Not too long ago, I did an interview with USA weightlifting legend Jessica Lucero. As most of you know, Jess has been one of our top American lifters for the last 10 years. She’s won multiple national championships, broken several American records, and represented the United States on the international stage. She recently decided to retire from competition, bringing her stellar career on the platform to an end, so I thought it would be great to interview her and get a career retrospective.

One of the questions I asked her was about the kind of advice she would give to younger upcoming athletes who want to be great. A lot of her answers to this question were about hard work, determination, and resilience. But she also said something that caught my attention because it’s a subject that has been on my mind a lot in recent years.

She advised young athletes to avoid getting sucked into the social media trap. Her words were, “Social media can be a major distraction and can influence your thoughts negatively in comparing yourself to other athletes, comparing your coach to other coaches, and causing doubt in yourself and your choices. You can be more driven to gain followers and likes than training itself and it can really suck you in. You need to use it as a tool to help you and not allow it to control you or distract you."

I’ve been wanting to write about this subject for a long time, but I couldn’t quite figure out exactly what I wanted to say about it. When it comes to social media, I have conflicting thoughts. I’m a high school teacher, and I’m completely convinced at this point that it has an incredibly destructive impact on young kids. But when it comes to the weightlifting life, is it all bad? Or are there some positives in it?

There’s actually an easy answer to that last one. Obviously, social media has good aspects. Personally, I’ve been able to use it to spread my writing to the weightlifting audience for over a decade now. Social media is a huge circulator for my articles and books, and it’s been wonderful to reach so many people with helpful ideas over the years. So I could never paint the whole thing with the same brush and classify it all as destructive and negative. There are some very definite positive sides to it.

But the bad sides stand out very prominently, so I want to contribute some thoughts and ideas about them in this article. Full disclosure of personal experience: I’m on Facebook. A few years ago, I have to admit I was pretty deep into it. But I’ve backed away quite a bit. I still check it probably once a day, but just to see if any big weightlifting news has popped up, and I’ll occasionally post a lifting video if I do something I’m excited about. It’s also the main sharing source for my articles and books, as I mentioned. But I’ve never been on Instagram or Twitter or anything else. And that’s my whole social media experience. 

It’s not my place to preach a Sunday school lesson about how you should live your life. But I’ve been in weightlifting for ages and this is something that keeps crossing my mind. To begin with, I’ll share a few social media tips for weightlifters. Accept them as gospel, blow them off, laminate them for your fridge, get pissed and post angry comments without reading the whole article…whatever floats your boat. 
 
1) Don’t post videos of gym lifts and call them “unofficial American records”-
***Obviously, this only applies to a small group of people who are in the range of huge record numbers. But the idea behind it is a valuable thing to consider. I think it’s generally a bad look when you try to lay claim to accomplishments you haven’t earned. When you attach the phrase “American record” to your name, even if you’re adding the word “unofficial” to it, you’re deliberately blurring the lines. You’re trying to make a gym lift sound like an official accomplishment. If you’re a competitive lifter, the only things that count as accomplishments are the weights you put up in meets. Training lifts are nothing more than benchmarks for what your attempts should be on meet day. Trying to glorify them beyond that is…a wee bit sketchy, in my opinion.
 
2) Don’t fall too far in love with your personal story of resilience and survival- Sometimes people put up Facebook posts that start with phrases like “Three years ago, when a doctor told me I would never lift again…” followed by two paragraphs of storytelling about how they beat the odds, never gave up hope, and fought through a mountain of setbacks that make “Saving Private Ryan” look like a trip to Jamaica. Listen, it’s great to have a story like this. If you’ve been through hell, survived, and triumphed, that’s a wonderful thing. It’s something you should be proud of, and it can be inspirational to share it with others. But you can wear people out if you’re constantly harping on it, so don’t go too far overboard. Everything in moderation…you know?
 
3) The “compare and despair” thing is real- One of the big problems people have with social media is this idea that you can easily start thinking your life is a piece of crap if you’re constantly looking at everybody’s posts about how awesome their lives are. I actually think this is pretty legit, and it can touch weightlifting in a unique way because our sport already makes it hard to stay positive. When weightlifting is good to you, it’s the best feeling in the world. But when the weightlifting gods are kicking you in the crotch (as they often do), it’s miserable. If you add the victorious moments of progress from 600 people’s Facebook posts to your own dwindling self-confidence, it can turn you into a basket case. 
 
4) Always remember the internet is basically a big sewer- You can drive yourself crazy thinking about the hateful, negative comments that come with social media. Hell, young kids are committing suicide over this stuff. But it’s all a lot easier to handle once you understand many of the people are the internet are trash, plain and simple. You don’t have to take them seriously. Why would you ruin your whole day getting worked up about a bunch of losers who run their mouths online? It’s definitely easy to get pulled into, but you can manage it all if you just keep the right mindset about the people you’re dealing with. Would you get deeply disturbed about some whackjob who stands on a street corner screaming and throwing his turds at everybody? No. You’d just dodge the turd and walk away, and then you’d have a laugh about it with your friends. The same basic principle applies to social media comments.
 
5) Don’t fall too far in love with the admiration- If you’re doing well and getting lots of praise, don’t go off the deep end and start celebrating yourself as a Golden God. Trust me, everybody will walk away from you and move on to the next big thing as soon as you stop producing superstar results. They heap admiration on you, and it feels like love. But once you’re not the top dog anymore, you’ll learn the truth. And if you’ve set yourself up to think the love is real, it’ll sting quite a bit when this moment comes.
 
Now, let’s go back to another thing Jessica said. She talked about “comparing your coach to other coaches,” and I think that’s an important piece to look at because there are some traps in the coaching landscape that you need to be wary of.

When it comes to coaches, you have to understand that many of the best ones out there are often going to be a little older. This makes sense, right? They’ve been in the game for years, they have tons of experience, they’ve mastered their craft, and they’re the ones who can get the best results out of you. Mind you, I’m not saying this is a universal truth. Being old and spending decades in weightlifting doesn’t guarantee you’re going to be a great coach. But I can definitely say from what I’ve seen during my time in the sport that veteran coaches often bring a lot to the table.

Understandably, a lot of these older coaches aren’t going to be hugely active on social media. They’re from a different generation, so they don’t commit huge chunks of their day to building up a profile on Instagram or Facebook. This makes them less noticeable to the internet world.

And then on the other hand, you’ve got a massive younger generation of new and intermediate coaches who have high-octane social media presence. They’re from the new generation, they know how to work it, and they do a great job of drawing attention to themselves in this way. This creates a built-in conundrum for the athlete, because the obvious temptation is to be impressed by shiny things. But the coaches who are best at dazzling you in this way are often going to be younger, less experienced, and probably not as skilled as many of the older veterans who might be invisible on social media.

Not to mention the outright charlatans and phonies lurking around the interwebz. I’ve been referring to young coaches who are new and inexperienced, but they’re not trying to misrepresent anything. They’re putting themselves out there a lot, but they’re telling the truth about who they are. That’s fine. But then you also have the coaches who are just straight up lying about what they’ve done, hoping to snag business (and money) from the people who don’t know any better. I’ve heard some freaky stories about this type of stuff.
 
Personalize it…

Listen, I’ve currently got a handful of remote athletes I’m working with around the country. They’re doing well, making progress, and having fun. I’m enjoying the hell out of coaching them. Want to know how they found me? You guessed it…social media.

At the end of the day, it has good points and bad points. Honestly, sometimes I feel like the bad outweighs the good. But then I realize that might just be me acting like an old cranky grouch. As with everything else, all we can do is try to handle it the best way possible. For some people, that might be complete withdrawal. I have some friends who aren’t on anything. No Facebook, no Instagram…nothing. They simply never joined up, and they don’t feel any desire to do so. That’s rare, though. Most of us are on social media, so we have to control how much impact we allow it to have in our lives.

When I started writing articles and posting them on the Internet, it took me a long time to deal with the comments. They were overwhelmingly positive, but then there were always those crappy ones that get under your skin, you know? You can read 20 nice comments, but one lousy one is enough to sour the whole thing. For a while, I let this get to me and it had a negative impact on the things I wrote. I would often put preemptive jabs in my articles, wanting to strike first at the comment idiots. None of this was good. It made my writing sound angry, cynical, and mean spirited. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. I hadn’t learned how to exercise control over the impact I let social media have in my life.
As Jessica said, it’s a very easy thing to get sucked into. Many of you have probably done it yourselves. You’ve got your own stories about times when you actually let your personality get dragged down by this stuff. It’s a topic with multiple angles, which is why I’ve tried to jump around and hit as many of them as possible.

If there’s a final takeaway from all of this, it’s probably the basic idea of being introspective. Examine your social media life. Ask yourself questions about it. Ask other people if they think you’ve gone off the deep end. Look at your life before you were on it, and look at it now. Is it better or worse? We’ve said there are positives and negatives, so what are they? Specifically, what are the things that bring some happiness to your day, and what are the things that bring you down? Pinpoint them.

Spend a little time thinking about this. I’ve done it, and it helped. I had four major surgeries over a seven-year stretch when I was in my late 30s and early 40s. Needless to say, my lifting career was in the toilet at the time. Spending my days on Facebook looking at everybody’s videos of their PR lifts was eating away at my mood. It was making me more pessimistic and bitter about what I was going through. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I know it now. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about, so look inside yourself and see if you can locate anything that might need fixing. I’m not telling you to chuck the whole kit and kaboodle, but I’m definitely encouraging you to put it under a microscope.