“There’s no way I could lift XXX right now.”

Training for strength sports is a little bit of an odd beast. In any competition or sport you’ve got the unknowns and unpredictable aspects of the competition itself that you can’t simply practice over and over again until you’ve got it perfect and then go do it live. But strength sports require an extra leap of faith.

You will typically train for months without coming even close to what you’re expecting to do in competition. If your powerlifting contest 3rd attempt deadlift is planned to be 300lbs, you might not go over 270lbs in training.

You have to take it on faith, even blind faith if you’re generally new to training for competitive strength sports, that you’re going to be able to lift 300lbs when it counts.

Which means you’re going to have session after session, for weeks on end, where you’re thinking that it’s going to be impossible for you to achieve what you hope to achieve on contest day.

There are two things you should keep in mind, if you want to keep your sanity and enjoy the process:

The first is that this is inherently the nature of the sport. It’s normal that you feel relatively weak when you’re two months out from the event. If you’re starting a new cycle right after a previous contest, it’s totally normal that you can’t lift the weight you just lifted in contest a couple weeks ago. Why are you even trying? Stop that. The more experience you have the more you will be willing to trust the process and take it on faith that you’re going to be able to perform on game day. But until then, you’ll need to mentally rehearse, visualize, and practice a very cognitive, if not subconscious, understanding that this is the process.

The second is that there are always opportunities, in every single workout, to do better than you’ve ever done before. This requires taking real ownership over and responsibility for your training – which you should be doing anyway. But if you’re just doing exactly what your coach writes down in your programming, you’re maybe getting 80% out of every session, at best.

Your coach, good as they may be, has no way of knowing in advance all the various things that can affect your state going into a session. They’re going to plan for you to progressively get stronger over the course of a cycle, but they’re also going to leave in some room for error. Too little and you’re not going to be able to hit the targets set out for each cycle, too much and you’re not going to work hard enough to progress.

But you are in it, and you have every piece of the puzzle. You know what you did last week because it’s in your training log. You know what your coach has in mind. And you know how things feels on this particular training day.

You have the ability, I would even say the responsibility, to make the call to ensure that every training session has a PR of some kind in it. Of course that doesn’t mean you’re going to pull a new 1RM every time. But it means you hit something for 3 that you only hit for 2. Or you do an extra set. Or you bump up the weight you previously did for a double or a triple. There are dozens of ways to PR in every session, and it’s on you to figure it out on the fly and execute it.

Training for competitive strength sports is incredibly rewarding, and not a little unique. The quicker you internalize this mindset and start figuring out how to make every training day a great day, the more fun you’re going to have and the better you’re going to perform.

The other night I was working with a client in the gym and I was reminded of something very important that I don’t know that I have specifically written about before. First a little bit of background so this makes more sense:

Biofeedback testing is by far the most useful “tool” I’ve ever found for training. In sort of economic terms it allows you to get more and better results at a lower cost and lower risk. Over the long term, like compounding interest, it adds up to a lot more progress because you’re not giving up training days to recovering from injuries.

Even knowing this, there are times when you might not actually need to use the testing as much. When you’re totally healthy, everything is working well, and you have a really wide range of function and the ability to push those to the limit you might not need to test often, or at all. You can coast on your intuition that has been honed by time spent actually testing. If you’re really healthy, you can get away with not testing at all, at least for a while.

But, the scenario is exactly reversed when you’re not totally healthy – especially when you’re dealing with a chronic pain situation. To be perfectly clear here, I’m not talking about sudden acute pains or any kind of pain that hasn’t been cleared by a competent medical professional. I’ve heard enough horror stories of someone just working around pain that didn’t get better only to find out that it was something incredibly serious that needed to be addressed medically. I’m talking about chronic movement-associated pain that doesn’t have a clear explanation or source and you’re trying to work around it in the gym.

In those cases you have to test everything. And I truly mean everything. Test the exercises or drills your PT gave you. Test the stretches that have felt good in the past. Test variations of every movement to see if you can find something better. Test every set, even if it tested well to begin with.

The most succinct and simple explanation that I can give for this, synthesizing everything I know about movement and the current state of pain science goes something like this: Chronic pain in the body appears to be at least somewhat related to a loss (or perceived loss) of function somewhere in the body. When a function is lost it can be extraordinarily stressful when you have to keep doing that function. To make a very rudimentary example, let’s say there’s a loss of function in your shoulder that causes you to be “forcing” a movement that isn’t there just to put your arm overhead. Now every time you reach for something on a high shelf, or put a shirt on, you’re dipping into that excess stress bucket to get away with it. The pain is signaling you to do something about it. But the more you keep doing the things that are stressful, the worse everything gets.

I see this every day with clients who are in pain. They may test well for a movement, but after a single set it doesn’t test well anymore. We make a small change and suddenly it tests well again. After a set it’s gone. Repeat over and over again. This is a fundamental difference between someone who’s healthy and can push the same function over and over again, like a powerlifter training the same squat week in and week out, and someone trying to resolve chronic pain issues who has to test a variety of different movements just to stay in the same vein of doing a squat.

I can not stress this enough: When you’re hurting, test everything.

Yeah, it’s kind of annoying to have to test so much and it’s probably even more annoying not to be able to just do the lifts you want to do. On the other hand though, I have not found and don’t know of a more effective way to get people out of pain than the combination of restoring function through things that test well, and reducing or eliminating distress by doing the things that test well.

By the way, Dellanavich (I) did a pretty funny video on this topic a few years ago.

I sort of touched on this in my recent article, whether training has to be fun or not, but it comes up enough that I want to address it on its own.

People often ask me what I think of this boxing gym, or that Zumba class, or insert whatever latest fitness-esque trend is happening at the moment.

I know that a lot of folks in the industry take the position that something is better than nothing and as long as people are moving that’s a good thing.

I don’t hold that belief.

Yes, the human body needs movement. But movement, especially in the sense of any kind of strenuous exercise, is a stressor. If you’ve been reading my work for any length of time you’ll know that stress can only be judged by the response, not by the stressor. Most people’s lives are already chronically distressful in the sense that they’re not responding well to the current stressors in their life. Taking a “boxing” class as a way to exercise is very often a good way to pile on stress they can’t actually handle as opposed to stressors that are specifically being chosen and targeted because they respond well to them – which is why we use biofeedback to guide our training towards the positive.

When is something worse than nothing? When the something is actually net harmful as opposed to simply maintaining the status quo.

Yes, of course less-than-ideal fitness classes can be gateways and lead to seeking better. And of course in some cases it’s not actually net harmful and just getting moving is better than nothing.

But one of my guiding principles is the pursuit of better, and there is much, much better than most of the fitness-adjacent entertainment programs that people and businesses pass off as ways to fulfill that human need to move and be physically challenged.

If you have cancer, you’re going to want to see an oncologist – not a physical therapist or a general practitioner. Sure, I suppose that seeing a physical therapist would be better than doing nothing at all, and it might lead you to seeing an oncologist, but would anyone ever recommend that someone’s course of action be seeing a PT? I hope not.

So no, I don’t think much of the latest and greatest ZuluX-Fit classes as it pertains to making you and your body better. But if you just want to kill an hour sweating go for it I guess. I can think of other ways to get sweaty.