Every once in a while, I like to write articles that are based on memorable quotes I’ve heard throughout my weightlifting career. After 30 years in the game, I’ve heard some doozies, both positive and negative. I’ve heard pearls of wisdom that were phenomenally intelligent, inspirational, and thought-provoking. I’ve also heard stupid crap that was staggeringly idiotic and irritating. Just like real life, this sport contains plenty of gems and turds.
 
This month, I’m reminded of something I used to hear my coach say frequently back in the old days. In the 90s, I trained and competed with the legendary Calpian Weightlifting Club in Washington, coached by John Thrush, who is arguably one of the best coaches we’ve ever had in this country. John was a brainy guy who made every thought count, and he had a few go-to ideas he would hit us with on a regular basis.
 
One of them was about motivation. We were an elite national-level club, so most of our members were hard-charging animals who had no problems with motivation. We were fighting our asses off to win medals at national competitions and qualify for international teams, so naturally that meant we were walking around with fire in our bellies 24/7, for the most part. However, as any longtime athlete can tell you, there were occasional time periods when some of us would struggle with the weightlifting blues. Constant intensity, the physical torture of training, mental demands…you know what I mean. Even if you love it and you’re invested all the way, you can still get worn down to a nub from time to time.
 
That’s where John’s quote fits in with this. He used to say, “Listen, this sport is hard enough to do when you want it more than anything else in the world. If you’re halfway in and halfway out, you don’t have a prayer.”
 
Ain’t that the truth, brothers and sisters? I probably heard him say this for the first time 25 years ago, and I still remember it. Now, as a coach, I say it to my own athletes when they need to hear it. And that brings me to you. I want to talk about the motivational struggles that can nip at our heels from time to time as we travel through our weightlifting journey. Weightlifting is an interesting sport because you don’t have the primary motivators of fame and money we see in popular mainstream sports. Weightlifters don’t become worldwide celebrities, and they don’t get rich (with a few extremely rare exceptions). It’s an incredibly difficult and painful life, and it doesn’t offer much in terms of the normal material rewards most people expect when they put in a hard day’s work. If you step back and think about it for a second, it’s almost a perfect-storm recipe for motivational problems. How can you stay fired up about giving everything you have to a sport that doesn’t give anything back to you?
 
If you’re brand new, you might not have dealt with these internal struggles yet. But trust me, you’ll eventually feel it if you stay in the game long enough. And if you’re a coach, you need to be well-equipped to manage these struggles, because I can guarantee your lifters are going to have them. You could easily watch some of your best athletes walk away from the sport if you don’t have the right things to say when the time comes, so let’s take a look at how we can survive the dark seasons.
 
First, what’s causing it?
 
I’m a guy, so I’m always going to think with typical male mentality. “What the hell is the problem?! Okay, so what the hell do we do about it?!”
 
Just kidding...kinda. But seriously, if an athlete is struggling with a motivational problem, I think it’s appropriate to find the root cause of it. We’re talking about somebody who’s wavering back and forth about whether they want to continue the fight. If this person initially made the commitment and took the big plunge to pursue to the sport, and now that commitment is shaky because he/she is lacking the same level of desire that used to be there, we have to determine what’s causing the shakiness.
 
There are two frequent culprits for motivational problems. The first one is the enormous demand of the sport. We’re talking about the time commitment, the financial drain of spending your own money to be a weightlifter and never getting any of it back, the physical pounding of hard training, the food and nutrition craziness, having to inconvenience your friends and family when your training demands conflict with the fun activities they want to do and you have to say no to them, the need to press the pause button on some of the real-life stuff you might want, like starting a family…and 20 other things like this. You know the story if you’ve been a committed weightlifter for any sustained length of time. It’s a huge thing to add into your life, and there’s no off season. There’s rarely even a short hiatus. It becomes a lifestyle. It becomes YOUR lifestyle, and everybody around you has to deal with it. It’s not for the meek, that’s for sure. And even if you love it, there might be times when it chips away at your soul and makes you entertain the I-just-want-to-say-screw-everything-and-move-to-the-woods fantasy we all flirt with.
 
That’s the first common cause of motivational trouble. The second one is even more simple. You sometimes struggle with your motivation to be a weightlifter because WEIGHTLIFTING ISN’T GOING WELL. The sport is kicking your ass! You’ve experienced failure, or maybe you’re experiencing repeated failure. You’ve plateaued and you haven’t set a PR since god-knows-when. You’re injured, or maybe you frequently get injured. You lost your technique and you can’t seem to get it back.
 
Very few people battle motivational problems when things are going well. It’s not hard to stay motivated when you’re getting a constant stream of progress, success, and encouragement. Everybody can stay fired up when it’s all sunshine and unicorns. But it’s a different story when your career runs into a brick wall.
 
I’ve experienced it myself. Bad performances never hurt my motivation. If I had a bad meet or a lousy stretch of training, it never made me lose my hunger. Actually, it was the opposite. Failure increased my motivation because it made me insanely pissed off and ready for revenge. But injuries were a different story. Not the little ones, like pulled hamstrings or a strained lower back. Those are no big deal. I’m talking about the torn ACLs and rotator cuffs, the injuries that required surgery and several months of recovery. I think it’s understandable to have doubts and depressing thoughts when your body explodes and you’re looking at a year-long road just to (hopefully) get back to where you were. These aren’t motivational struggles, if you think about it. It’s entirely possible to still be hyper-motivated during major injury stretches. They’re more like times of pure misery and frustration. You still want it just as badly as you always did. You’re just bummed out beyond imagination because your plans and goals have been derailed.
 
Either way, all of these circumstances lead to the same thing: internal struggles. So where do you go when these hellhounds are on your trail?
 
Second, what can you do?
 
There are two steps you need to follow when you’re battling motivational or mental trouble. 1) Pinpoint the SPECIFIC cause. 2) Develop an action plan to help you beat it.
 
First, you need to figure out specifically what’s causing you so much grief. If it’s an injury, that’s an easy one to pinpoint. Nothing complicated there. But if it’s something less obvious than that, you have to put on your thinking cap and get down to the root of it. I think people often make the mistake of describing their dark times with vague, non-specific language, like “I don’t know man, everything just kinda sucks right now.” You’re not doing yourself any good when you think like this, because you wind up fighting an invisible army, which makes you feel even more powerless. You can’t fight back because you don’t know where to throw your punches.
 
What EXACTLY is it that’s getting you down? Is it a meet you bombed out of? Is it a long stretch of time with no PRs? Is it grief from your family or friends? Is it somebody you train with or compete against who’s getting under your skin and driving you batty? If so, what exactly is this person doing that’s pissing you off?
 
Is it physical pain? If so, where? In your wrist? Your shoulder? You get the idea. The only way you can effectively treat a motivational problem is through identifying it in exact terms. If you stick with the “everything sucks” mantra, you’re not helping anything. It’s like hearing a squeak coming from the engine of your car and trying to fix it by spraying WD-40 over the whole vehicle. Probably not accomplishing much, are we? So pull yourself out of your funk, start thinking clearly, and narrow down one or two precise things that are creating this mess.
 
Then, it’s time to build an action plan to beat this crap into submission and get you straightened out. Once again, let’s avoid non-specific language like “I just need to try harder” or “I just need to quit being a little bitch.” I totally agree that there are times when those sentiments are right on the money. Indeed, there are plenty of occasions in weightlifting when the proper prescription is a bountiful dose of quit-being-a-bitch. However, some people use that phrase as an attempted cure-all. I’ve known lifters who tried to use it to fix major technical glitches in their jerk technique. If you’re not dipping and driving correctly when you try to jerk the bar overhead, I don’t see that problem getting solved by cussing and telling yourself to harden the f*** up.
 
Your action plan for this problem would be developing a set of corrective exercises you can implement into your training program that will fix your jerk technique, or maybe getting some video analysis going so you can see exactly what you’re doing wrong. See what I mean? Fix the actual problem with a sensible plan instead of just trying to growl your way through it.
 
If you tear your ACL, your action plan is to attack the rehabilitation process as intensely as you can. Make your physical therapy exercises your new training program. Do them as perfectly as possible, with all the same discipline you’d use if you were getting ready for the American Open.
 
If you’re struggling with motivation because you haven’t set a PR since forever, FIGURE OUT WHY. Technique? Leg strength? Mental barriers you’ve created? Or maybe it’s none of those things. Maybe you’re doing everything right, and you just need to take a step back and realize it’s the normal life of a weightlifter to have dry spells. Doesn’t matter how talented you are, you’ll sometimes have to spend ages crawling through the desert on the road to breaking new ground. Happens to the best of us.
 
If you’ve had a streak of bad meets where you bombed out or went 2/6, maybe your action plan is to compete in a meet where you intentionally open with very light weights and take sensible jumps, just so you go 6/6 and get confident on the platform again. If your PRs are 90 kg snatch and 120 kg clean and jerk, and you’ve had a bunch of terrible meets because you tried to open with 87 and 117, maybe you should find a small meet where you snatch 77-82-85 and clean and jerk 105-110-115. All of a sudden, you’re back to feeling confident and identifying competitions as FUN instead of a waterboarding session.
 
If we’re talking about one BIG bombout, just look around the sport and realize it happens to everybody at some point. All the best lifters in the world have a bombout on their record somewhere. It’s not the end of the world, even though it feels like it at the time.
 
If you’re taking a lot of static from a family member or something like that, your action plan should be a sit-down with the person where you communicate and get it straightened out. You get my drift. Problems are specific, and they require specific solutions. I personally think you can fix the vast majority of your motivational problems if you simply stop, take a step back, think clearly, and follow a plan like this. And if you’re the coach, you simply walk the athletes through the process.
 
And by the way, quit being a little bitch
 
One of the athletes I’m currently remote coaching lives 2,500 miles away from me, trains in her garage by herself full-time, works an average of 60-70 hours a week in a demanding job, takes care of her sick relatives, and fights every day to keep her lower back healthy because she got hit by a car a few years ago and the damage still lingers. You want to know how often she complains about motivation? Never.
 
As I’ve already mentioned, it’s normal to have some occasional mental battles with motivation. But when I say “occasional,” I mean it. Weightlifting is far too punishing for people who continually debate whether or not they’re all the way in. I’ve given you my best recommendations for how to handle motivational struggles, but I also believe you won’t have many of them if you’re really cut out for this sport. You could say the same for any sport, really. Being a successful athlete requires truckloads of desire and hunger, and your desire should be even stronger when things aren’t going well. When I look back at my career, I think my times of failure and difficulty were also the times when I was hungriest for success. I was desperate to prove myself after I blew it, and I think that’s the best mindset you can have if you’re a competitor.
 
But I also learned over time that you can’t fight back against failure if you aren’t being smart about it. Many problems can’t be fixed simply by growling louder and working harder. That stuff is essential, but it has to be blended with intelligence, which is why you should always remember to use your brain when something goes wrong. Every moment of failure has a cause. Your job is to find those causes and figure out ways to stop them from developing into habits.