29 Apr The Day I Was No Longer a Hardcore Powerlifter
By: Derek Wilcox
Since the age of 12 or 13 my life has been oriented toward becoming the best strength athlete that I could be. I was always exceptionally small playing sports growing up, which created the necessity for me to develop myself physically. Not only to play better, but also to hopefully not get killed on the field (stronger people are harder to kill, scientific fact). General weight training came into my life and from that moment on it was generally the most important thing in my world. Later on I found out about powerlifting competitions, and after doing a few high school bench press and clean competitions between other schools, this sounded like the most amazing thing that had ever been created. I developed a very competitive drive for lifting weights and this seemed like the perfect outlet for it.
My entire life revolved around powerlifting for many years after I graduated high school. I sacrificed my schooling, my work schedule (if it didn’t fit my training schedule, I would call in) and I constantly gave up social outings and interactions to make sure that I had enough rest to do as well as I possibly could in training the next day. It was a 24/7/365 commitment for me because that is what I believed it took to achieve my goals of one day breaking some sort of all-time world record and competing at the Arnold Sports Festival with the best powerlifters in the world one day. I understood that I was the epitome of skinny fat before beginning weight training, I knew that the road to these goals is going to be a long and steep one.
After years of living my life 100% committed to succeed in powerlifting and only powerlifting, I finally reached my goal of qualifying for the professional money meets that I had watched many years beforehand and had dreamed of being a part of. This is a very tough transition as you go from being one of the absolute best amateur level powerlifters in the world to being the absolute worst professional level powerlifter in the history of mankind. I know I’m not the only one who felt this way, but when this transition happened the pressure that I put on myself to try and compete with the professionals that had been in the money meets circuits for many years seemed astronomical. I essentially felt like the titan Atlas holding up the world with a 65-pound squat bar on my back.
I trained like a crazy person for the next year following the qualification for the big meets. Every little thing that I could do that I thought might make my lifts better I was going to do. Extra workouts, drilling technique constantly, reading every possible training article that I could find, probably bugging the crap out of the higher-level lifters that I had befriended (a couple of the guys on this team actually) and training hard 100% of the time. This is the life that you have to lead to be successful in strength sports, right?
Finally, my first big professional meet had come! I made all the arrangements and cut corners where I could financially because even though I was a completely broke undergrad student at Appalachian State University, I wasn’t going to let something as trivial like financial responsibility keep me from traveling a few states away to try and prove myself as one of the best powerlifters in the world. I showed up to the meet and oddly enough I wasn’t nervous. This is very strange to me because even before the smallest meets that I was excited for, I always got at least a little bit nervous.
I made my small weight cut to 198 and reconstituted easily before the next day but even the night before, the butterflies hadn’t kicked in yet. I went out for my first squat of 865 still without feeling any excitement or nervousness and I missed it. Even worse than that, it felt awful. I got it on my second attempt barely and got crushed by my third attempt of 900 pounds which I had worked with a couple times in training and never felt that bad. Onto my eternal nemesis, the bench press. I had successfully pressed 500 pounds in the two previous meets that I had been in smoothly and was hoping to end up around the 550 range. I opened it what I thought was a smart 485. First attempt, I come out and it didn’t seem like the shirt was set very well at all. I touched with great ease and simply had no pop off the chest, miss. No big deal! Just set the shirt up for some more support go back out there and crush it on my second, right? Not so much….. It seemed like my shirt had less pop than a mouse fart so I really needed to set up the shirt aggressively to get my third attempt and stay in the meet. I go out there for my third attempt, unrack the bar and began the descent down. The shirt locked up very hard and I had a lot of trouble touching, but once I finally did one more good mouse fart to barely see the bar move off my chest and that was it. I bombed out of my first big professional money meet. There was 16 years of buildup leading into this meet with expectations and imagining exactly what this moment would feel like, but I never thought that I would basically fall flat on my face. I was beyond depressed, and that made for a long ride home.
Post-meet depression is a very, very normal thing regardless of sport, but this was a pretty different situation. After I had missed all of my benches I took off my bench shirt, changed back into normal clothes and sat and contemplated what just happened in the warm up room. My first initial thought was that I had wasted over half of my life chasing something that ended up making me completely miserable. I was almost relieved that the event was just over with and I just wanted to go home. I had dumped all the money that I saved up over the previous several months into an effort that was a complete failure and the reality set in hard that by the time I got home I was going to have a bank account in the lower double digits until my next paycheck came. This is when it dawned on me how much I didn’t need powerlifting anymore. On that long quiet ride home by myself I committed 100% to never going back into a gym or signing up for meet unless I was excited about it. THIS was the day that I was no longer a hardcore powerlifter.
Sure, you can just point out that I had a bad meet and I was disappointed, but the crazy thing was that I didn’t have fun during all of the heavy training for the months leading up to the meet at all. That heavy training had previously been the most exciting thing in my life and I had somehow changed that with all the pressure that I was putting on myself to be that hardcore powerlifter I felt that I had to be every second of every day. It all just felt like work that I had to do for my own self-worth. However, if your own self-worth is dictated by just one thing, it won’t keep you happy for very long.
The entire next month I completely changed my approach and on average trained one or two times a week. Basically only training when I felt like it on a whim. I had no plan at all for my training for the first time and I just did whatever exercises that popped into my head that sounded fun and left. By the end of that month the old exciting thoughts of planning a training cycle leading into a meet half a year away were starting to creep into my head and it felt like a massive breath of fresh air. That excitement and enjoyment for the sport and the training had come back once I allowed myself to step away from the sport and truly believe that I was something without it for the first time in my life. The next training cycle that I had resulted in me achieving my first lifetime goal of breaking an all-time world record by squatting 935lbs in the 181lbs class.
The lift wasn’t quite up to my standards of quality if I am to be completely honest, but very few all-time world record lifts ever are. When you are trying to push farther than any other human being has successfully gone in history, you are essentially riding a lightning bolt that is unpredictable. I went into that meet with a big smile on my face, lowered expectations and a belief that no matter what happened on this day I was going to get to hang out with a lot of great people that I knew at the meet and still have a very fun time. I have consciously worked very hard to keep this positive approach in my training and in my competitions. It’s safe to say that it has served me much better than trying to be the hardcore powerlifter that I thought I had to be for success.
When you see my training videos and I’m doing something really goofy or I’m playing one of my guitars, basses or my mandolin it’s because I’m dedicated to making everything as fun as possible and emphasizing the Life in 10/20/Life. Hopefully those of you that read this article can learn from the mistakes that I made and save yourself all the mental anguish and generalship that I put myself through for no good reason. Find a way to train that makes you truly happy as well as find people to train with that make you truly happy with positive attitudes and remember to be a person that powerlifts and not only a powerlifter.
Derek Wilcox
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