Guest Post by Renegade Inner Circle Member Matt Knox
I was the skinniest dude in my town. Period. Dot. Exclamation point.
Don’t believe me? If I wanted to wrestle in school (9th grade), I would have had to gain at least 5 pounds.
Yep I couldn’t even make the wrestling team because I didn’t weigh enough to make the smallest weight class of 93lbs. Pathetic.
Did that stop me? Nope I would play football next year with all of my buddies right?
Wrong, I was so small that my parents and coach did not want me to play because more than likely I would have been hurt. What a blow to my small mans complex.
The only sport I was allowed to do from 7th grade to Senior year was cross country. And I was wasn’t too bad at it. But after all what 110lb Junior wouldn’t be a fast runner.
Again you read right. 110lbs as a junior. Pathetic. I ate, and ate a lot. But none of it was really nutritious. When Mom and Dad weren’t looking I threw my good healthy food away or fed it to the dog and went straight for the snacks. But I was so active in my back yard with my brother playing football, baseball, basketball and whatever else we could that I kept the weight off.
Of course I knew nothing about lifting weights because the weight room was only for football players and wrestlers and there was no gym in the town, and no one lifted weights.
Senior year came and of course I was the puny pathetic little guy in school. I think no one beat me up too bad honestly because I grew up best friends with probably the biggest kids in the class. But of course they couldn’t help with the ladies. I had been rejected more times than I even want to remember. Damn my self-esteem was non existent.
No worries though, I learned to play guitar during the summer and thought all the girls were gonna love that. Especially when I pulled off a Jimi Hendrix inspired Star Spangled Banner, with my teeth, in front of the entire school.
Man that had to be a panty dropper. Nope, not at all. Got a lot of praise from dudes that played guitar though. Sad Sad Sad. Since I had no self-esteem I took up the things that made me feel better, music, smoking (cigarettes), and drinking. I hid my pain very well and my parents never knew. Now I could get shit faced and write music to feel better.
I went into the work force instead of going to college. It was an easy decision since I needed to somehow support my drinking habit even though I wasn’t 21. But after a while I stopped because I started dating a great chick (now my wife) and a couple years later we had our first child.
Things were starting to look up and my self-esteem was there until that tragic day of 11 September 2001.
It was my dads birthday but they were on there way to see my little brother graduate Army bootcamp. I became so irate at the fact my little brother might have to go fight a war that the next day I was in the Air Force recruiters office signing the papers to enlist. The sad part was that I barely weighed enough to join. The minimum was 119 and I weighed 121, at 21 years old. I have the medical records to prove it.
Yep it was official, I was the biggest pussy on the face of the planet.
A year later I was trying for a competition but I had my Captain tell me that he didn’t trust me carrying a ruck sack during a competition cause I only weighed 135. Here we are almost 23 years old and still the weakest person man kind has ever come across. Back to drinking.
I got orders for my first deployment and told myself that I was gonna get big. I have the time because there is nothing to do but work eat sleep and work out when you are deployed. I had no clue where to start though.
I had dudes try to tell me that I needed every supplement know to man to get big or that it just wasn’t possible because the weights would kill me. Oh by the way they thought it was funny to give me the heaviest gun in our arsenal, but it made me look bad ass.
Since I didn’t know where to start I went to google and typed in “how to get big”. The first link I clicked on was called “How to Get Jacked” by Jason Ferruggia. I bought it and took it with me. I read it one sitting, and then again and again. It was like he personally wrote it for me.
The basics of it were eat as much as humanly possible and lift the heaviest you can while making sure you recover. Fucking A I can do this.
My diet may not have been the best. Probably about 4000 calories of pizza, burgers, fish, chicken, cereal, sandwiches and fruit. Every day for 7 months I ate the exact same thing. I could tell it was working. I saw abs as crazy as my diet was.
I was getting big, I was getting told I was getting big and I love it.
Oh man I was on top of the world because everyone wanted to know what the little guy was doing to get so big. In that 7 months I went from 135 to 160. I was the fucking man, and I owed it all to Jason Ferruggia.
Fast forward a couple years and I had only got to about 165 but I was cool with that. Cause now I was doing Muscle Gaining Secrets and was getting strong while putting on those few pounds. And they all went a way in about a week.
When I got the call that my father was in the hospital and probably wasn’t going to make it through the night, I stopped at the store and picked up enough cigarettes to last me I don’t know how long. And I had quit over a year ago.
In 1 week at the hospital I went from 165 to 142. I remember looking at that scale in shame. But I didn’t care. I had lost the most important person in my life and he was only 56 years old. I needed to stop smoking, drinking and eating healthier so that I know I will be able to live to be an old man.
I got right back on Jays programs and haven’t done any different ones since.
Jay’s programs got be back up to about 170-172 where I hover right now. I am happy with that but do have a goal of 180 and I WILL get there.
But I don’t mind if I don’t hit it for a while. You see I spent my whole life with ups and downs and chasing numbers or chasing something that I just don’t care about that too much anymore.
I still see dudes that inspire me to chase them hard but I don’t need those numbers yesterday. I was the puniest piece of shit ever, and now I am bigger, sort of strong, and happier than ever. I owe this all to Jason and his programming.
I am a die hard Renegade to the end.
I wrote this just so you can see after you obsess over the numbers, you learn to stop caring about them as hard. That is the only lesson I want you all to understand. They take time to come, you will lose them, you will hit new ones. Peaks and valleys will come.
But always stay true to yourself and whatever goal you want will be there.
