Photo Credit: Alora Griffiths @aloragriffiths
The Biggest Powerlifting Fears
Fear of injury under heavy weight Fear of competition Fear of success Fear of the weight Fear of being judged Fear of failure Fear of expectations
Here’s the thing.
You can’t control who you compete against. You can’t control how you are judged. You can’t control expectations outside of your own. So a big chunk of this list you have no control over. You can control your training, your education, your experience, your mind, your choices, your actions and how all-in you want to go. This clears out even more of the fears.
When you lift heavy weight one of three things can happen:
1. You get hurt
2. You make the lift
3. You miss the lift
Looking closer, powerlifting has a lower injury rate compared to other sports (endurance training has around 10-12 injuries per 1000 hours while PL somewhere around 4 per the same hours). Yes, I’ll be the first to say that if you strive to be the best, or even the best you can be, you will get hurt. It’s not a matter of if: you will. BUT, the odds of this being acute while under heavy weight are far lower than other sports.
Go to any meet and you can see for yourself the number of acute injuries during all the lifts performed are not very high. Not enough to create anywhere near the fear it does in people. Let’s just say injury could happen in 10% of all heavy lifts - and that’s a very high guess.
If you've done the work, you've done your training, and you’ve selected reasonable training weights and max weights, the odds you will miss are also very low. Let’s make this a bit higher because weird shit can happen and it takes time to really learn how to auto-regulate. You may miss a lift 10% of the time.
This means you have (based on my crappy stats and math) an 80% chance you will make the weight if you totally commit to it. That’s assuming the WORST!
How can you be scared with those odds?
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