Stop Being Such A Nerd

At some point in your powerlifting career, you are going to have to work really friggin hard.  As much as we love to obsess over the details of programming, fixating on the minutiae of whether 4 reps at RPE 8 is more optimal than 5 reps at RPE 9, or whether pin squats are more effective than pause squats, gets us all majoring in the minors.  At the end of the day the more important variable from day to day is effort.  Obsessing over where you put your quaternary benchpress variation relative to your pec isolation work is missing the forest for the trees.  Side note, some of y’all need to simply spend more time taking everything to failure, not only to become better at appropriately gauging RPE, but also to learn what taking your body to failure truly means. 

We all know that gym bro that trains “sub optimally” and yet is way is bigger and stronger than everyone in the gym.  They’ve been doing the same bro split program for years, with weekly set counts being too high, body part frequency being too low, taking every set near failure, and yet they are still seeing results, chipping away slowly year after year.  Their effort is always high, and they take the gym with them wherever they go.  They don’t lose sleep over exercise selection, tempo, or rep selection, or even if they progress from week to week.  They understand that humans are not fixed input output machines.  They train hard, but recover harder, always making sure to get there 4-5 meals in per day, balancing lean proteins, clean carb sources, healthy fats, and making sure they consume some vegetables.  They go to sleep on time, not letting themselves fall into a Netflix or YouTube wormhole, then blaming their poor performance in the next training session on the program, rather than their shitty lifestyle habits. 

Accept that if you want to be good at powerlifting, it is going to be hard, really hard.  Anything in life worth doing or achieving is going to be hard otherwise it wouldn’t be worth it.  I heard this described recently as type 2 entertainment.  Type 1 entertainment is chillin on the couch eating your favourite snack while watching a movie or football game.  Type 2 entertainment is doing something hard that has a reward at the end.  Hiking up a mountain, skateboarding, learning an instrument, endurance sports, and so on.  All these endeavours have many moments of discomfort.  I would probably argue that most of the time spent participating in type 2 entertainment is uncomfortable in one way or another.  Everyone wants to be able to land a 900 like Tony Hawk, but no one wants to know or experience how many times pro skaters have fallen and broken bones, or worse.  Everyone wants to have a world record deadlift like Bryce, but no one wants to deal with the plethora of nagging injuries (hip, knee, shoulder, etc., etc.) that he has battled through time after time, year after year.  It’s easy to be a hype man when everything is going well, true character is exposed when things are going poorly.  How hard are you working when no one is watching?

Embrace the Suffering

Everything worth achieving in this life requires work and some level of suffering.  You are going to experience some levels of discomfort during certain reps, whether it’s a 1RM, or the end of a 10RM.  After each set there is going to be some level of metabolic or mechanical disruption that has some kind of acute distress.  Post workout you will be gassed out and depending on how long you’ve been in the game, achy.  One of the things I notice after a hard deadlift session is that my body simply feels heavy.   The next day you will be sore.  You earned this soreness, be proud of that soreness.  It might even suck just trying to walk around.  If you want to reach high levels in powerlifting or physique building, you better accept that some part of your body will be sore basically all the time.    Note: I am not saying chase high levels of muscle soreness as gratification, that is misguided.  Week to week as you progress through a block, or a program fatigue will accumulate.  Don’t freak out and start changing things.  Play the tape to the end.  You made a hard training plan for a reason.  The movie will always have a climax of tension followed by a resolution.  Finish the tape and see what happens at the end.  The point of hard training is that it is hard.  It is going to take time, more than you think, for your body to recover, and adapt to hard workloads.  If you are always trying to keep your body fresh and recovered, and you never push your body passed your current workload capacity, you will never reach the point where you can handle the workload necessary to create the highest levels of adaptation, growth, and performance. 

You are probably not going to over train.  Do you understand how hard it is to get yourself into over training syndrome?  Training very hard, or very often, and over training are not the same thing.  Sport Science definition of overtraining syndrome is a long-term reduction in performance capacity observed over a period of several months.  True overtraining usually leads to things like serious performance decrement, aches, poor sleep, even illness.  Is this really what you are witness in yourself? Or are you witnessing short term decreases in performance that may last days to weeks, acute overreaching. 

Antifragility

Humans are antifragile.  When fragile things are stressed, they break.  When you drop a coffee mug off your desk, it will break.  One might think that the opposite of fragile is strong or robust, like steel.  When you bang on steel once it doesn’t break, and it can be the backbone of massive buildings.  But if you provide enough stress to steel, eventually it will bend or break.  Antifragility is the opposite of fragility.  It is the idea that something when something is stressed it gets stronger.  The Hulk is the epitome of antifragility.  The more that you beat up on the hulk, the stronger he gets.  Eventually the Hulk always wins.   When humans are stressed physically or mentally, they don’t break, and if they are provided with enough time, recovery, and resources, eventually they get stronger. 

But so and so makes it look so easy…

We all know that some lifters just seem to make it look easier than others.  One of the problems with the social media era is that it incentivizes people to share their successes and highlights, while not always rewarding sharing the whole journey, or sharing the lowlights as well.  It is a rare thing for most people to be successful sharing whole training sessions, long form vlogs, or just highlighting when they are in a building phase of training, nobody really wants to watch multiple sets of 6-10.  (Funny enough, the only person I am currently aware of that does something like this is Sam Sulek posting daily 30–60-minute videos of entire training sessions and inter set rambles, somehow accumulating hundreds of thousands of views per video.)  Part of me sometimes wonders if x1@7-8 RPE became so popular in powerlifting programming simply so that lifters could share heavy-ish lifts week in and week out for content production reasons.  No one really gets to see when lifters are grinding through multiple sets of squats and benchpress, trying to survive grueling training sessions when their body is sore, achy, and tired.  The reason people can share huge highlights is because of months and years of monotonous work in the gym week in and week out.  Consistency is king, there are no shortcuts to huge totals, consistent training, eating, resting, recovering, sleeping, repeating over and over and over again.  While some lifters do in fact make lifting huge weights and progressing look easy, we don’t get to see how hard they are working behind the scenes.  They experience every bit of discomfort I was describing earlier on.  They are still human just like the rest of us, they experience mechanical and metabolic stress just like us.  They get sore and tired too, probably more so since the weights they lift are greater. 

Genetics matter, but don’t let them self-handicap you

Genetics matter for sure.  I would not sit here and tell you that they don’t.  Some people are selected better for different endeavors.  Heights, weights, limb lengths, metabolism, psychology, ability to withstand and recover from hard training, adaptation rates, muscle fibre types, all these things will play a part in producing huge lifters or different athletes.  It always bothered me when people called me a freakbeast or something like that, because I knew how hard I had worked, so I’ve always tried to avoid diminishing people’s accomplishments by talking about their genetics.  My first real experience with real genetic outliers occurred when I started playing university football.  It was so apparent that some of the guys I played with were just so much more gifted for the sport of football than I was. 

   When I met Mike Miller in my first year, it bothered me that he ate chips and candy at the end of every day but still maintained a low body fat and could run like the wind.  At the end of his career, Mike was listed at 6’0”, 229lbs with abs.  Mike also outworked everyone and made a successful 11-year professional career of doing it.  It takes a special breed of individual to only play special teams for their entire career on their way to becoming the CFL’s all-time leading special team’s tackler, voted a team captain along the way, eventually being stepping into a coaching position as Doctor’s were forced to cut Mike’s career short due to neck injuries. 

                  The other personal freakbeast of a friend of mine happens to also currently plays for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.  We used to call Jake Thomas the ManChild. He looked like a big fat baby but was stronger, more explosive, and faster than everyone.  There was a time me and the boys were engaging in some post-game festivities at our house, Jake and I got into some friendly tussling, and while trying to get away Jake whipped me to the ground with one hand.  I have never felt like such a little child haha.  While I am 2 years older, Jake was the man, and I was the boy.  Jacob was drafted to the CFL as a 20-year-old.  When scouts and coaches asked our head coach about Jake at the time, Coach simply said, “he is still a kid, in 5 years he will be killing this league”. 12 years later Jake is still with the bombers, having played Defensive Tackle in over 200 games, an enormous feat, I cannot imagine how his body feels from day to day.  Both Jake and Mike helped lead the Bombers to a couple Grey Cups (CFL Championship) along the way. 

Some of you reading will know that I have been buddies with Garrett for a long time.   I met Garrett Bentley in 2012.  I saw this grown ass meathead waddle across the gym and promptly cook everyone in the gym in every bodybuilding exercise you could think of using already unreasonable weights for sets of 20 on every isolation exercise you could think of.  At the time Garrett was involved in bodybuilding while I had just started training for a powerlifting meet.  I used to roast Garrett for using straps for deadlifts and then complaining that his grip wasn’t strong enough, albeit using 5 plates for multiple sets of 6-12 touch and go conventional deadlifts.  If you have ever met Garrett in person, you know he is just a huge guy.  In pictures he makes Bryce look like a little boy.  Garrett often gets roasted for his cankles, yet the size of his joints is one of the things that makes him a great powerlifter, and current Open Bench only world champion.  One can only dream of being gifted with large bones to support the kind of weights that Garrett hits in competition.    

Finally, Bossman Brucey.  I shook Bryce’s hand for the first time in 2016 at CPU Nats in Regina and immediately it dawned on me why Bryce was so good at deadlifting.  At the time Bryce was already an IPF World Record Holder in the deadlift, and this was before he ever switched to sumo. Not only was he bigger in person than I expected, with a broad frame and long arms, but his hands were also massive.  I remember feeling like I lost my little hand (can’t even hold a cheeseburger) inside of his massive catcher mit.  Bryce has gone up a full weight class since then and holds it well.  When I went up to my heaviest bodyweight of 115… well…. I will just say that I did not hold it well.

I use these examples of my friends because they are real life humans that I have met and experienced their genetic gifts in person.  At the same time, I also know that they are out working everybody because I have seen that in person too.  Extra workouts, extra sets, doing everything right outside of the gym, challenging teammates and competitors, no excuses always pushing the envelope of their individual sport.  Sure they might have been gifted with genetics that that select for their sport of choice, at the same time I do not think any of them are the most genetically gifted athletes or lifters I have played or lifted with, they worked their asses off through speed bumps, mishaps, injuries, stressful periods, and always worried about how hard the person in the mirror was working, rather than worrying about success people were showing on the other side of the cellphone screen.

Sure, genetics matter.  Are you really going to let that stop you from working your ass off to build the best version of yourself?  Don’t be a pussy.  Have you tried trying?  Stop being such a nerd.  Fucking try.  Believe in yourself.   Take a step towards the threat.  Or be average the rest of your life.