Lifting Weights has Always Been About Holding Yourself to a Higher Standard.

One of the things I try to engrain into every client that I coach is that it will serve you very well if you are always holding yourself to a high standard with your lifting.  This is of utmost importance when coaching powerlifters, as there are actual rules to the sport and if you are not lifting to the standards of the sport then you will have a rude awakening on competition day.  Early in the coaching process I try to differentiate between Type 1 and Type 2 errors.  A type 1 error is something that will get you red lights on meet day even though you may have completed the rep. Not squatting to depth, not pausing your bench, the bar moving down during the ascent, hitching your deadlift, stuff like that.  While a type 2 error on the other hand might be a movement imperfection, it will still get you white lights on the platform if the lift is completed. Examples being things like knee cave in the squat, shoulder shrug in the bench press, back rounding in the deadlift, all these imperfections will still allow for a completed lift within the rules of the sport of powerlifting. 

It always made me chuckle when I would meet people who would associate the sport of powerlifting with sacrificing form to ego lift the most amount of weight.  I can think of two former co-workers that somehow thought our movement standards were lower because as powerlifters, our main objective is to move the most weight.  Yes, squatting with a full range of motion, pausing your benchpress on your chest, and deadlifting a maximally loaded bar from the floor without hitching will somehow give me worse results in the gym.  You don’t lift the most weight ego lifting with bad form, you lift the most weight with good form and respecting the weight.  Coaching powerlifters to lift with a full range of motion and with high movement quality is almost simpler because you can simply point out that that lift will not count on meet day, so it is wrong.  “No rep.”  “Use less weight and pause.”  Convincing a bodybuilder, physique enthusiast, or NARP to lift less weight with a standardized range of motion is harder a lot of the time.  Why would I squat to the point where the crease of my hips is below my knee? That shit is way harder and scarier.  Pausing heavy weight on your chest while your face is exploding is terrifying.  You mean I can’t start my deadlift from the rack?  “Ditch the straps pussy.” 

Having rules for the big 3 and differentiating between error types is valuable in getting normies to get more out of their training.  I think more people would get more out of their training if they applied this concept to the rest of their lifting as well.  No one ever got smaller or weaker from lifting with a complete range of motion, controlling the eccentric, pausing, completing the concentric contraction with now downward movement, and then holding the contraction at lockout.  Don’t forget that on top of that the point of powerlifting is literally progressive overload.  Your mindset should be that you have no type 1 or type 2 errors across all movement that you use in the gym, at minimum no type 1 errors.  There is a time and place for some body English, only some.  We are trying to get big and strong after all, and that happens best when our structures are highly stressed through all the different ranges of motion and positions, over and over and over again. 

Sport Practice

                  One of things powerlifters do get accredited for is their commitment to great technique under load in an effort to move the highest amount of weight.  This technical proficiency is built up by hours upon hours of months and years of deliberate practice.  Deliberate practice is Intentful, focused, commitment to executing the task at hand to the highest level an individual can.  The quality of the practice always trumps the quantity of the practice.  I always try to argue that this adage applies to training volume as well, and funny enough they are directly related.  If this facilitates less total time in the gym it also has the benefit of improving training density, subsequently allowing you to be in a period of recovery for a longer period.  There is an interesting dichotomy in powerlifting practice because there are loading requirements if you want to practice the sport, as we must also train the technique within the confines of straining against load.  You can’t get better at squatting 600 by squatting 135.  This goes for hypertrophy training as well.  You can’t get jacked doing 1000 bicep curls with a pencil. 

Accessories

                  If we get so much credit for our attention to detail and commitment to mastery when it comes to SBD technique, how come we have earned such a bad rap when it comes to accessory work?  Always remember that when I am pointing the finger at you, I am pointing three back at me.  How often have I gone through the motions with rows, or pushdowns, or been completely content using the same weights week in and week out on single leg or hamstring work.  Do I even track these loads and rep PRs? Why the heck not, you spend all the time writing the perfect squat program and you can’t even track your reps and/or loads on hamstring curls to make sure that you are being as accurate as possible with your overload progression.  Please don’t take this as me saying that we need to endlessly force progress, that is not what I am saying.  I am saying that we could all do a better job being precise with load and rep progression, by holding our accessory movement execution, and subsequent tracking habits, to a higher standard so that we can be accurate and milk progress for a longer period of time. 

                  Do you have movement standards when it comes to accessory training?  Are you controlling the descent well, making sure you feel tension in the muscle, aligning your joints up against gravity or the loading angle appropriately, squeezing the contraction hard at the top of the movement for a full 2 count, making sure that stability is high so that you can pinpoint the muscle that you are trying to train, making sure not to muscle fuck the weight up just to achieve the prescribed rep range, or force load progression with sloppy technique without actually stressing the muscle to a greater magnitude.  I am a culprit of making all these mistakes throughout my training career and still to this day.  My body is forever paying the price for some of the things I did in the gym.  This is my official warning to you, not only to hold yourself to a higher movement standard for the injury prevention benefits, but also because you will achieve greater results if you are stressing your muscle more precisely through greater ranges of motion, and bigger, stronger muscles will support the technical proficiency you are trying to achieve in the powerlifts over the long term.  Real strength is developed when every muscle is strong, supportive, and moving synergistically with the muscles that surround it. 

Do the hard stuff

Find the hardest, most humbling, and challenging movements you can do, then get strong as hell at them.  Everyone has heard the story of people trying their first bodyweight glute ham raise and their hamstring cramps up trying to do one full rep.  Find these kinds of exercises and build up to 20 reps with controlled form and a full range of motion.  No one ever saw someone do 20 strict pullups and thought they were weak or had a small back.  This mindset is even more badass the bigger you get. Super heavyweights that can rock out big sets of pullups are usually strong af in the main lifts as well.    Joe Defranco used to say that his random test for sprint speed or power was a pullup amrap, because if you can do a ton of pullups, it means you are strong and lean. 

Skip on the belt for some movements, cos eff the belt I want to be strong without it.  Hitting big beltless RDLs or barbell rows will training your trunk and back in the way that you want them too.  On the topic of barbell rows, you can probably use stricter form.  Get your trunk as parallel to the ground as you can, Let your shoulders really protract, try to keep your low back neutral, and try to keep your legs as stationary as possible.  Strict doesn’t mean no body English, but it also means that your legs are supportive and active, but we should not see and knee or hip action. 

If you can’t balance your single leg movements to the point where you can effectively feel your legs being trained, then you are just bloody weak.  Take your time to learn how to take yourself through lunges and split squats with your trunk, hips, and legs working together to take you through an athletic range of motion.  The stability, control, and trained feeling you are looking for will come with time.  And you can always fill in the gaps on the other end of the strain spectrum with a single leg variation that has very high levels of stability. 

Now that I think about it, my strongest lifting was either while I was doing my strongest Bulgarian Split Squats and Reverse Lunges I have ever done, or during the training period after.  It’s probably a good example of one of those things that makes you strong, but then you remove it from your training in the name of specificity or fatigue, and then your strength goes to shit, and you don’t know why.  Be strong af on one leg.  Try to make NARPs in the gym say “oh shit” when you start reverse lunging their squat max for reps. 

Trickle Down Standards

If you get better at doing things right inside the gym, you get better at doing things right outside of the gym as well.  It all comes with that same attitude of wanting to hold yourself to a higher standard.  On top of that, if you are working so hard in the gym, why wouldn’t you do everything you could outside of the gym to try to maximize the product of the process you are taking part in.  People will tell you that they want to be jacked and strong but when you ask them about their nutrition, they either don’t eat enough, don’t know how much they are consuming, don’t have a plan in place, or just clearly have no idea what they are doing at all.  At some point everyone should spend time tracking their food or using a meal plan as a way of learning how much food they are eating every day, how their body responds to different foods or strategies, and how they manipulate these numbers and food choices can impact performance and body composition.   It’s a weird thing in the powerlifting world, and probably other S+C communities as well, how eating “like a bodybuilder” can become demonized.  Bodybuilders look and perform the way they do because they live their sport every hour of the day.  It’s odd that there is a stigma around eating large portions of meat, rice, and vegetables, multiple times per day to build the most muscle you can.  A lot of the time I think people are just too lazy to plan, cook, or take time to make their food taste good.  If you really want to get the most out of your efforts, you will pay more attention to what you are eating and understanding the way high quality food experiences impact our mindset, digestion, psychology, and performance.  Eat some flippin vegetables and drink your water. 

After a full day of effort and holding yourself to a high standard you should feel proud of your efforts but also exhausted.  Earn the right to recline on the couch every day.  I joke with Sam that some days I am racing to get to the point where I get to lay on couch.  Planned rest, both physical and cognitive, should be somehow worked into everyone’s day, but you must earn it.  This isn’t slothing all day.  This is planned breaks between bouts of effort culminating with cool down time in the evening as you transition towards sleep time. 

Eventually, the attitude about doing the little things right in the gym, as well as to support the gym, trickles into the rest of your lifestyle habits as well.  I didn’t become a house tidier or a bed maker until I spent years working in a gym tidying and cleaning every day.  You get better at holding the door for people, using please and thank you, and asking cashiers how they are doing today.  Try to hold yourself to a higher standard in everything you do, and it becomes habit, it becomes who you are.  No one is perfect, but we can all do better inside and outside the gym.