[zackmorris]

I know that feeling, I was nervous about the risks you listed when I was broke and started lifting around 2000/2001 anyway. Trust me, the expense of losing one's health due to inactivity is higher than any financial cost. I trained intuitively, which mostly means going it alone at the school of hard knocks by trying everything and keeping what sticks. I got hurt countless times from ego lifting too much weight in my 20s, not going through the full range of motion, etc, but nobody else got hurt on my watch. But athletes pretty much always recover anyway. That's the important part - learning that proper exercise, nutrition and supplementation makes the body fungible, so there's really no limit to what it's capable of. Now I'm one of the biggest guys at the gym as a lifelong natty and nobody's laughed at me since I got the eye of the tiger about 3 months in.