I have gotten two (2) emails asking how I lift. Since Sherry is busy moving (in a snowstorm!), and lifting is on my mind anyway, we can take some time out to talk about it. One thing I'll say upfront, though, is that I am obediently following a trainer. I don't compose the program or have the experience to compare different kinds of programs. In emailing with a reader, we realized that I don't know the names of the training styles or people that came up with different parts of it. I pay my trainer for all that, and follow a strong-back, weak-mind practice. (Actually, this is increasingly untrue. I am finally familiar enough with some of it that I can do stuff and ask questions about its origin.) A lot of my attention goes to casting a busy-body eye over the gym. I watch relationships and other people's progress and moods a lot.
Since we've been focusing on powerlifting, our routine has been pretty simple:
Monday – deadlifting
Wednesday – bench press
Thursday – squat
Sat – speed work, usually bench press.
We max out, which is the part I love, for two weeks in each lift on a staggered schedule. Then we rotate into something different for a couple weeks, like a few sets of heavy triples, or lots of sets of medium weights, trying to get a lot of speed on the lifting part of the exertion. Sometimes we use large elastic bands, pulling against the lift, so it gets harder as you do it (at 41 seconds, and yes we do that very bendy arch for benchpress). The other thing we seem to do a fair amount is accustom the body to really heavy weight. We’ll stand holding bars twice what we could squat or deadlift across our yokes for several seconds. Sometimes we'll practice slowly lowering weights that are heavier than we could lift.
Mostly, I'm enjoying the details, which I love. I don't know if this is what the emailers are interested in, maybe you want pounds and reps and rest times, but I don't think about those for long. I kinda just watch me, for surprises. In the past few months, we've realized that I take a ton of warming up to lift well. Other people can go straight to something near their heavy weights and start closing in on a max. Not me, man. If I want to get up to 250, apparently I have to lift every thirty pounds along the way. I'm trying to find visualizations that work. Dork that I am, I’ve been imagining (blushing to admit)(um, really blushing now) vector arrows pointing up my quads. Thick ones, to show magnitude. I pay attention to how I rest between sets. I've found that unless I decide to do something different, I want to go into down dog. I wait in this squat a fair amount, which I think must be countering the arch. There's something interesting nearly every time. Last week we were doing bench presses, bringing our hands narrower after each rep. At one width, I could pop the bar right up. A single finger's width narrower and I couldn't move it for love or money. That must be the transition between pecs and triceps, and who knew it was such a sharp line.
The other things I've been especially enjoying recently are the incidental gestures becoming engrained and familiar. These gestures aren't the point, but they're the mark of time spent. They're shaped by necessity, but it takes repetition to make them fluid. I suppose my own don't count quite yet, because I am still attending to them. But I approach a racked bar and watch my hand line up, middle finger to smooth ring. Loading and unloading the bar, hearing the ring of the weights going on. Handing a ten across to the other loader. You do that enough times and eventually you look like a powerlifter even before you heft any weight. I've seen it before, in the pivot of a martial artist to straighten her uniform without facing a black belt, or in Ultimate players clapping mud out of their cleats. So I like watching the gestures develop in a new sport.
That's where my mind is, what practice is like for me. I suppose if Sherry is busy moving for a while, we could talk about how surprising it is to lift heavy things. How the lift is normal, whatever, sure it takes some work, but dude you're just doing it like always, and then you get up to real weight and imprecisions you never detected become huge and knock you over. Or what it feels like at failure. Or how you suddenly understand that the earth is pulling on you and it is really big and you are so small. It is good for a soul to understand about implacable forces and finite bodies, I think.