The Intangibles of Success: My Recent Powerlifting Odyssey

​ Earlier this year i decided to train for a Push/Pull Powerlifting meet after not having competed since 2012. Two years previous in May 2014, i had my Meniscus repaired in my left knee after a giant bucket handle tear had flapped over and got pushed to the other side of my knee. I decided to hire Mike Tuscherer and the crew at Reactive Training Systems to write my programming for me, which was an experience i can't recommend highly enough. Mike and the people he surrounds himself with are, in my opinion, some of the brightest minds in the sport. I started my journey in April 2016 and competed on October 22nd. Here are the highlights of my training this past year:

  -Made all 6 of my lift attempts on both the Bench Press and the Deadlift and set 2 personal records
  -Hit 475 on the Deadlift (previous best in comp was 455) 
  -Hit 315 in the Bench Press (previous best in comp was 242 (started this cycle of training only being able to bench 205 for 5 reps)
  -Added 12 pounds of muscle in 4 months (confirmed by DEXA scan)

 This blog post, however, is not about the nuts and bolts of training. There are plenty of articles out there on what program to use, what set/reps schemes to employ, etc, etc. What i don't think gets talked about enough is the underlying mechanisms of success that run much deeper than program design. If i'm being completely honest here, i attribute most of my success to consistency, having a good work/life balance, having access to good quality food, being able to sleep as much as i needed, and being singularly focused on achieving these goals while letting other things less important to me take a backseat. 

Become your own N=1. One of the biggest mistakes i see with my clients, colleagues and people i interact with that struggle to progress is trying to emulate other people. After carefully observing people that are successful, i realized that they ultimately take ownership and responsibility for finding their own means and methods to achieving success. This may not be news to many of you, but i'm still astonished at how common this is. Use guiding principles to start and refine your journey, but be meticulous in recording and monitoring how you respond to different stimuli. Not everyone is the same in regards to responding favorably to training. This is likely one of the reasons we see athletes achieving great success on wildly different, almost completely antagonistic, styles of training. This ability to tinker and carefully monitor your own training will ensure that you achieve the stimulus that is right for you. Because of the amount of variability inherent in humans, you can't assume that what works for one will work for you. How many sets? Enough to get the job done. How much rest? Enough to feel ready to hit the next lift. How many days a week? As many as you can recover from and still make progress. There is no right answer. And one of the biggest thought crimes is this notion that we can somehow achieve perfection and avoid uncertainty. We are a complex biological system in an infinitely chaotic world. The more you can get comfortable with that, the more you can learn to thrive in it. 


"Start creating a pedagogical schema that allows people to live with uncertainty; That makes them happy about that, not unhappy about it. Reassurance should come in the form of possibility, not the lack of it." -David Krakauer


Standardize your warm-up. With all the 'biohacking' out there, it's easy to forget that you have some of the best auto-regulatory tools available to you without any special equipment. These are RPE (rate of perceived exertion) and your warm-up. When you warm-up, you start to know how 135 pounds feels day-to-day. If it feels heavy or slow on a certain day, then you may need to proceed with caution. Everyday i stepped into the gym, my warm-up stayed the same. Here's my bench press warm-up, for example:
  
   Bar x 20-30 (just getting blood flow in the arms/upper body)
   95 x 10
   135 x 8
   185 x 6
   225 x 4

This stayed the same regardless of what set/rep scheme i was using each day. What this allowed me to do was create my own biofeedback system. I know i know, super high tech. Each day i warmed up, i became very familiar with how a weight felt in my hands, how fast the bar moved, how sore or achey a certain muscle or joint was, etc. This would become incredibly valuable for deciphering how my working sets might go that day and if i would need to modify my workload or exercise selection. Of course this is a process that became more refined and more accurate as i practiced, but my point is that standardizing my warm-up was an essential part of auto-regulating my training. 
   
Frequency trumps Intensity. This is a point that i learned years ago from reading and implementing work from Pavel Tsatsouline. For starters, training more frequently gets you more exposure and more time building skills. Skill acquisition requires frequent practice. Even though in the grand scheme of things lifting isn't the most complex set of motor skills, they are still more technical than you might think. Especially for beginners, whose success is largely related to neuromuscular efficiency, having more touch-time on the competition lifts is paramount, in my opinion. There is certainly a time and place for intensity, but it is my experience that intensity gets a lot more attention since it looks sexier on your Instagram. Training more frequently also allows you to accumulate more volume over a weeks time frame without being too fatigued during any one workout. This means more quality work over time, which seems to transfer to greater success long term. If you dust yourself on day one, you likely won't be motivated to come back and lift on day two and beyond. This is a self-limiting form of training in this regard, but it takes skill to learn how to not overdo it. Beginners are what i call 'Baby Rattlesnakes'. Baby rattlers, when they bite, will release all of their venom when they bite. Adult rattlers, on the other hand, carefully dose their venom so as to have some in reserve in case another threat comes along. This is a smart survival tactic. Beginners in the gym, tend to go all out every workout which may work in the short term, but it's ultimately a dead-end strategy that leads to stalled progress and potential injury.

 Another point i want to make is about pressing. If you look at the SRA (stimulus-recovery-adaptation) curves of the Squat, Bench and Deadlift, you'll discover that the Bench Press has the shortest curve. This means that you can train the Bench Press more frequently. International Bench Press day (Monday) is now extended to Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday...maybe even Saturday. As true Bench-a-holics say, it's always Monday somewhere, so start Benching more! As a notoriously bad Bench Presser, i added about 100 pounds to my Bench press in 6 months of training by Benching 4 days a week. This might seem like a lot, but you'd be surprised how quickly you can recover from Bench Pressing vs. Squatting and Deadlifting. 

It's OK to get beat up a little bit. There seems to be a trend in the industry these days for recovery. The reality is that in order to adapt to training, there are times when you need to let yourself get beat up a bit in order to adapt. Molesting a foam roller for an hour a day, taking cold shower, rubbing lavender oil all over your body, and other such recovery tools are not only excessive in many cases, but could be stalling your success. Remember that you want to create a bit of an alarm response to give the signals to your body to 'summon the troops' that help repair and restore you. If you recall the Supercompensation curve from any basic training text, you'll note that training is designed to beat you up a little bit so that you can come back after you are recovered better than when you started.

​With that being said, if you feel beat up ALL THE TIME or, in particular, you have nagging joint or tendon pain, that is typically a sign that your chronic or acute workload is too high and you may need to go back to your program and figure out if you are progressing too rapidly, if your technique needs work, or if your workload is too high for you to recover from. Another quick point i will make is about the use of recovery modalities. If you examine Soviet sports training texts, they were very strategic in their implementation of recovery methods. They would 'periodize' these methods based on the phase of training the athlete was in and only use them when they needed them to recover. Recovery methods, just like any other training stimulus, fall prey to the Repeated-bout effect, meaning that the more you use them, the less and less effect they have over time. So save your favorite recovery tricks and tools for the end of your training cycle/deload weeks or when you are peaking, but getting frisky with your foam roller every night for an hour and yanking on your joints with stretch bands is a poor use of your time, in my opinion. Embrace the suck and thrive in it. For more information on recovery methods, i recommend Dr. Yessis' book on Russian Sports Restoration and Massage.

Not every day is a PR day.  In the sport of Powerlifting, the name of the game is lifting as much weight as you can once. There are no points for how many sets of 10 you can do with a submaximal amount of weight. Just like there are no points in gymnastics for how many muscle-ups you can do (that's called 'Crossfit'). So, it's easy to get fixated on trying to push your weights up week after week, however, no two weeks will be the same. There will be good days and bad days. One of my coping strategies when i was having a bad day was looking to set a PR in something. This didn't mean weights would go up. Some days i would look to set a volume PR, other days a technique PR (maybe going for a longer pause at the bottom of the bench), or perhaps do higher reps on a weight i did the previous training session. Everything will move your working max up. For example, if you are having a hard time hitting 225 for 5 reps and 245 feels like shit. Stay at 225 and either do more sets of 5 reps with it, do a longer eccentric, or maybe go for sets of 6-8 reps. All of these things will drive up your lifts, but getting fixated on absolute weight all the time will likely lead to frustration, stalled progress, and possibly injury. 

Don't Miss Lifts. I learned this piece of advice from the great Ed Coan (see: the Greatest Powerlifter of all time). If you examine Ed's training programs, they were very boring, very consistent, and they had a bad habit of allowing him to ABSOLUTELY CRUSH records. Ed made it a point to never miss a lift. He planned diligently, he focused, and he smashed weights year after year. Pavel Tsatsouline has a term for this called "Staying off the nerve", which means accumulating a lot of practice with heavy enough weights to groove form and drive adaptation but not so much that you end up grinding your reps or sacrificing your form. I like using Mike Tuscherer's '80% Heuristic' which means to stop the set if your form breaks down by about 20%. This is obviously fairly subjective, but it's a good rule-of-thumb. Save those capillary-bursting, snot-bubblin' reps for the platform or when you are at the end of your training cycle when you are supposed to go hard. Most of your training should be spent in the submax zone leaving 1-3 reps in the tank on each set. This goes for skill acquisition, too. If you watch a child trying to do a handstand, they won't try and punish themselves by gritting their teeth and holding their little bodies up on a wall, upside down, until they pass out. Kids are generally averse to pain. But one thing kids do well is keep practicing, frequently, until they get tired. Then they go inside, have a juice and snack, take a nap, then come back outside and continue practicing. Be like a kid (except the tantrum part...nobody likes tantrum face....it's ugly). 

Letting Go. One of the key differences i see with people that achieve great things comes down to sacrifice, focus, and time management. So many people that i work with that don't achieve the success they wish to receive is a product of trying to do too much, not prioritizing, and not creating space for change. Scary is the person who becomes so myopic in pursuing what they want with focus and consistency. Many personal trainers and coaches can relate to the client that comes in and drops down a bunch of goals into their laps, stating that they want to "Gain 30 pounds of muscle, lose 40 pounds of fat, run an Ironman coming up in 3 months, and fix their knee and low back pain". They want to do this all in an un-reasonable amount of time without changing any of the underlying lifestyle factors that could create the fertile soil for which to sprout these lofty ambitions. If you work 80 hours a week, have a high stress job, and have 3 young kids at home, if you are training for an Ironman triathlon, i think your parenting and job duties will likely suffer. But hey, i'm willing to be wrong here, i'm sure there are some super men and women out there, but we can't have all things all the time. When i decided to pursue my goal of Benching 315 and Deadlifting 475, i was blessed to have the space in my life to do so. I gave up my evening clients to have time to train, i prioritized sleep and ate well. I have a loving, supportive wife who let's me do these crazy things. I don't have kids, i love my job, and i practice the "Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck" when it comes to things that are not meaningful to me. I let go of everything that is not important to me, and i set my sights on what i want and then sprint towards it.

  My body got a little beat up in the process, i lost some cardiovascular shape, and my mobility suffered a bit (although not as much as i thought), but i'm okay with that because i know i can get it back when i'm done achieving the goals i set out to achieve. So many people try to do too much in training, try to build a bunch of muscle while also trying to cut weight, or go out and party on weekends. Well, my friends, this might work for a little while when you are in your twenties, but good luck with that approach heading into your thirties, forties, and beyond. Especially important the more advanced you get in your training. The higher the peak, the greater the sacrifices. 

 We all have roadblocks and hurdles, and i say with the utmost humility that i feel blessed to be at a place in my life where i am healthy enough and have the space to be able to pursue things like this. But i also understand that there are many people out there that don't have this luxury. I think it is important to be honest with ourselves in regards to how much energy we have to devote and it is the job of good coaches to give an honest appraisal of one's abilities, taking stock of total stress load, and setting realistic expectations towards achieving success. This doesn't mean that you can't achieve great things, but just know that it may take longer depending on how much time and energy you have to devote. If you want to work 80 hours a week at a high stress financial job, it makes it really hard to try and win an Ironman Triathlon. Just sayin'. 

  Lastly, i want to say that every journey we embark on is a learning opportunity and the pursuit, even if it leads to failure, is a stepping stone to future success. Lean in, get your feet wet, and embrace the chaos!

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