To my coach, A thousand word essay about me not being in my head
Powerlifting
Powerlifting is simple. Either the weight moves, or it is glued to the floor. Either you get a good lift, or a failed rep. There is no room for ambiguity. Powerlifting is a sport of nine chances to display the best of one’s ability.
The sport is comprised of the squat, bench press, and deadlift for maximum weight, each taken in succession. Unlike your gym buddy’s sternum-crushing, rib-bouncing, 315 pound bench, the movements have to be done to a set-standard. It’s a high standard. Attempts to gain an unfair advantage of leverage, momentum, or any deviation from prescribed rules, are rejected as an unsuccessful attempt.
The simplicity of the sport, the high effort of training, and the unyielding standard of competition lead me to believe powerlifting can be a Stoic practice.
Impressions
Without cracking open my copy of Discourses to find the page, Epictetus spoke of impressions as awareness. This includes your interpretation of world, classifying events as good, bad, or indifferent, and your agency within the dichotomy of control.
The stoic practice in powerlifting is in taking those impressions and acting accordingly. Take what you can control and work within it. Then, have faith the rest will take care of itself. Otherwise, you adjust. Lest you bomb out and we all get to look at your numbers on Open Powerlifting
Seemingly Subjective
When it comes the calibrated plates of steel sitting atop the platform, what is in front of the lifter is what it weighs (with a +/- 1% tolerance). It is what it is.
Sniffing ammonia, yelling and screaming, gripping and ripping may give the impression that any weight will move. The truth is no level of hype will affect on your peaked neurological and muscular adaptations. “Want-to” feelings by themselves aren’t enough.
The objective factors leading up to competition including programming, sleep, diet, stress management, workout performance, and recovery efforts are what really count. You can’t outrun a bad diet. You are overtraining and under-recovering. Depth won’t be there on meet day. It takes more than a lucky day. Even then, are you only ever betting on a lucky roll?
The narrative about your lifting career, aspirations, and the proverbial “why” are not worth bonus points day of competition. Others have a perfectly good “why”, or they don’t, and they are just stronger than you.
Though, narratives are not for naught. You are in charge of what you say about your life. Never assume that the results are scripted; that you automatically get the desired resolution to your story.
How you frame it matters. A poor meet can be one that had you on the podium as third instead of first because you missed a record you expected to make. A great meet can be coming in dead last, but hitting all new personal records (all the cool kids call them PRs).
Personal Experience
I started my powerlifting journey in 2018 at a CrossFit gym in Seattle. I broke a 1000 pound total by just over three pounds. Perhaps all that I had out of doing nothing more than just trying really really hard. Last spring of 2024, I competed my second meet, attaining an 1168.4 pound total. There is a lot of story that doesn’t matter in those six years of trial and error.
What matters is that the near-year leading up to April’s Empire Classic in Spokane was defined by a lot of training to do everything as right as possible. The real progress was in letting go of the ego.
What followed the competition until now has been training for the third competition. In a Tale of Tri-Cities, I will be attempting to add 110.3 lbs to my total to qualify for the International Powerlifting League World Championship, taking place in Las Vegas this November.
The fact is, in six years I improved my total by fourteen percent. Now in four months, I will improve that total again by a further nine percent.
The Difference Maker
Coaching myself increased self awareness. I made physical and mental advancements. I developed an ability to be intrinsically disciplined towards improvement.
Now I have coach, which is an extrinsic factor I have not contended with. He has taken off some of the extra layers of control for me and made my job easier: execute.
A few weeks ago I had a spell of the yips and performance anxiety that I have never dealt with. Maybe it had to do with being in uncharted territory of progression. I never have sustained this level of effort for this long. Maybe there is a less margin of error at these (relatively) heavy weights.
My wife told me to get out of my head and said she was proud of my effort. And she was right.
My coach told me to stop being a little bitch and that I got this. And he was right.
Since then, I am out of my head. More recently my deadlift has had me working around 95 percent of my max, trying to whittle my best technique. I was given critiques on what to further improve. I had constructive feedback on progress and critiques that I still had farther to go. Both can be true, and often are.
From that I learned the following lessons:
Intrinsic Mindedness: within us must be a calm, disinterested disposition towards irrelevant externals, or at least tools to get back there.
Extrinsic Awareness: there are things outside your reach that do affect the things you can control. Don’t ignore them. You still live within this world.
Your responsibility follows your commitments you set, to others, to events, towards your duty.
Arete: Excellence in any competition is-
a primed capability
the execution of practiced skill
trust in those dedicated to your success
being able to combine all three into one performance
a little luck is never expected, but never hurts