Training programs, technique, nutrition, recovery, exercise selection, volume, etc. etc. etc…

These are the subjects that make up your weightlifting life. When you’re a serious athlete, they’re the things you think about, read about, talk about, ask questions about…on and on. You’re probably reading this magazine because you want to pick up better ideas about all of them.

And you should. Topics like programming, technique, nutrition and recovery are the ABCs of what we do. If you get them nailed down perfectly, you’re going to make progress. If one (or all) of them is out of whack, you might stagnate or get hurt. So it behooves you to make yourself an expert in as many of these “basic foundation” areas as possible.

However, I’ve always been a big believer in the idea that your success as a lifter will be a result of much more than just these topics. After spending most of my life doing this, I’ve come to believe that your weightlifting career is enormously connected to what’s happening in your life outside the gym. I’m specifically talking about the stuff you do that’s not weightlifting-specific. You probably do a lot of things at home that are weightlifting-specific…preparing your foods, foam rolling and icing, watching lifting videos on YouTube, and reading stuff like Performance Menu. But we all know that your life has a lot more in it than just your training.

Just a few weeks ago, I was talking to a high-level weightlifter that is in the middle of a major breakthrough phase in her career. This is a gal who has been lifting and competing for several years without really reaching the type of success she’s capable of. But right now, things are starting to come together for her. She’s annihilating her old personal records in the gym and her most recent competitions have ended with substantial increases in her total. She’s on fire, plain and simple, and it’s obvious to everybody that the next few years are probably going to be her greatest. Now, the thing that’s interesting about this is how she explains the reason for why she’s gone from cold to hot. Basically, she decided to make some changes in her life over the last year. She’s in a different environment now with new people, new relationships, new coaching, etc. All of these changes have given her a bigger feeling of support, safety, and happiness than she’s had in a long time. She’s been lifting for years and the coaching she had in the past was good, so it’s not like she was being trained by some incompetent jerk or anything like that. It’s just a situation where all of the X-factor type of stuff, the personal elements that set the tone for your whole life, is better and healthier than she’s had in the past. She’s very happy now, so she’s lifting well.

Where are you at right now in this department? Do you have the kind of personal life this girl is talking about, where everything is in good shape and feeling pretty easy? Or is it the opposite for you, where you’ve got rough territory that’s causing you some grief and hassle? I imagine your answers are probably all over the board. So let’s take a few minutes and analyze this area, since it should be obvious to all of you that it’ll have a big impact on how successful your weightlifting experience is.

I cut my freaking ear off!

Some people walk around depressed and miserable all the time. Have you ever noticed that? I wonder how they get that way. Maybe it’s the music they listen to. There’s a great John Cusack movie called High Fidelity where he plays a record store owner who’s constantly gloomy and negative. He has a great line in the movie where he says, “People worry about kids playing with guns and watching violent videos. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss.” Good flick, you should check it out.

Sylvia Plath was an American poet who died in 1963. She’s probably one of the most famous depressed-chick writers of all time. And you know what’s interesting about her? She wrote most of her best stuff right after she found out her husband was cheating on her and they separated. He was a writer too, and she discovered that he was fooling around with this little German babe on the side. He left Sylvia after she confronted him about it, and over the next few months she produced the writing that established her as a legend. For whatever reason, the pain in her life helped her creatively.

Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter who…oh hell, I don’t need to tell you who he is. He’s one of the most famous artists ever. You know why you remember him, don’t you? He’s the guy who cut his own ear off and gave it to a hooker as a present. Yeah, seriously. I think everybody agrees that van Gogh was off his rocker. His mental illness has been thoroughly examined, and the ear-hacking situation wasn’t the only nutso stunt he pulled in his life. However, like Sylvia Plath, he did a great deal of his best work right around the time when his craziness was at its peak. He sliced himself up in 1888, and five or six of his biggest masterpieces were done within six months of the incident.

Kurt Cobain was the lead singer of Nirvana, one of the most important rock bands in history. He was a depressed heroin addict. I think you get the point. These people were all artists, and we know about the ‘tortured soul’ thing that goes along with that kind of personality. I think these people are in love with their own suffering, for whatever reason. Maybe they think it makes them better at what they do, maybe they just have borderline personality disorder, whatever. The bottom line is that they’re obsessed with their personal misery. Knowing this is the case, it makes sense that they would produce their best works when they’re at their lowest points because that’s actually when they’re the happiest.

Now, let’s talk about you and me. Think about your own athletic experience. Try to remember the time periods when you’ve done your best stuff, had your most successful performances. And now, think about what was going on in your life at the time. Can you see any connections? Any patterns? Were you at your best athletically when your life was good, or maybe when it was bad? Or is there no clear-cut pattern that you can identify?

One situation that really stands out in my mind is the time period right after I got divorced. I was married to a pretty well known lifter for five years. We got married in 1998 and split up in the summer of 2003. The process of separating and getting a divorce was incredibly painful, even though it was the right thing to do for both of us. I was training at the time, but it was just in limbo, staying strong with no real focus. It was hard enough just to get through those days, much less think about preparing for a national meet. But the thing I really remember is how my lifting started to get hot again right after the divorce was finalized. For some reason, I felt really good when it was finished. Maybe it was because I had survived it and it was all behind me, and there was this positive feeling of moving on and starting over. Even though things were still raw because it was a time of learning to get my life back together after losing a five-year marriage, I was happy that it was done and I was still on my feet. The next year was one of the best phases of my career.

It only stays that way if you let it…

So…how about you? What were your life circumstances when you did your best stuff? And if you haven’t done anything big yet, is there something in your life that might be holding you back? Seriously, that’s a big question to ask yourself but I think you should do it.

Some people will put up with bulls--t for a very long time. I can think of at least four or five friends of mine right off the top of my head who are doing it right now. They’re in lousy relationships or dead-end jobs, something like that. But they’re not doing anything to change it. They just get up every morning and eat the same mouthful of crap, day after day. Do you know any of these types? I think you probably do. We all do. And I know it’s easy for all of us to look at them and say, “Pull your head out of your ass and make some changes. If you’re miserable, just fix it!” Those are very easy words to say, but it’s not always that simple to do if you’re on the receiving end.

All of this has an effect on your weightlifting, whether you know it or not. I think it hinders you in both training and competition. When you’re living in a constant state of negativity, you eventually get to a point where you stop expecting things to go well. In training, it makes you more accepting of plateaus and bad days. The crap you’re carrying around from your personal situation works its way into your subconscious. Nothing is cooperating in your life, so you don’t really expect training to cooperate either. Those times when you’re stagnant, or when you’re missing a lot of attempts in the gym…they start to become your norm. You get used to sucky weightlifting because everything else sucks so badly.

In competition, this can go even deeper. When you’re standing on the platform at a meet, preparing to lift a weight that’s pushing the limits of your ability, that’s a time when your self-confidence and positive energy needs to be peaked. It’s one of the most individually challenging situations you can find yourself in as an athlete. At that point, if your life has basically taught you that nothing is ever going to work out in your favor, why would you expect the barbell to be any different? Before you know it, you’re stringing together some weak performances. And it all started outside the gym, that’s the funny thing. It started with the tolerance you built up for failure through the difficulties in your relationships, job, or whatever. The overall vibes that live in your subconscious can permeate your entire outlook on things, including the way you respond to challenges as a competitor.

Now, I guess we have to acknowledge that pain and misery can be a source of fuel. Some of you might be reading this and thinking to yourself, “I’ve had some of my best athletic moments when things were difficult in my life.” Sure, I get it. There’s something to be said for the toughness you develop when you have to endure struggles all the time. But I think this toughness is developed by people who keep their hardships on a temporary basis. Hell, we’re all gonna take our licks from time to time. There’s no way around that. But there’s a difference between plowing through the occasional bout of bad luck and permanently adjusting yourself to failure and frustration as they become the basis of your life. When you adjust yourself to unhappiness, then you’re living in the pain and misery of Plath, van Gogh, and Cobain. Obviously all of those individuals were successful, and they’ve gone down in history as legends. But do you know something else they had in common? They all committed suicide.

And if you’re a coach…

All we’ve really tried to do in this article is look at how your athletic life can be affected by a wider spectrum of factors than programming, technique, and nutrition. Some people never find a way to break through their barriers in weightlifting, and they spend all their time looking at the primary training variables while they try to figure it out. It’s possible that their problems could be caused by an ineffective routine or sloppy technique. However, it’s equally possible that their lack of progress could be connected to something else, something so obvious that it’s sitting right in front of them, but they just don’t see it. Home life, career issues, internal conflicts, these are the things we’re talking about. Sometimes, I think we look at people who are really successful and we just automatically assume they have great personal lives. That’s not always the case.

If you’re a coach, there will be times when you need to talk to your athletes about this stuff. We all know there’s a close bond that develops between coaches and athletes, and it goes beyond training and competing. I think there are occasional situations where a coach can see that there’s obviously something wrong with a lifter. When these times pop up, the coach shouldn’t be afraid to ask about it. Keep in mind; I used the word ‘ask.’ There’s nothing wrong with a coach checking in and wanting to know, “Is everything okay?” But if the athlete doesn’t want to talk about it, leave it alone. You don’t want to poke into somebody’s personal business if they’re making it clear that it’s off-limits. But in my experience, the athlete is usually going to want to open up about it. Sometimes they need advice, and sometimes they just need somebody to listen.

The scariest part of this analysis is that these problems can only be solved through big decisions. It’s easy to change up a training program, adjust the volume of your squats or pulls or whatever. Technique problems are a real bugger, but they can be fixed through good coaching and lots of work. But the type of things we’ve looked at here, the dysfunction in your life that might be crushing your hopes in weightlifting, those can only be fixed through some kind of major overhaul. It’s hard to specifically say what change might be called for because every situation will be different. But at the end of the day, the person who’s going through it will reach a point where the solution is clear. They know exactly what they need to do to get their lifting (and their life) back on the right track. At this point, it just becomes a matter of courage. Courage to take risks, courage to make choices that might have uncertain outcomes.

Look inside yourself. Ask if you’ve got everything happening in your life the way you need it to. If the answers are all positive and you’re in a good place, you should probably do two things. Be thankful, and figure out how to keep them that way. And if the answers to your questions tell you that you need to make some big changes, have courage. It takes a lot of guts to be a weightlifter, and you’ll never know what kind of amazing things might be waiting for you unless you step up and roll the dice from time to time. Best of luck to all of you, on and off the platform.