There’s a huge social injustice going on, and I have to speak out against it. This is gonna be kind of like when John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath. He traveled around California during the 1930s and saw how migrant farm workers were getting royally screwed by the system, so he wrote a 700-page book about it as fast as he could because he wanted to protest their circumstances. The nation was freaked out and everybody went into a major tizzy when they read it, too. This article will basically be a repeat of that situation; with some small differences… like my subject isn’t anywhere near as serious and almost nobody will care about it except strength athletes.

You want to know what I’m so enraged about? Okay, here it is. I’m pissed as hell that nobody will pay me to lift weights. There, I said it. I’ve been a weightlifter for over two decades, and not once has anybody ever offered to give me a full-time salary with benefits for working out. I’m not asking for much, people. I would be happy with around $75,000 per year, plus medical insurance and a retirement pension. No big deal. Just give me the money and let me spend all my time training.

I’m not just talking about myself, brothers and sisters. I’m talking about ALL OF US. Somebody needs to pay us to work out, damn it! I don’t care if it’s the government, Bill Gates, the IRS or Colonel Sanders. Whoever wants to fork over the dough is fine with me. Just make sure we get our paychecks every two weeks, and then let us train for a living. The fact that nobody is financially helping us out is wrong…just plain wrong. It’s unfair. We deserve to be compensated for our hard work. The world owes us a living.

But you know what? I don’t think it’s going to happen. We’re probably going to have to keep doing what we’re doing right now…working for a living and training on the side. Many of us feel like our lifting is “what we do for a living” because we center our whole lives around it. Still, nobody is going to pay our bills and let us focus completely on our workouts. It might be a possibility if we were Olympic-level competitors and we lived in the right European/Asian country, but most of us aren’t in that bracket.

Almost all of us have to incorporate our training into our professional lives, and that means our jobs have demands and expectations that we have to meet on a daily basis. What we’re going to look at in this article is the issue of “daily preparation.” I’m talking about all the things you have to do (and NOT do) throughout the day that will put you in the best possible shape to train at the end of the day. Obviously, you’re a diverse crowd and I understand that many of you have different types of jobs. Some of you might be self-employed and you can set your own hours, and some of you might work from home. But most of you probably have some kind of eight-hours-a-day job where your workouts come at 5:00-6:00pm, after you get off work.

If you want to be a successful strength athlete, you have to focus on little details. Neglecting them will destroy your career. Weightlifting, powerlifting, strongman, etc. are all “lifestyle” activities. You have to arrange your whole life in a particular way if you ever want to move from “casual recreational” level to “maniac ass kicker” level. Trust me, everything you do throughout your day is going to affect (either positively or negatively) how you feel when you get to the gym and put your hands on the barbell. It would be easy to manage this if somebody paid you a full-time salary to lift weights because you wouldn’t have anything else to worry about. But when you have to work for a living, it gets challenging. That’s why we’re going to put together as many thoughts as possible about the best things you can do to make sure your daily preparation is effective.

ORGANIZATION!

This article isn’t going to be a smooth, flowing analysis. It’s going to be a choppy list of different factors you need to address for proper daily workout preparation. You should read this like a checklist, because that’s exactly what it is. I’m a big believer in checklists. I think there are times when you need abstract thought, and there are times when you need rigid organization. For this topic, it probably behooves you to lean more towards organization. I’m also going to throw in a lot of my own opinions based on experience, because I personally learn a lot when other people tell me what works for them and I have a feeling many of you are the same. So let’s get started:

Workout time: Some people train well in the early morning. I’m not one of them. It has nothing to do with having the discipline to get up early or whether I get enough sleep the night before. My body just doesn’t feel like it’s primed to lift big weights at 5:00am, or even at 8:00am. If my workouts were just bodybuilding-style stuff like presses and curls with some cardio thrown in, early morning training would probably be fine. But when we’re talking about the Olympic lifts, it’s a different story. The O-lifts demand a much different level of speed, flexibility, and alertness than lat pulls or jogging. I’ve personally found early to midafternoon to be the best training time. Age has a lot to do with this, too. When you’re young, early morning training will be a little easier and you probably won’t notice much of a problem. But as you start to get older, your body just needs a lot longer to warm up. This is what I’ve found to be true, and there are obviously going to be a lot if individual differences from athlete to athlete.

Warm-up: When I was younger, I used to think the best way to prepare for training was to do absolutely no physical activity throughout the day leading up to my workout. I didn’t want to exert myself at all before I hit the gym, thinking it would be a waste of energy. I wish I would have known differently, because having some general movement and activity early in the day is essential for good training. Your joints and muscles need to get loosened up and active at least a few hours before you start your actual workout session. This doesn’t need to be a ton of work, and it won’t tire you out if you do it correctly. I’m talking about some basic dynamic exercises…arm circles, toe touches, air squats, torso twists, or maybe some low-impact total body movements like jumping jacks or bear crawls. Five to 10 minutes of this stuff can do the trick, maybe even a couple of times spaced throughout the early and mid-day. You don’t want your workout to be the first time your joints have moved all day. This is why it can be a positive thing if you’ve got a job that allows you to move around a little. Things like walking up and down a staircase (warming up the lower body) or stocking shelves (warming up the upper body) can serve this purpose. What you absolutely DON’T want is sitting in a chair for eight straight hours prior to training. If you’ve got a cubicle-type job that demands this, try to figure out ways to stand up and move around for at least a few minutes each hour. Go to the bathroom and do air squats in the toilet stall or something. Your lower back will feel as stiff as a coffin nail after a long day of sitting on your ass.

Time on your feet: We just said you don’t want to sit in a chair all day prior to training, right? Well, you also don’t want to be on your feet all day. You want some activity throughout the day, but not a six-hour stretch of standing. The best combination is a mix of these two, and moving around when you’re on your feet is always better than standing still in the same place. When you’re immobile, all of the bodyweight above your waist is sitting right on your lower back and the blood in your body is pooling down to your feet. At the end of a long day of this, you’ll feel it. If you absolutely have to do this because your job requires it, I would recommend getting off your feet (and elevating them) for at least 30 minutes prior to training if it’s possible. I also think this is a bigger problem for heavier lifters. I’ve competed at 198 lbs. bodyweight, and I’ve also competed at 280. Without a doubt, the effects of spending all day on your feet are worse when you’re supporting a lot of mass.

Eating: I’ve tried lots of different things over the years in this area. Eating right before training, not eating for three hours prior, eating fruit before workouts, eating candy bars before workouts, etc. Since I think this part is probably the one that’s most dependent on individual preference, I’ll just tell you my personal findings. I don’t train well when I feel bloated, so I like to eat three to four hours prior to lifting. If I have anything in the last hour before I start, it’ll be something small with a little sugar in it (apple, candy bar, Clif bar). I’ve found it doesn’t really matter what I eat before training as long as my nutrition in the days before has been solid. In other words, it works like this…if I spend three days eating like crap and then I eat something healthy on a heavy training day, I’ll probably still feel lousy. If I spend three days eating really healthy and then I eat something crappy on training day, I’ll still feel okay. Make sense? The only caveat is that you can’t eat something prior to workout that’s going to upset your stomach. It’s hard to train well when you have to repeatedly run to the bathroom for explosive diarrhea.

Caffeine: We just covered eating, so how about drinking? Listen, some people go haywire with the caffeine. I’ve trained with lifters that practically embalm themselves with the stuff before they train. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of sources these days, you know? You can stop by any gas station and head for the Liquid Crank section where you’ve got an assortment of Red Bull, Monster, Five-Hour Energy, and trucker pills looking you right in the face. Personally, I’ve never gone too far with this stuff because I don’t like the idea of relying on something to the point where I can’t be effective if I don’t have it. Years ago I trained with a lifter who made the World Team, and he was a coffee addict. When he got to the worlds, he couldn’t get any before the competition. He bombed out. That sucks. When you depend on things so strongly that you get paralyzed without them, it’s bad.

Stress: Man, this one is a doozy. Stress is a funny thing because it reveals a lot about your personality. Some people just don’t feel it very much. Have you noticed that? They have what I like to call “old hippie syndrome.” They just stay mellow and go with the flow, man. Anxiety isn’t a big part of their lives because they’re connected with the universe, or whatever. For these people, life is going to feel a lot easier. Seriously, think about what it would be like if you simply never worried about anything. Most of us aren’t like that. We’ve got more intensity in our personalities, which is probably one of the reasons we like weightlifting so much. When things stress us out, we get pissed and tense. We’ve got high expectations for ourselves in everything we do: our jobs, our training, our family commitments, etc. We expect a lot out of ourselves. When obstacles get in our way, we feel it inside. Now, this is where we learn about levels. Some people have a high stress management level, which means they’re going to feel the worry and anxiety but they handle it pretty easily. Nothing wrecks them, and they can make it to the end of the day without any borderline-heart-attack moments. These are the people who usually make the best weightlifters. And then you’ve got the panic junkies. These are the people with low stress management levels, and it’s a wonder they even make it through their lives. When difficulties pop up, they go into a catatonic state of fear, anger, and distress. By the time they get to the gym, they’re like sponges that have been squeezed completely dry. There’s nothing left inside to get them through a hard training session. I guess these people probably just don’t make it for the long haul. If they can’t figure out how to manage their anxiety better, weightlifting probably isn’t going to work out for them.

And then sometimes, none of this matters…

You want to know the funniest part of this whole discussion? It’s the fact that there are occasional times when these factors have almost no impact on your training. Here’s what I mean, and I’ll bet you can probably relate to this.

You’ll have times when you manage all of these factors perfectly, and then you still lift like crap. Know what I mean? These are situations where you put yourself in an absolutely perfect position to train well by handling your daily preparation effectively. You do everything you can think of to make sure you show up to the gym feeling physically and mentally fresh and ready, and then you still have a bad day. This is maddening because it doesn’t make any sense. You have a lousy workout, and you go back through everything and try to find the cause. Nothing clicks, because you did everything right and you still sucked a fat one.

Then… (you know what I’m gonna say next) there will also be occasional situations where almost everything goes wrong leading up to your workout, and you still set the world on fire and have a great day. Ever had one of these? I’m talking about times when you’ve had little sleep, poor nutrition, too much hustle-bustle at work, etc., and you still feel great in the gym. You kick ass, even though there’s almost no reason why you should. This is freaky. You try to figure it out, and it just doesn’t compute.

Listen, these two scenarios I just listed are examples of exceptions. Sometimes, this is just how it goes. All the rules get thrown out the window and the universe makes strange things happen. You prepare perfectly, and you still suck. Or you prepare like crap, and you still kick ass. You want to figure out how it works? Listen, I’ve been trying to figure it out for over twenty years and I’m a pretty smart guy, and I still have times when I just have to shrug my shoulders and admit that some situations don’t always follow standard logic. Two plus two doesn’t always equal four in this sport. Occasionally, your lifting will be great (or terrible), and there isn’t a concrete cause.

However, and this is the main point of the whole thing, these situations are exceptions. Most of the time, proper daily preparation will lead to successful training. The weird scenarios we just described are going to pop up from time to time, but you don’t want to plan your life according to rare freak occurrences. You want to plan your life according to what works most often. Controlling the things on this checklist will have a high success percentage. You’ll usually feel pretty good in the gym if you manage them the right way. Will there be strange glitches every now and then? Sure. But that shouldn’t make you think organization doesn’t matter. It does. And since nobody is going to pay you a full-time salary to devote your whole day to training, you’d better sharpen this area up. Best of luck, brothers and sisters.