Lifting slowly

Because going hard at 43 hurts.

I just fucked my knee up in the gym. Again. Had to pack up and go. I was in the middle of a set of clean and jerks and then CRUNK, shooting but familiar knee pain.

“Bollocks.” Home we go.

I’ve been lifting weights for about 25 years or so and focusing mainly on Olympic weightlifting for the past 7ish. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I cannot train sensibly. I simply cannot stick to a sensible, gradual plan for more than 6 months at most, before I’m off chasing bigger numbers.

The problem is, unless I’m pushing myself to a limit – my limit – I don’t feel like it’s worth it. Now, I’m very familiar with the scientific literature around training and I know, in my brain, that that’s not true or sensible. I know that properly programmed, periodised, programming with incremental weight increases is the best way to long-term success.

But I’m impatient and stupid.

Olympic weightlifting is hard. I mean, it’s really fucking hard. Not only do you need tremendous explosive power, but you need to couple it with at least some very ample flexibility. I don’t have much of those. In all the years I’ve been doing snatches and clean and jerks, in any committed sense, it’s always felt janky. It hurts. I can feel I’m always pushing my body to its limits, whether in a range of motion sense or a pure power sense. Snatch balances make my shoulders and wrists cry. Catching a clean in the bottom makes me wince for my knees. Jerks for reps fill me with dread.

But not all the time.

Sometimes, about 10% of the time, it feels incredible. When you hit a lift, and it just flows. The bar path is crisp. You time your movements just right and move fluidly around the bar and everything falls into place, almost effortlessly. You put everything into making the lift.

At those moments it feels like nothing else. All the pain is gone. It’s just elation. That 90% of being at the front of the Struggle Bus was worth it.

But 90% of work being worth it for at best 10% of the time is starting to feel like it’s not enough.

I know full well that I cannot but help to gravitate towards training at or close to my max. Because everything else just feels lame. Even though logically I know the training and practice and technique refinement all make a vast contribution, small weight on bar make sad, big weight on bar make happy.

So I push. I hit maxes. I punish my body a little more to chase that 10% feeling more often.

The outcome is inevitably injury. Time off. And no weight on bar. Which also make sad.

This stupidity carries over to other things as well. When I wanted to do “Couch to 5k” I literally got off the couch and made myself run 5k. When I want to move to 10k I just made myself run 10k. Was it pleasant? No. It hurt. But I got a little bit of the 10% joy right after. Stupid.

At 43 I know this isn’t sustainable. At 43 I know this self-inflected misery for an occasional high of achievement is almost certainly ego-driven. I don’t really like team sports for the same reason, because I don’t get that feeling of me pushing me. And at 43 I know this has to stop.

Now I have no idea what I’m actually going to do, or how to stop pushing quite so hard and still get that feeling of satisfaction, but I’m going to try. I’m actually still sitting here in my gym kit because I wanted to get this down immediately. See, impatient.

Yeah, I know, fitness for health, yada yada, but that’s boring. Loading up and moving a bar with big numbers is just fun. It’s always fun. But only briefly. So, here’s to finding a way to take it more slowly. To trying to find a way to be happy with smaller numbers and, erm, stuff.

(FFS, I’m bored just writing the concept down… this is going to be a bumpy one.)

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