Gaining Confidence Before A Meet Last week I urged any lifters prepping for a meet to avoid a test day too close to competition day. Now, I want to give you some suggestions for what you can do if you are getting close to a meet and feel like you “don’t know where you are at.” If you are...

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One Of The Main Limiting Factors At The Gym....Time Time is one of the main limiting factors in the gym. Some people have 3 hours 4-5 times a week to spend in the gym, and for them the issue becomes avoiding doing too much, but for most people the concern when programming or planning is how to...

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A Heavy Weight Will Feel Heavy Heavy weights will always feel heavy. Any time you are hitting a new PR, a new max, that weight will feel like a max! But here’s the thing, we can condition our minds to perceive weights as heavier than they are, making those PRs that much harder to hit....

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Resist The Temptation A common temptation lifters feel as they are preparing for a test day or competition is to do a test before the test. “I just want to see where I’m at.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that by lifters. To some extent this urge stems from a lack of...

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Stop Lifting The Same Weight Plateaus are a part of training. Your strength, skill, endurance, bodyweight (whether you are gaining or losing), none of it will progress in a straight line. There will be times of great improvement where everything feels great, but also times where you feel...

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Learning From Failure Last week I talked about how often you should compete. I had to learn my own lesson early in my career. I did my very first meet in December 2012. It didn’t go well, but that’s pretty normal and I’ll write about that in the future. I did my second meet in June 2014....

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You do not know your genetic potential. Nobody does! And the current research shows that where you start is not an accurate predictor of what you can hope to achieve. Despite this, too many people label themselves things like “skinny fat.” Implying that they can’t build muscle and can’t...

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Competing Too Often Over and over and over I have seen lifters get stuck in the trap of competing too often. It is an understandable urge: we compete in powerlifting because we like lifting heavy shit, and meets are the best place to do it. On top of that, very often when lifters come out of...

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The Benefit Of Low Rep Sets When people talk about the number of reps they are doing, they usually correlate this with the weight on the bar. Higher reps means lighter weight, and as the reps go down, the weight goes up. Once they get to 5s or 3s, they are doing some pretty high % work. While...

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Read This Before Your Next PR: Here we are talking about maxing out again. This is such a common question: how often should I test my max? And immediately after comes the question: how do I test my max? We could spend a week talking about these two things but we’ll give it a go in this...

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