Do any of you know who Brian Oldfield is? Those of you with some track and field background might be familiar with that name, but most others probably don’t recognize him. Brian was an American shot putter from the seventies and eighties, and he’s often considered one of the most amazing athletes in the history of throwing sports. Huge cat, packed with muscle and explosive power. He annihilated world records and sent the 16-pound ball flying farther than most humans who have ever picked it up. His accomplishments in shot putting are the stuff of legend, as is his personality.

Brian was a wild man, plain and simple. It wasn’t uncommon to see him smoking cigarettes between throws at the national championships and Olympic Trials. By all accounts (including his own), he partied hard and lived with a level of insanity that seems like it would destroy the career of a world-class athlete. Drinking, carousing, generously partaking of the ladies, and every other type of hardcore behavior that we commonly associate with people like Ozzy Osbourne and Charlie Sheen…that was the life of the dude we call “The Big O.” One of his most famous quotes was, “No man is entirely worthless. He can always serve as a bad example.”

That leads us to this month’s topic. We’re going to talk about the effects of partying and wild living on weightlifting performance. Specifically, I’m referring to alcohol, sex, smoking, recreational drug use, and all of your basic MTV Spring Break behavior, know what I mean? How much damage does this stuff do to your training? Now, I understand that this might sound like a silly topic at first. Many of you are reading this and saying to yourselves, “Serious athletes don’t do that crap. Why are we going to analyze how partying can damage your weightlifting when we all know that you don’t do any of that stuff if you’re a committed lifter?”

I understand your questions. Plus, many of you are past your twenties and you’ve already grown out of the Animal House phase of your life, if you ever had one at all. Some of you have lived like monks and nuns and you’ve got pretty limited track records of degenerate behavior. Others, as I just mentioned, have had your years of partying and now you’ve transitioned into responsible adulthood. I get it. However, I just happen to have a sneaking little suspicion that there are some of you out there in Performance Menu land who are really serious about your weightlifting…but you also still indulge in a little of the devil’s business on the side. How about it, did I hit close to home? Any lifting machines out there who enjoy being naughty, naughty little boys and girls on occasion (or every weekend)?

Listen people, I’ve been a weightlifter for a long bloody time. You can’t fool me. I know damn well that some of you like to cut loose. People who train hard often like to play hard. This is a scientifically proven fact. I have personally seen plenty of elite athletes doing research experiments on this subject in bars, hotel rooms and rental cars over the years. That makes this a legitimate area for analysis. And for those of you who fit into the aforementioned categories of “monks” and “nuns” and therefore don’t think this area applies to you at all, just remember that many of you will decide to coach someday. You will occasionally coach people who need some guidance and possible discipline with their lifestyles. Knowing this, it’s important to have your facts straight regarding what’s okay, what’s not okay, and why. Plus, this is just interesting stuff to read about. We all get some secret guilty pleasure from observing bad boys and girls. That’s why those idiots from Jersey Shore are famous. So let’s go see what Mr. Brownstone is up to, shall we?

Misconceptions…

When I became a weightlifter, I had the same assumptions as most of you about elite athletes. Basically, we tend to think that people who have reached the highest levels of their sport live exceptionally strict lifestyles. That’s just a fundamental belief about championship competitors, and it makes sense. It’s no secret that there are negative health effects that go along with a reckless, party-hard way of life. This is why rock stars die when they’re twenty-seven. Because this is common knowledge, it seems safe to assume that people who are trying to maximize their physical performance would stay totally abstinent from all that mess. Right?

Yeah, that’s generally a safe theory. But I’m going to tell you, there are grey areas out there. As I rose through the weightlifting ranks and got closer to top national level, I found out that there are plenty of champions who don’t play by the rules. Brian Oldfield is a pretty extreme example of this. I haven’t met Brian personally, but I’ve known a lot of people who trained and competed with him, and he’s also been pretty forthcoming about his exploits in articles and interviews. I don’t think there are many world record holders who have (or could have) lived the life he did. And Brian will tell you now that he’s paying for it. The years haven’t been kind to him.

He’s not completely alone in this department though. Look at Wilt Chamberlain, one of the most dominating basketball players in history. One of the things Wilt is most known for is scoring 100 points in a single NBA game. It happened on March 2nd, 1962 in Hershey, Pennsylvania. That’s right, the man scored 100 points by himself against another professional basketball team. Nobody had ever done it before, and nobody has since. It’s a milestone performance in athletic history, and he did it with no sleep and a hangover. Yep, that’s right folks. Wilt spent the night before the game in New York, partying all night with a lady friend. He dropped her off at 6AM, got on a train to Hershey, and scored 100 points against the Knicks that night.

Are Oldfield and Chamberlain the lone two examples? No, they’re not. It didn’t take me long to learn that many of Europe’s top weightlifters smoke like chimneys. Seriously guys, these are the strongest lifters on the planet and they’ll fire up a cigarette at the drop of a hat. Isn’t it killing their performance, you ask? No, apparently it isn’t. How in the world can some of the greatest athletes in our sport be engaging in one of most unhealthy acts known to mankind? How can a guy spend all night drinking and having sex and then go straight to a 100-point NBA performance on no sleep? What the hell is going on here?

Stop with all the insanity! Let’s get organized and look at things one at a time. We’ll examine some of the most common components of the partying lifestyle, and what effects they have on your weightlifting.

Drinking: Beer, wine, whiskey, vodka, margaritas, and all their happy little friends are big parts of our culture. If you don’t believe me, look at the revenue generated by alcohol sales every year in our country (and worldwide). We all know people who like to drink, but is it damaging to your training as a weightlifter?

This isn’t going to be a scientific analysis or anything. I’m just going to tell you some things I know from my own experience and learning. First of all, research generally says that alcohol consumption lowers testosterone levels, although I have read some reports over the years that challenge these findings. Some studies say that testosterone can be lowered by drinking alcohol, but the person would have to drink almost at the level of a functioning alcoholic and, even then, the drop-off in plasma testosterone would be minor. To make a long story short, science mostly says that drinking will lower your testosterone level, but the severity is debated.

Drinking alcohol does equal calories, and we’re not talking about good calories that fuel your cells. That’s one point nobody argues with. However, you can obviously control your alcohol calorie intake just like you can control how much chocolate you eat. If you don’t want tons of calories, don’t pound a twelve-pack of Sam Adams. There is also dehydration to think about. Alcohol is a natural diuretic, and improper hydration can cause a variety of problems with your training. But as with anything, the negative effects are largely connected to your amount of intake.

Smoking: Smoking is an interesting one when we talk about weightlifting because the damage, as we know, is largely (although not exclusively) focused on the lungs. Since weightlifting has very little cardio component, there’s a potential assumption that your performance won’t be affected much. If you don’t need the lung capacity of a marathoner to clean and jerk heavy weights, smoking shouldn’t matter much, right?

I don’t know, guys, this is a weird one. I personally consider smoking to be one of the worst things a human being can do to their body. There’s just nothing but bad that comes from it. However, I mentioned earlier that a lot of top European weightlifters smoke, and it’s true. So can we say that smoking can destroy your lifting? No, I guess we can’t, simply because of all the examples to the contrary. But we can definitely say that smoking can destroy your life. No amount of dialogue can prove this wrong.

Sex: Now we’re talking (giggle giggle, snicker snicker). Listen, I’m not going to turn this into a locker room conversation where we’re faking a serious analysis of how screwing can hurt your training. There is no concrete evidence to prove that sexual activity either helps or hurts your athletic performance. It’s all dependent on the individual, and the specific conditions surrounding the shagging (duration, impact, recovery time, etc.). Remember Wilt Chamberlain from before? Did you know that Wilt claimed to have slept with 20,000 women in his autobiography? Somebody did the math on this and I think it was determined that Wilt would have had to nail ten women per week from the ages of fifteen to fifty for this to be true, or something like that. The guy must have worn special pants with a ripcord.

Actually, there’s a quote from a legendary baseball manager named Casey Stengel that summarizes my personal opinion on this perfectly. When somebody asked him if sexual activity had a negative impact on performance, he said, “The trouble is not that players have sex the night before a game. It’s that they stay out all night looking for it.” Well played, Casey. Well played.

Recreational Drugs: This is a huge can of worms, probably a better subject for a separate article. Can drugs like marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, and others have a negative impact on performance?

I’ll tell you a quick story about this, and I have to keep it anonymous. I was once talking to a guy who was a national-level lifter back in the 1970s. I knew him pretty well, and he had a really blunt personality, so I asked him frankly about the drug use back in those days. Boy, did I get an answer. I’ll give you a basic run-down of what he told me:

Me: “How many of you guys were using steroids back in the 70s?”
Him: “All of us. Anybody who wasn’t juicing was stupid. It wasn’t even illegal back then.”
Me: “Did you guys do other drugs besides steroids?”
Him: “Oh hell yeah, everything. It was really important on meet day. You never juiced on the day of the meet. Strictly coke and speed. The routine was like this: you weigh in, then you pop some speed. Right before you start warming up, you do a line. After the snatches, you do a couple more lines to get ready for clean and jerks. That put you where you wanted to be.”

True story. Did this guy suffer any negative effects from this approach? You betcha, and I’m not just talking about physical issues either. Now, I want to make it clear that this isn’t the world I live in. I have basically zero experience with drugs, performance-enhancing or recreational, and I like it that way. Aside from the obvious problems this stuff can cause with your health, there are legal consequences to consider. Right off the top of my head, I can think of four or five big names from weightlifting who have done prison time for trafficking cocaine. Some of these are American, and some are international. Some of them have been released, and some are still incarcerated. The story just never seems to end well when you cross the line into this world, so I decided when I was a kid to stay away from all of it. My advice to you would be to do the same thing.

The Personal Manifesto of Mang Foremong…

Those are the basics of what I consider “The Big Four” of the party life. If you want more detailed information on any of these categories, do some more reading on your own. What I want to do now is share my own experience and opinions on this subject.

I was clean as a whistle in high school, basically exercising complete abstinence from all of the stuff I’ve talked about here. When I got to college, the super strict lifestyle got boring and I decided that I wanted to cut loose and try walking on the wild side. For several years, I was a bad boy. I never got into any serious trouble. No arrests, DUIs, diseases, or trips to the emergency room, but it was just blind luck that I avoided all of that stuff. I graduated from college with honors and had a fruitful weightlifting career at the same time.

Aaahhh, but this is where a good question comes in. Even though I had success as a lifter, would I have been even better if I would have played by the rules and stayed away from the partying? That’s a very good question, and I’ll never really know the answer to it. Actually, that’s not true. I know the answer to it. Yes, I’m sure I would have lifted bigger weights if I would have continued with the strict lifestyle I was living before I decided to go freaky-deaky. I don’t think I can run from that fact. I wasn’t really moderating anything in those days. It was balls-to-the-wall, and my weightlifting numbers tell the story of the results. My lifts stagnated for a few years, from 21 to 23ish. I had a total that was big enough to get me to all of the top meets in the country, but I’m certain I would have made a little more progress during this time if I would have kept the animal in the cage more often. Did I have fun during those years? Yeah, I did. Those were great times, and I look back at them with a smile on my face. It’s easy for me to do that because nothing happened that screwed up my whole life. It could have easily gone that way, but it didn’t. I got lucky.

You have to make your own decisions in all of these departments. I’m a pretty big believer in not telling anybody how to live their life, but I feel okay about throwing out some friendly advice that you either take or leave. So here’s the bottom line; if you want to make it to the top as a weightlifter, you have to completely commit to it. You’d better believe the Chinese national team doesn’t party. They don’t even get to see their own families, much less go out bar hopping on the weekends. However, you’re not a Chinese national team member and many of you probably want to have a little fun and freedom as you travel through your life. That means you have to decide what your priorities are, and what kind of balance you want to have between training and social activity. When I look back at my younger years, I don’t think I could have kept living like a choirboy even if I wanted to. I had a wild streak in me that needed to come out. I could feel it inside, like a wicked little fetus.

I guess I controlled it enough to keep my weightlifting moving forward, even though I probably would have moved faster with a little more restraint on the weekends. You have to make up your mind how much control is right for you. Some of you are wound up so tight that the party life is a million miles away from where you’ll ever be. Cool, more power to you. Some of you might be on the opposite end of the spectrum, fighting every week to curb your animal appetites. Either way, I think it’s always a good thing to have a clear grasp of consequences. That’s really what this article is about…consequences. You can choose them as deliberately as you choose which shirt you’re going to wear on a date. Just make sure you know how far you’re going to let the date go before you get in the car. Setting limits for yourself and sticking to them is a pretty good life tactic.