. I've never confused the teasing for being fat as a cause. But it certainly didn't help me get into better shape. The teasing sucked, but it was tolerable. Instead, a couple of incidents that actually had me feeling worried for my physical well-being really sparked the change.

The bullying in high school hit a low point when I was doing a science presentation in a class the teacher could not even control. Two of the guys in the gang I referred to in my first post started tagging my freaking presentation board with gang symbols. It's a hilariously stupid scenario in hindsight. Honestly, I laugh about it now. But at the time I was freaked out, and angry because this meant I couldn't use it for the science fair later. It wasn't them teasing me about my weight that prompted me to lose weight, but rather fear of physical harm from them. I had to sit beside these guys in class and I'd see them come to school with knives and pull them out and pretend to stab people with them. In hindsight, they wouldn't have been dumb enough to hurt me so long as I didn't give them a reason. But not giving them a reason to hurt me felt like such a cowardly thing. It was letting them frame the "debate" and to hell if I would let them do that. It was never about me, it was about them and their issues with their father beating them or something.

So quite honestly, I was partly motivated to start losing weight out of survival instinct. I wanted to be able to defend myself if it ever got to that point, so I started pumping iron so I would be stronger than them should things ever get to that point.

The thing is, I wasn't even really the primary target of these bullies. So as ridiculous as my account above is, other guys had it worse. They really did get beaten up. There's a fine line between being pushed to the brink and being broken. I wasn't France in WWII, I was Britain. I had options available and I responded accordingly.

To your point however, my gym teacher also had a part in motivating me to lose weight. He would never cut me any slack. Jocks would get remedial attention in math courses they were having problems with. There is no special education for gym. In gym, when we had to say do gymnastics on hanging rings or flips on mats, I never got any slack. My teacher would make me get up there and fail, very publicly, and in a humiliating way. He gave me a C for effort.

Bullying issues aside, I think my school did exactly what it needed to help me out. The gym classes included lots of talks by our gym teacher about how we would all gain weight as we got older, got office jobs, and became immobile. And some humility is good. I couldn't even hang off of the gymnastic rings let alone do what was required to get an A. If this were an Algebra course, I wouldn't have been able to count. If anything, they were a bit indifferent about my situation. It's one thing to point out to a kid that he has problems. It's another to give him options about how to solve them. I stumbled upon weight lifting as an option only because my older brother was a wrestler and I'd seen him do it.

As far as the worst bullies go, that's a whole other kettle of fish. The solution to treating those sort of bullies these days is to shuffle them around the school system until they either play out the clock and graduate or drop out. My school was considered a "good school" which had the effect of encouraging principals at troubled schools of sending their worst offenders to our school to discipline them. So 99% of the students were good but had to face 1% of the school population which were probably psychopaths. I don't think schools can treat these bullies. They simply don't have the jurisdiction. For a lot of those kids, you'd have to remove them from broken homes.

For your casual bullying, I'd say the best approach is to play both sides of the coin. Tell the bullies to get over themselves and tell the victims to do the same. If you're that hung up over getting bullied for being 120 lbs at 6'0" tall, maybe it is you that has an issue with your weight. At that point, the bullies are merely amplifying your discontent. You can either learn to accept it and let the comments slide off of you because they no longer hurt, or you can do something about it and gain weight.

One of these days I need to learn how to be more concise :-)

I wasn't France in WWII, I was Britain.

Off topic: actually France and Britain attacked and declared war on Germany. So probably neither works as a metaphor for a victim of bullying.

I think you mean the first world war.

To be technically correct, France and Britain had a well-publicized mutual-defense treaty with Poland (among others), and when Germany attacked Poland (knowing full well of the alliance) the signatories had no choice but to declare war. In fact, Britain and France gave Germany an ultimatum to pull out of Poland before initiating hostilities.

Furthermore, Germany actually didn't even bother declaring war on Poland first before launching their first attacks.

In other words, this was not a Pearl Harbor, Germany knew full well what they were getting into. Yeah, Britain and France were not iconic examples of bully victims, but if you're suggesting Germany is, you'd be mistaken.

but if you're suggesting

I'm not.

The analogy is that while the enemy wasn't beating him up and "occupying" him as badly as they did others, he still had to deal with a bit of a blitz and ended up using his ingenuity to break their enigmatic code, develop a radar against future attacks, and ultimately develop a world class force of his own to contend with them.

Of course, the analogy breaks down around there unless he made friends with an even-less-bullied kid and another bully who suddenly became outcast and bullied in his own right, and worked together to defeat the other bullies once and for all.

Somehow this sounds like a pitch for a TV show...

Very nice account, I enjoyed reading it.

You mention that the bullies you had to put up with used to carry knives. Did weight lifting really help against bullies pulling a knife on you? I'd say it takes more specialized training to be able to face a knife wielding opponent.

Her principal called her into his office to say that you'd have a good influence on her? I'm going to assume that's an egotistical embellishment, and not an indication that the whole story is fabricated. :-)

We both went to religious schools. Unlike public schools, teachers could and would comment on things that probably were none of their business. They'd also encourage and discourage certain types of behaviour outside of the academic domain. In elementary school, a teacher once kept me in at recess to talk about my older sister (she was 19, pregnant, and having the baby). Pissed me off...

How long does it take to get in shape? I know this is a difficult question: what's in shape? So how long does it take until other people start to notice?

In shape is a term you'll have to define for yourself. When I was younger, the definition seemed to revolve around appearance and weight. Nowadays, I also throw in exercise metrics.

For example, this time 6 months ago I was 10 lbs lighter than I am now. But I'm a lot stronger now. I couldn't even do 135 lbs back squats (bar plus 45 lbs plate on each end) back then. Nowadays my routine consists of a few sets of back squats that culminates in a 10 repetition set of 315 lbs (bar plus 6x45 lbs plates). Physically, my weight is 10 lbs heavier now, but I have a lot less fat and so I'm a lot more compact in size.

I'm trying to lose some more fat, but when doing this there is always the real risk of losing muscle along with it. The scale does not tell the whole tale. By keeping tabs on how strong I am with respect to certain exercises, I can get a pretty good back-of-the-napkin kind of estimate of whether I'm losing fat or muscle.

When other people begin to notice changes depends heavily on your approach to "getting in shape". You can go fast and hard (and incorrectly). This might have you drop lots of weight the wrong way (e.g., losing lots of muscle a.k.a. the Oprah 1990s approach). A lot of commercial dieting programs depend on this strategy, because people will notice fairly soon (e.g., 1 month after starting). The early congratulatory praise by colleagues is encouraging and motivating to the dieter, causing them to keep going. If you go for a more gradual approach, people may not begin to notice for many months. That was the case for me this time around. People really didn't begin to notice until I bought some new clothes.

Because I lost weight so rapidly in high school, it was much more difficult for me to keep motivated this time around. Luckily, my friends whom I train with kept me focussed on metrics that could indicate progress such as how much weight I could push in an exercise and for how many repetitions. The goal this time around was to pack on muscle first, even if it meant gaining weight, and then to begin a cutting phase where I'd adopt an extremely strict diet and different exercise routine for a one or two month period.

Let me know if you're interested in some good resources. I didn't adopt any one plan. For example, I enjoyed the Hacker's Diet and while I think it's a good start, I personally felt like absolute shit most days when I treated a "calorie as a calorie". Whether I interpreted this incorrectly, the book says not to worry too much about what you eat so long as you pay attention to your caloric intake. Well, until I started eating nutritiously, I felt like crap, performed like crap at the gym, and while I did lose weight, I just didn't feel very healthy.

I'm not sure if you're personally interested, but if you're trying to get in shape I would allocate a 3 month window in which you think your chances of being stressed out are low and in which you can get lots of sleep and rest. You're going to be forcing your body to make so many changes that it'll really stress your immune system and ability to stay committed. In the first month, cut out stupid habits like excess drinking (or switch to vodka/soda from beer), eating half a pizza on a Friday night, downing tons of non-diet soda, etc.. This will be enough of a shock to your system, but you'll need to plough through 3 weeks of this to kill the bad habits.

In the next month, start increasing your physical activity while refraining from your previously bad eating habits. I'd tell you to get a personal trainer if you can afford one, but honestly the quality varies so much that it's risky. Perhaps you can seek out a friend who has a similar body type to your target, who can show you the ropes. Again, really push through the first 3 weeks until working out becomes as much of a priority as ensuring that you've done your backups or checked your code into the repository :-) Don't feel like you need to join a gym. The activity can be a sport, riding a bike to work, hiking, etc.. It just has to be consistent

In the third month, come back to your diet and begin to adopt healthier eating habits. Count your calories in everything that you eat to figure out where you're going overboard. Then make changes so that you come under your caloric requirements. I'd suggest 2000 calories as a good daily target intake for your average young male trying to lose weight this way. Any less and you probably won't get enough protein. Any more and you're probably eating too well. Increase your protein intake: if your target weight is 160 lbs then try to aim for 160 grams of protein a day (chicken breasts and eggs are your friends). If you're like most westerners, your meals are probably meat/poultry/fish supplemented with carbs and then rounded out with vegetables/fruits. Invert this last allocation so that your meals are supplemented with lots of vegetables/fruits and rounded out with a few carbs. In fact, if you really like vegetables, go to town on them. The more you eat the better you'll feel (it's a subjective thing) and they're generally so calorie-sparse as to be a non-worry.

I'm curious how you went from squatting 1 rep max of 135lb to 10 reps of 315lb in 6 month. It's quite a transformation. According to http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/SquatStandards.htm..., that puts you in the advanced percentile of men who weight 140-160lb which should take roughly, "multi-years of training (more than 2 years)."

How about many rep's per set and set per session did you do? And how pound increment did you add for each week?

My ideal weight is 170 lbs but I'm training to get to 181 by end of summer (buddy and I are using similar charts:-) ). I'm at 195 lbs now, so still stocky. My 1 rep max wasn't 135 at first, but it was the max weight I could do 10 reps of. At my weight now, the advanced percentile is way higher than 315. It's 387 according to that chart. The 315 lbs set takes all my effort. If I don't eat right, sleep well the night before, and am not mentally ready, I might fail after about 4 or 5 reps. I've gone up to 330 lbs but then my form just sucks and I'm not squatting deep enough. I imagine if I want to get up to 365 lbs it'll probably take me another year. All that said I'm happy with my level on squats now. I'm not as strong on dead lifts (flexibility problems still) and I'd rather focus my effort there. I've been stuck doing Romanian dead lifts until I sort out those flexibility issues and can get my form right.

My buddy who is training me happens to be an engineer who loves these charts and reads a lot about training. He immediately identified my natural strength on the squats but pointed out that my flexibility was absolutely atrocious (sitting all day as a programmer, who'da thunk!). So he forbid me from doing back squats at first. I focussed instead on doing lunges, lots of stretching, and then we eased into doing body weight squats and dumb bell squats. He also had me strengthening my core as much as possible so it'd be ready for squatting.

Other than that, I have a nice natural ability to put on muscle. That's never been a problem. My problem is as the muscle packs on, so does the fat. A lot of my progress is attributable to my training buddy though. He really pushes me and on days when I work out alone, I don't nearly get as good of a workout. It also helps that we've both got the same ideal body weight (although his problem is he's naturally underweight). So we don't want to fall too far behind the other in our weak exercises. We're both too lazy to want to keep moving plates back and forth onto bars in between our sets :-)

UPDATE: just saw this part of your post How about many rep's per set and set per session did you do? And how pound increment did you add for each week?

After the first couple of newbie sessions of squatting, I could do 6-8 reps at 185 lbs. We would do 4 sets of squats right at the beginning of our workout. First set involved 6 warmup body weight squats. Set 2: 6-8 135 lbs. Set 3: 6-8 155 lbs. Set 4: 6-8 185 lbs. We'd only do squats once a week. Only in the past month have I increased squats to a once or twice a week exercise. If you aren't hurting (at first) or stiff (later) for the next couple of days after squatting, you're probably not pushing your max weight and you have some sort of mental block. At first the long rest left us completely fresh for the next workout.

The way we train is that we don't move up until we can get a high rep set at our previous max weight. So even though I think I can only do 6-8 going into that last set, if I can push myself to do 12-15, I will. This is where a gym buddy comes in handy. They'll know if you're sandbagging and will tell you to push out two more reps. If I hit this target, we move up a weight class, which at first meant throwing another 30 lbs on there to 215 lbs. I stuck at 215-225 for a while. Then we jumped up to 275 which was shocking after about 2 months at 225. I stuck at 275 for another couple of months and then we started putting on 10 lbs here and there, until I could get to 300. That was a big psychological double-edge sword. It felt like a hell of a lot of weight but it felt good being able to do that. A couple of weeks of 300 was enough for me to get to 315. I've stayed there and really focussed on improving my form and depth.

Right now we're doing 4 sets as described above, and then on the 5th set we drop down to whatever weight we can handle 15-20 reps of. For me right now, that's 225. After that last set I'm about ready to pass out, it's pretty exhausting.

I dunno, sounds pretty chaotic :-) But we like to change it up. We're constantly contradicting ourselves, one week going for low rep high weight and the next going for high rep moderate weight sets.

Thanks. Great reply!

Weight is not really a problem for me yet (according to this BMI index I'm underweight, fwiw), but this year I lost muscle and gained weight (in fat). I'd like to reverse that. My problem is with exercise: when I feel like exercising I do it like I used to be able to. But then the next few days I can't exercise because my muscles are sore and weak. And generally I have a hard time getting into the habit. I used to cycle ~120 km per week to school but now I live closer to school...so I used to burn one day's food by cycling and I'm not eating less now.

I don't care about looks and muscles, but I'd like to get in shape to be able to run & cycle better again and feel fitter. What type of exercise do you recommend? How do you motivate yourself to exercise?

Perhaps getting a buddy who shares your aims can help?