Fortunately, I managed to whittle it down to 11 short points, as follows:

1. Think long-term
2. Rest properly
3. Eat properly
4. Lift weights
5. Choose low reps and high sets
6. Put the weight up
7. Write a training plan
8. Keep a training log
9. Put the weight up
10. Learn how to squat properly
11. Find a mentor

A basic programme

I wasn’t going to specify a programme as I think it’s important to go through the process of finding out what works for you and what doesn’t.  After all, lots of intermediate lifters find success with a 5 x 5 programme but 5 x 5 never seems to work out for me.

Having given it a bit more thought, though, I figured that it might be handy to have a cookie-cutter programme on hand, just to start with, in case my 17-year old self asks for one.

Starting Strength

Ideally, I would recommend that my teenage self began the famous Starting Strengthprogramme immediately.

Why?

Well, it’s a programme that many thousands have tried and succeeded with.  Why would I try and create a customised programme when there is a field-tested and proven formula that works?

So what’s the problem?

I think Starting Strength would be too advanced for me without doing some sort of preparatory programme first.

Now before you go thinking that I was some kind of chess-playing, sick-note carrying sport hater, you have to bear in mind that I was swimming 100m in under a minute and had the upper body to prove it. 

No, I’m not talking about advanced in terms of strength development but in terms of mobility and technical ability.

Mobility and stability problems

My main problem was that I was sitting at a desk all day studying and then doing an hour or more a day of very repetitive exercise with no corrective strategies whatsoever.

So my hips were tight, my quads were dominant, my lower back was hypermobile, my pecs and lats were pulling my shoulders round and I could barely look to see behind me without twisting at the waist.

After all, the Starting Strength programme is based around several key movements: the back squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press and power clean.

These are all great movements, possibly The Great Movements.  However, they all require a certain amount of mobility and technique to perform.  So I came up with a few compromise lifts, alternatives to get me started and take me from being in the danger zone to being ready for Starting Strength.

Some alternative movements

Back squat

• Problem: squatting can be performed badly if you don’t know how to use correct hip drive and use your quads/lower back instead.  Swimmers tend to have hypermobile lower backs because of butterfly and after a couple of hundred lengths of freestyle, they often forget they have legs at all…
• My replacement: the lumberjack squat
• Reasoning: no spinal loading, you learn to keep your chest up and it makes you learn that you need to suffer if you are to improve

Deadlift

• Problem: getting all the way down to the floor can be challenging if your hips are tight from sitting at a desk all day
• My replacement: the Romanian deadlift
• Reasoning: avoids mobility issues off the floor, makes you push your hips back and use your hip drive, and helps increase mobility at the hip (rack pulls do the first but not the second or third)

Bench press

• Problem: benching badly is a recipe for sore shoulders, especially if your shoulders are as wrecked as mine were
• My replacement: weighted push ups
• Reasoning: weighted push-ups groove the correct movement for a good bench and are good for core and scapular stability

Overhead press

• Problem: er, can you say “overhead athlete”? plus my posture was poor from the overdevelopment of my pecs and lats from too much front crawl.  Not a good idea to introduce overhead pressing without some corrective work first
• My replacement: the Viking press
• Reasoning: overhead presses can aggravate shoulders where posture is poor, this gets some overhead without being directly overhead

Power clean

• Problem: as back squat.  Plus, have you seen swimmers on land?  They’re like penguins.  Problem is, though, that they’re really good at pulling motions.  So do you want a bunch of malcoordinated athletes throwing large amounts of iron around when they can’t control their own bodies?  No?  Me neither.
• My replacement: pull ups and inverted rows, followed by bent-over rows once completed
• Reasoning: I like pull ups, inverted rows get your core and scapulae working better and rowing is good for you

The programme

So I hope that this programme would have done a couple of important things:

• Start building some basic strength
• Start correcting some of my muscular imbalances
• Prepare me for Starting Strength

It’s not a true “corrective” programme.  I haven’t put rear delt flyes in, for example, which I probably would have done, along with a fair amount of rotator cuff work.  But it’s the basics that I would have based my programme around, had I known what I know now.

For simplicity, I’ve based it along the same lines as Starting Strength, with an A-B-A split, 3 sets of 5 reps, true linear progression and 3 workouts per week.  Here’s the summary:

Workout A (3 sets of 5 reps of each of)

• Romanian deadlift
• Viking press
• Weighted pull up

Workout B (3 sets of 5 reps of each of)

• Lumberjack squat 
• Weighted push up  
• Inverted row, transitioning to bent-over row when 3×5 completed

This would be just the beginning, obviously.  In time, I’d hope to run through a Starting Strength cycle and then move towards the kind of routines I do today: 10 sets of 3 reps and 5RM, 3RM and 1RM max effort work.

You have to ask yourself, what would you have done differently?

For most of my teenage years, I had deep concerns about things that I know now were completely irrelevant.  Going to Cambridge would probably have been quite bad for me anyway.  That girl was completely unsuitable.  Playing the guitar for a living is overrated.  I thought I was a unique snowflake.  That sort of thing.

There was one thread in my teenage life, however, that started out as a robust line, grew tired and old from misuse and finally snapped altogether until my late twenties.  And that was the pursuit of strength.

If I had a time machine, I would go back and change that.  And this is how.

But first, a little background

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be strong.  I enjoyed the strength I had and I enjoyed showing it off.  Boys will be boys, I suppose.

At junior school, I can remember spending hours arm-wrestling in lunch breaks.

And it was important to all of us.  People paid attention.  Other kids would come up to me and say “you’re number three in class 4P aren’t you?” and “when are you going to arm-wrestle Duncan in class 4W?”

I honestly can’t remember now if I was number three or two or what happened when I finally arm-wrestled number one.

But I do remember how much fun it was and how much personal satisfaction I gained from competing in a strength sport.

The thread started out strong.

Competing at swimming

An affinity for water and some anatomical irregularities (no, I don’t have webbed feet) gave me a head start in competitive swimming and the pursuit of faster times quickly became very important to me.  Fortunately, I was encouraged both at school and in several clubs.  Sprint distances of 50m and 100m became my favourite and I was passably good until I stopped growing and suddenly all my competition were 6 inches taller than me. 

Undeterred, I persevered.  The thread held. 

But then came physical education

Our physical education (P.E.) class at school was so bad it should be possible to take the teachers to court for some sort of malpractice.  I don’t think I ever saw them teach anything.  They just watched as the ones who could already perform a skill performed it and the rest just looked around hopelessly.

I once saw one lad, who was desperate to do a handspring like some of the more athletically minded, miss the bench completely and land squarely on his head.

They took us to the “gym” once.  It was full of machines. We were told that we weren’t allowed to use it until we were in the fourth year (14-15 years) because if we used it earlier it would stunt our growth (I jest not).  Then they gave us a sample programme that used various machines with very little rhyme or reason.  We weren’t taught about progression and nobody talked about diet.

It put me off going to the gym for a very long time.  I can think of no worse testament to their inadequacy.

The thread frayed.  An opportunity was lost.

Lifting weights for swimming

Life happened and I kept swimming peripatetically.  At 25 years old, I was considered retired from proper swimming and became a master (like a veteran).  That gave me a new lease of life and I started competing again.

Moving out of London made it hard to find a proper club but fortunately a good friend had been teaching me about Mark Foster’s routines, which involved lots of weights work and very little swimming.  Since he is probably still the fastest human through water, with a 50m time of 21.13s (short-course), I listened.  Carefully.

Then I went home and did some pull ups.  I haven’t stopped doing them since.

What I would say to my teenage self

OK, so listen to me now.  You can carry on mooning around or you can get up and work at something worthwhile occasionally.  You want to be strong?  This is how to do it.

1. Think long-term – strength is a long-term game and you can’t just go into it thinking you’re going to be the strongest man in the world in a few weeks.  I know that’s hard to accept this kind of limitation with the huge amount of testosterone that’s pumping around your system at the moment but if you can believe that, you’ll be half-way there.
2. Rest properly – as a teenager, you’ll be able to recuperate faster than pretty much anyone older than you.  But don’t be fooled.  Spending every night partying and getting hammered all the time is going to catch up with you eventually.  Get to bed on time!
3. Eat properly – I’m not going to bore you with the details here.  Just make sure you eat lots of real food and plenty of protein.  Stop eating baked beans on toast and eat more meat, milk, eggs, cheese, fish, rice, potatoes, vegetables and fruit.  If you need to, down a protein shake twice a day.  I don’t care.  Just get plenty of good quality calories in.
4. Lift weights – don’t get seduced by bodybuilding or circuit training.  Lift weights.  Properly.  Pick 3 or 4 compound exercises you like and get really good at them.  There’s a saying: “strength is a skill” and skills need practice.  The more you do them the better you’ll be.  Choose squats, deadlifts, rows, chins, dips or cleans if you can.  Don’t worry if you don’t know what they are yet.  We’ll come onto that later.
5. Choose low reps and high sets – when you’re lifting in the gym, you’ll be surrounded by grunting guys with bulging biceps and giant pecs doing high rep sets with minimal rest between them.  Ignore them and do your 10 sets of 3 reps religiously with a minute between sets.  Try 10 sets of 4 or 2 reps occasionally but never go higher than 5 reps.  Ever.
6. Put the weight up – unless you didn’t get all of your reps out in the last workout, always put the weight up higher than it was last time.  By the time this stops working, you won’t need to listen to me anymore, because you’ll know what you’re doing.
7. Write a training plan – don’t ever do a session unless you’ve planned it and you know what you’re going to do in that session.  Plan your sessions in blocks of several weeks at a time.  Look for progression.  Increase the weight.
8. Keep a training log – don’t leave the gym without writing down what you did.  Every so often, check that you’re still progressing.
9. Start with simple exercises – not easy exercises.  Simple exercises.  Don’t expect to be able to walk into the gym and do the Olympic lifts perfectly the first time.  Start with the deadlift, chins, dips, bench press and rows and get comfortable with them first before you start anything more ambitious.  You’re not wasting time because you’ll still be doing those exercises when you’re sixty.
10. Learn how to squat properly – don’t miss this step out.  You will need to squat if you’re going to be strong.  You’ll need to be able to squat before you can Olympic lift too.  Forgetting this could lead to a world of pain.  You might disagree now but you’ll come around to my way of thinking eventually.  Take the time to do a few sets with an empty bar after your workout and start to find your groove.  It’ll come.  Just give it time.
11. Find a mentor – you don’t have a clue how to squat properly?  No problem.  Find someone who does and get them to teach you.  Self-taught weightlifters rarely accomplish anything significant.  There are exceptions but we’re trying to give ourselves the best possible start, right?

And that’s it.  In 15 years time, you could be an absolute monster.  Or you could be just starting out, like I am now.  The choice is yours.