Music is powerful. The songs we hear, and not just the ones we listen to by choice, form a soundscape for our lives and our lifting. It is inevitable that you will have a musical backdrop while you train. Have you ever been in a gym where music wasn’t playing? When we’re building a playlist for a session, most of us don’t consider the significance that the music we’re selecting may take on while we’re listening to it in the same way we don’t usually have any advanced warning of a night where lasting memories will be made. But when these special training sessions come together with the right sonic backdrop, the power of the memories produced can be lifelong. Here’s our soundtrack for your first year of weightlifting.

Track 1: Help! (The Beatles)

It’s no coincidence that this is the first track. You are going to need help in your first year of weightlifting and you cannot start building a relationship with a coach early enough. On the face of it, the sport of Olympic Weightlifting is simple: Lift as much weight as possible using two different but essentially alike techniques. However, weightlifting is anything but simple. There may be athletes out there who are self-taught, but I sure haven’t met any. Invest in yourself and your long-term lifting career and find a club to join and a coach to learn from on day one. It’s not just about cutting down the learning curve; it’s about safety, too.

Track 2: Don’t Stop Me Now (Queen)

As a new lifter, you’ll feel unstoppable. Once you’ve got the basic technique nailed, you’ll be on PR fast track: I’m talking a new PR at least every month-maybe even more frequently! This is addictive and the Olylifting equivalent of the honeymoon period. Everybody loves a PR, and yes, they are kind of the point of weightlifting. But don’t get side tracked with always lifting as heavy as possible. What you need in your first year is lots of time to develop sound technique. If you load up the bar too much, then the drills you’re doing will be sub optimal.

Track 3: He’s Misstra Know It All (Stevie Wonder)

You’re gonna try to run before you can walk, especially if you are a guy. The best advice I can offer here is don’t be a know it all. Swallow your pride and listen to your coach instead. We’ve all witnessed it: The coach is watching a lifter who keeps missing a heavy lift. The coach walks over and suggests the lifter reduce the weight and do a specific drill for half an hour. The lifter refuses to give up on the heavy lift and keeps on missing. Most of us are going to find ourselves in this scene at some point. Make the choice to listen to your coach and stop making life hard for yourself!

Track 4: I Need A Dollar (Aloe Blacc)

Starting a new sport is expensive right? And nothing makes you feel ‘part of it’ quite like buying the right gear. However, in weightlifting you can get off relatively lightly; for a kick off, you won’t need to buy a bar, weight plates, squat rack, etc. Just find a decent gym or weightlifting club and let them carry the cost of buying and maintaining all that hardware. Your biggest outlay is going to be shoes. Get some, end of discussion! Literally almost any gym clothes will do, so only buy specialist gear after you’ve paid for those shoes. And never, ever spend more than the price of a cup of coffee on wrist wraps!

Track 5: The Boys Are Back In Town (Thin Lizzy)

Did you know that weightlifting is a team sport? It’s true that there’s only one person on the platform when the clock is ticking, but it is an Olympic sport and this means that a country will send its squad or team to represent it. Weightlifting is still a niche sport in the UK and US, and so can be a lonely game to play. Because it’s not easy to find other athletes, when you do, you’ll generally find that you bond quickly and easily. And because this is a sport where you’ll suffer, struggle, fail, and succeed together, those bonds will be made super strong under the pressure of shared adversity.

Track 6: Train In Vain (The Clash)

Here comes the ‘F’ word. Failure. There. I said it. I can’t hide the truth from you. You will fail. Sometimes you’ll fail a couple of lifts, sometimes you’ll spend a month working on one weakness before you can move forward. Failing sucks. Nobody likes it. It’s hard to keep these moments of struggle in perspective and occasionally the only solution is to strip the bar, pack up, and go home. These dark moments are when those friends you made earlier make the difference between quitting altogether and living to fight another day.

Track 7: Everybody Hurts (R.E.M.)

It’s pretty likely you will get hurt in your first year. Injury can be a taboo subject, especially among athletes with a background in something like CrossFit. In my experience, there are three distinct stages of injury: denial, acceptance, and healing. When you pick up an injury, your first thought will usually be, “I can still train with this, right?” If the injury is anywhere between your toes and the top of your head and it hurts to pick up a dead bar then the answer is likely to be no, so accept it and get healing.
Most of us will train when we shouldn’t; we are strength athletes and in many ways we are comfortable being uncomfortable. But a lost week now is better than a lost year because you pushed through the pain and made things worse. Try to apply the level of effort to healing that you do to training.

Track 8: Eye Of The Tiger (Survivor)

You’ll get injured, but you’ll come back. When you do, you’ll need a cheesy but uplifting song in your playlist, because recovery can be as much a mental as a physical battle. With each injury comes a new fear based on the circumstances that lead to the unhappy event. It can help to fill your head with the right music to drown out that inner demon.

Track 9: We Are The Champions (Queen, again)

You might not make it on to the Olympic squad in the first year, but don’t let that stop you feeling like a champ; sticking at such a challenging sport for so long is an achievement in itself. The first year in weightlifting is special; it’s intense and hugely rewarding in terms of results. The early months are also the optimum time to lay down solid foundations for your weightlifting career and to learn lessons that will keep you in the game when it gets tough.

We’ve put these songs in a Spotify playlist*: listen to them during your first year and then make sure to come back to it in the future so you can reminisce from time to time about your weightlifting honeymoon period. Maybe in your second year you’ll be able to use some of these to get you psyched or remind you that you will get through a tough time because you did before.

*Ed. note: Apologies for the Beatles cover band; the original was mysteriously unavailable on Spotify.