07 Dec Harness Your Internal Fire, But Don’t Burn Yourself
By Tucker Loken
There is a big difference between people who have had a successful run in gym athletics and have decided to hang up their trunks, or singlet or what have you, and the people that burn out because of stress and the mentality they have towards competing. We’ve all seen the bikini girl Facebook status where she says this will be her last competition because although she loves the sport, the pressure she puts on herself and the mindset she takes on is toxic. Then there is the guy who’s been injured over and over and finally decides it’s enough and he’s tired of limping around every day and wants a normal life.
There are some outliers – girls who genuinely had a good coach and everything set up well around them and they just had to be honest that they had some body issues that needed to be addressed and competing was only exacerbating the problem, or guys who had a history of injuries from other sports and just felt like competing wasn’t realistic anymore. For most of them you can look at their training/diet style, their approach to prep, the coaches and people they surround themselves with and pinpoint where all the undue stress and misery is coming from and how it’s ruining what was supposed to be a fun hobby.
Below are what I’ve seen to be the two biggest culprits – bad coaching and bad mindset.
Bad coaching or programs:
Ah yes, the idiot coach, you knew this would be top of the list. There are a lot of variations of just how bad a coach can be. They can be the psycho coach who emphasizes tons of volume and intensity and leave most of their clients hurt, or over-trained, with a few exceptional freaks that respond and perform well. They can be the lazy coach who just doesn’t reply in a timely manner and doesn’t give people the direction they need. The most common one I see is the coach who just doesn’t have enough knowledge, or experience and as a result puts their clients into some very miserable circumstances.
When I’ve looked over a lot of clients’ or friends’ previous programs they got from coaches, or heard about their experiences, the thing I can’t stand most is when you can clearly see the coaches ego getting in the way of the health of the client. Everyone wants to be the coach that took someone from overweight to contest shape, or helped someone put 150lbs on their total, but not every client will be like that. Bodybuilding and powerlifting are very similar in that the body moves in waves of intensity and performance. You can only get so strong out of one meet prep, and then back off and prepare for another cycle where you make PR’s.  You can also only get so lean in a bodybuilding prep. Especially with beginners, the body will get so stubborn that they will have to do unreasonable amounts of cardio and eat so little to get the extra fat off that the ends don’t justify the means. This would be when a responsible coach would have to recognize this is all they will get out of the prep. If the client looks decent and won’t make a fool of themselves, they can still have the client hop on stage and not take first in class, but use it as a learning tool to get the nerves out and another stepping stone towards the next show. If the client doesn’t look good, it’s time to pack it up, maintain their body fat level and bulk for a few months to reset everything, and then get after it again. Unfortunately, because they don’t want to be the coach that didn’t get someone in shape, they push and push to get their client on stage, and the competitor ends up looking like junk in the end anyways.
Sometimes you can fault ignorance for this, the coach may just not understand that that’s the way the body works and perhaps they’ve been trained that way and train others that way. The fact is, pleading ignorance doesn’t absolve you from the crime. You’re still a crap coach and still ruining the process for a lot of people that could have enjoyed themselves and made this a lifetime hobby.
Although it is the client’s responsibility to keep an open mind and learn about better training and coaching strategies, you can’t fully blame people for getting burnt out on this kind of coaching.  It’s no wonder that when the powerlifter thinks every time they prep for a meet they are in for 12 weeks of brutal soreness and CNS burn out that they won’t enjoy it.  In the same breath, the bodybuilding/figure competitor thinks it’ll be 3 months of starvation, hours of cardio and grumpy/foggy-headedness, all to either perform poorly – I wouldn’t want to do it anymore either.
Bad mindset:
If bad coaching wasn’t enough, this one will surely do them in. Often it’s the bad mindset of trying to push their hardest and abuse their body that leads people towards coaches that will abuse their body as well. Bodybuilding and powerlifting often attract people who are obsessive and hardworking to a fault. Beyond doing themselves in with overtraining, they criticize and overly nitpick at their physique, or their strength. I can think of a handful of people that I’ve trained who’s mindset would constantly be their own worst enemy. I had a guy who would constantly over train and change his diet before I told him to. It might have only been doing an extra session of cardio that week, or a light workout, or dropping some carbs from one of the meals that I might be planning on pulling from, but it showed his obsession and lack of willpower to follow through listening to a coach. He was always getting headaches and feeling tired, and the burden could only be placed on him because when I would ask about his workouts, he never took the day off that I told him he should have, and his body suffered for it.
I had a girl who was very slim, to the point that when she got ready for a show she just looked boney. I really wanted to have her train her upper body more and get more food in so that her shoulder blades wouldn’t always pop out from her back and her ribs, collar bone and shoulders wouldn’t look so gaunt from the front. Week after week she barely gained weight though, and it was always a similar excuse – she didn’t have the appetite, she got off work late and forgot to eat, she just really likes doing morning cardio because it eases stress…etc. etc.
Both are great people and I would still consider them friends, but also people with a lot of potential who burnt out because of their own doing. Often times the bad mindset competitor doesn’t even need a coach to ruin the process for them, they do it all on their own.
There are other reasons people burn out and stop competing, but in my experience I found these to be the two most difficult ones to watch. I can say this though, speaking as someone who’s struggled with having bad coaching as well as an obsessive mind state, that research and curiosity are the keys to being free from these kinds of things. Finding other reputable coaches to work with and talking with people better than you, trying to emulate them can really help. Pro bodybuilders and powerlifters who want to make it a lifetime profession don’t work until they are on the edge of burning out, they make it a manageable lifestyle. If that’s how the pros do it, that’s how we all should be doing it. Patience and a relaxed demeanor is usually the best way to approach anything, especially a hobby that you love and enjoy. If you follow that up with hard work and dedication, that’s the recipe for long term success and a healthy relationship with the weights.
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