Recently, I’ve been on a 10-week decline in the gym. It began with a powerlifting meet that I entered back in November. I had been sick the entire week leading up to the competition. I had downed almost two bottles of NyQuil and felt about as run down as I’ve ever been.
My initial course of action was to pull out because I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be anywhere close to a record setting day for me. However, a late night phone call from one of my training partners persuaded me to suck it up and head down the next morning to lift. It was a push-pull meet so I figured I could pull off a decent day and maybe hit a PR or two in the process. I should have known better.
Warm ups were rough. Every weight I took out felt heavy. I was shaky on all of my repetitions. Long story short, I made my opener and then proceeded to get buried on my second attempt with a weight that would have been a 5-lb PR. I passed on my third attempt and pulled out of the meet. I didn’t see any big deadlifts happening that day.
I was as mad and frustrated as I had ever been about anything in my life. I was mad for trying to compete when I was sick. I was mad that I barely made my opener with a weight that I had repped only two weeks earlier. I was maddest for wasting time, energy, and mental confidence by competing in a meet that I wasn’t prepared for. I made it up in my mind that I would train harder and smarter than ever before starting that very next day.
My first few training sessions went well because I brought plenty of intensity with me each day, and I had a well thought out plan for each workout that I executed with precision. I decided to begin training in the mornings as opposed to the evenings because the crowds at my gym were out of control. I also figured that the change up might spur some new growth because I had been training in the evening for so long.
The first few days went okay, but as the weeks passed, my strength levels started to drop off. I tried to offset this by once again moving my training to the late afternoon, but I ended up experiencing the same if not more strength deterioration. I then decided that the training environment needed to be changed because I was becoming more and more frustrated with the crowds and douche bag trainers instructing their clients to perform paddy cake, hold my hand lunges on top of a stability ball. I joined a fantastic facility that had excellent equipment with an atmosphere that was conducive to hard and heavy training. Still, my lifts continued to plummet.
Everything from my deadlift to my floor press to my T-bar row was decreasing, and I was extremely pissed about it. What the hell was going on? I trained the same (if not harder). I ate the same, I slept plenty, and I kept the rum and cokes to a minimum. I was completely baffled. It was affecting my attitude at work. It was affecting my relationships with friends, co-workers, and even my wife.
So this is the part where I tell you how I persevered, how I now lift more than I’ve ever lifted in my entire life, and how my plans to take a run at Matt K’s total in the 220-lb class came to fruition as well as my plans to try out for the Packers and fight Kimbo Slice. The truth is that even as I write this, I am still trying to figure out how to proceed. I started by submitting my sob story to Jim Wendler because I figured he’d been through this type of thing before. After first advising me to up the dose, he went on to provide some great insight into this fairly common predicament that we all face from time to time. His remedy was simple. He told me to take time off, reevaluate current strength levels and new plans to increase them, take some time to do only what you enjoy doing at the gym, and most importantly to me, quit putting so much pressure on yourself.
The last one—quit putting so much pressure on yourself—hit home for me more than all the others. I didn’t consider the gym and my lifts as defining who I was. Or did I? Was the fact that my squat had dropped off really so much a part of who I was that I was acting differently toward those around me? If I had a bad day at the gym, did that excuse being an asshole to my wife that night? I realized that I had been struggling with this for quite some time and hadn’t even realized it. Most likely, this was the biggest factor in my 10-week train wreck of a training cycle. I just needed to cool it, plain and simple. I needed to regress back a couple of years to a time before I started competing, when lifting was just an activity that I enjoyed and a tool that I used to take out anger and relieve stress.
I decided to take a completely new approach to my training that mirrored my days of old. I purchased Jim Wendler’s three-day a week book to begin using the 5/3/1 template because everyone and their sister’s cousin seem to be raving about it. Will it work? Time will certainly tell.
I plan on writing a follow up in 12 weeks to see where I’ve progressed to. I am confident that the gains will come back. Changing one’s entire way of thinking and altering a training mentality that has been etched into my brain for the past seven years hasn’t and won’t be easy. My peace of mind comes from knowing that my old ways of thinking and stubborn approaches to training are what got me to the position I’m in now. I’m pretty sure things can’t get any worse, so what the hell, right? Besides, if it doesn’t work out, I can always take Wendler’s original advice and up the dose.
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