How Bodybuilding Saved My Life - by Kai Greene
How Bodybuilding Saved My Life - by Kai Greene
THE GYM WAS MY SALVATION
For a long time I’ve preached to anyone who will listen that bodybuilding saved my life. And now I’ve got the chance to have grown a little more and see a little deeper I’m able to understand with a lot more clarity what I was trying to understand and share.
My life changed in 1991 when, aged 16, I walked into the 5th Avenue Gym in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn which was a sometimes smelly, dark basement gym with no natural light. It was as basic as you can get. But I had found a home. I took to the gritty feel of the battered weights straight away. Almost immediately I had a structure and purpose to my life; the gym was somewhere I had to be. Very soon I was working the front desk and undertaking cleaning duties. I was still living in a group home but never really felt safe there and so on many nights I would sleep in the gym. The gym really was my home and its inhabitants became my family. The big name at the 5TH Avenue Gym at that time was Bernard Sealy who had finished 14th at the 1990 Mr. Olympia. I looked upon him as some sort of a God. In the magazines I was impressed with eight-time Mr. Olympia Lee Haney, for his great size and tiny waist and by Russ Testo for his inventive and unique posing displays.
Along with generating physical development this new life at the 5th Avenue Gym helped me grow mentally. In its sweaty environs I was in control of the weights I lifted, of the sets I completed, and it was the gateway to forming the habit of controlling things outside the gym. I started to look at things differently. In the gym, for the first time in my life, I felt I had a purpose – a belief that I was achieving something positive. Each workout, each best lift was a victory. It was here that I first learnt the meaning of “work ethic” and how to apply it. The 5th Avenue Gym represented the first stepping-stones to changing my life that eventually took me where I am today.
MY JOURNEY
I grew up in institutions as a ward of the state, moving around various foster homes and other facilities. I had to deal with a host of different challenges. A lot of it was down to me being unable to handle myself correctly. I had an inability to understand what was going on generally, particularly socially. I came to learn that I had to make better decisions that would put me in a better place and give me fruitful opportunities. I learnt I just couldn’t walk around on automatic pilot feeling angry and thinking I had some sort of entitlement due to me. I learnt that being angry and wishing the world would leave me alone and get out of my way wasn’t productive; in fact it was destructive. So I reflected on my thoughts of, I didn’t have a father, didn’t have a mother, didn’t have a home, and begin to say, So what? Was I going to let the traumas of my early life define me? The more important issue I had to face was, What you gonna do?
I learnt the truth was you have responsibilities and opportunities. You have personal power – what does that mean? It means you have the ability to act. Let me repeat that, the ability to act. There a host of self-help books out there that many people consider just hype and hucksterism. But for a person like me who didn’t grow up with the safeguard of having a parent and a home in place, those books laid out certain the parameters for me and gave me the gateway and a pathway to how to conduct my life and be successful. So it was left up to me to decide what I was going to do. Despite my past, the world or anyone in it didn’t owe me a living. It was down to me to change my life.
Today as an adult it’s easier for me to understand that it doesn’t matter what party is in office, doesn’t matter what the social-economic climate is; none of that matters. Instead you identify yourself as man of action working to advance and achieve objectives. You have to figure out ways to get that done. Through bodybuilding I was able to identify a path toward positive overall self-development that made sense to me.
I have the best coach in the world in George Farah and have a great support team behind me. I’ve been fortunate enough to partner up with a really cool business partner in Adam Paz, and Vlad Yudin and the guys at Generation Iron. All these business developments and the people and things have come into my life is a result of my efforts to put my best foot forward and invest in being a better me – the best me I can be. It’s not being selfish to focus on yourself. It’s being aware of the fact you as an individual are able to make choices and focus on things that don’t depress you but help you keep your motivation at a high level. In that way you are capable of taking more efficient action steps towards achieving what your ultimate larger goals are. The bodybuilding experience helped me to better understand and navigate my way through this life and maintain and build on the positive path I had stared to follow. The recent Arnold victories are just part of that path, and my journey is far from finished.