Owning It

I step up to the squat rack and slide under the barbell. I find my position, placing my hands on the bar snug against my shoulders, the cool smooth metal against the back of my traps.

I take a deep breath, straightening against the bar as I brace, and lifting it off of the rack in the process.

"Whoa that's heavy," slides through my mind before I can stop the thought.

I take an assertive step back, first with my right foot, then with my left foot, to give myself room away from the rack. Without moving my neck, my eyes look down to make sure my feet are even. I twitch my right heel first to get it into position, then my left heel so that it matches, a movement that almost every powerlifter I have ever watched also does when getting ready to squat.

It's cool to feel like I'm part of this club that I've been silently wanting to belong to for the last year.

The entire class has stopped to watch, including both of our head coaches. Coach A, who has been teaching me the Olympic lifts (if you follow on IG, I just posted about my lessons with her today), stands some 15' away in front of me to check my form, and her husband Coach D has stepped behind me to spot me. If I fail the lift, he is there to help catch the bar.

We are doing one-rep maxes for The Big Three aka powerlifts: squat, deadlift and bench press. Except I was the only one in the class that was cleared to attempt one-rep maxes. You have to have consistently good form with heavier weights in order to graduate to 1RM.

"You are ready," Coach A had declared with a smile. It is the biggest compliment of my hard work that I have received since joining this gym.

I thought of that scene in Karate Kid when he's finally finished waxing the car:

Miyagi: "Now ready?"
Daniel: "Yeah, I guess so."
Miyagi: *sighs* "Daniel-san, we must talk."
Both of them kneel.
Miyagi: "Walk on road, hm? Walk right side: safe. Walk left side: safe. Walk middle: sooner or later *squish*" Get squished just like grape. Here karate, same thing. Either you karate do "yes" or karate do "no." You karate do "guess so": *squish* Just like grape. Understand?"
Daniel: "Yeah, I understand."
Miyagi: "Now, ready?"
Daniel: "Yeah, I'm ready."

That conversation translates directly to lifting. You either do the lift or you don't. If you do "guess so" when lifting, you can quite literally get squished.

"Now ready?"
"Yeah, I'm ready."

I contract my abs, bracing, and step into a slightly wider stance. I take a deep breath, turning my core into a solid trunk that will stay upright and firm under the weight of the barbell...and slowly sink.

Down, down, down, into the deep dark depths of the hole.

Pause at the bottom. The bottom of the squat, also known as 'the hole,' is the part that will make or break you: you have to be able to come back out of it.

Hanging out in the hole in a different squat on a different day with 155 lbs on the bar.

"Own it," I tell myself.

"You've got this!" Coach D says behind me.

I slowly invoke every muscle in my glutes, quads and hamstrings to engage and force my knees out as I start to grind back up, pushing against the weight of the barbell like a diver struggling to reach the surface of the water from the darkest depths of the sea, exhaling my breath in a hiss between my teeth.

"Go go go go!" both coaches say in unison.

I straighten up all the way. "GOOD JOB!" Coach D places his hands on the bar to help steady it as I walk it back into the rack. I slide out from underneath the bar and lean against the now warm iron. My heart is pounding and I'm breathing hard.

And I have the most enormous grin on my face. I just stand there grinning like an idiot because there isn't enough happy jumping in the world to show how I feel right then. Coach A and Coach D see my expression and laugh.

I had just squatted 185 lbs, almost exactly 1.5 times my body weight, to correct depth, which used to be my biggest struggle last year when I did the powerlifting block with Trainer: I could never hit depth.

Well, I had just changed that.

And everyone was celebrating for me and with me.

Guys. It was amazing.

"Was that good?" I ask the coaches.
"Yes!" Coach A says. "Except that you felt the heavier weight and went into a wider stance than for your warm-up sets."

We discussed the cons of this. It was a bad habit I had developed with Trainer back when I tore my left glute last November: the wider stance under heavier weight used to allow me to guard the injury.
"Can I do it one more time to fix it?" I ask.
"Yes," Coach A says. "But take a couple of minutes resting first!"

The rest of the class goes back to working on their 5-rep maxes. Four minutes go by and Coach D returns to spot me.

I do everything exactly the same, except that this time I don't allow myself to have even the most fleeting thought about the weight of the barbell, and I don't take a wider stance before getting ready to squat.

Coach A was right: it was so much easier when I used my regular stance. With my current strength levels, a too-wide stance makes it more likely for my knees to cave in. (This is a HUGE no. Squatting enormous amounts of weight won't kill your knees. Allowing your knees to cave while squatting, will.) Having a slightly narrower squat stance (aka my normal) makes it easier to engage my glutes to keep my knees from caving in.

Granted, "easy" is a relative term when you're squatting 185 lbs for the first time in almost a year.

We moved on into the deadlift.

Just like with the squat, I had three opportunities to go up in weight before hitting my goal for the one-rep max. Once I had that goal weight, I had one attempt to complete the lift.

A month prior, I had set a one-rep max of 185 lbs during a deadlift WOD in the gym. For the past month, I've been doing a deadlift protocol with Hybrid Performance Method that is intended to make your deadlift stronger. In my case, it's a double whammy: all of the accessory work for deadlifts in this particular program strengthens the entire posterior chain (back, rear shoulders, glutes and hamstrings), which is my weakest link. A lot of the accessory work is also exactly what I would be doing if I was training to graduate to unassisted pull-ups (another goal of mine.) I've honestly been thrilled with this program so far...and I had recently turned 185 lbs into my bitch by pulling it for reps!

I had one drawback against me now: I had just done heavy squats, which had exhausted my lower body. BUT: this is the format for powerlifting competitions. This was my opportunity to really get a feel for it.

In light of where my strength felt to be at, I decided I would aim to repeat my 185 lb 1RM instead of trying to one-up it. I was given free rein to choose between sumo or conventional stance for pulling deadlift, and of course I chose sumo.

This was a huge argument back in the day with Trainer: to sumo or not. Bodybuilders think that pulling sumo (with your legs spread apart) is "cheating" because it shortens the distance that you have to pull the bar. The truth is: no. Anatomically it is easier for some people because the bar doesn't have to clear your knees as much as in conventional. For someone who is both short-waisted and long-legged like me, and who is also used to engaging quads with legs spread out for things like horseback riding, pulling sumo for deadlifts is a piece of cake compared to conventional.

Conventional setup on the left, sumo on the right. You can see what I mean about having to clear the knees with conventional.

Me pulling sumo. 145 lbs on the barbell.

I progressively went up in weight for my three opening sets, with the third set being at 175 lbs. My right quad was pissed by then. I bumped up the weight by 5 lbs, hoping to make it to at least 180. I positioned my feet so that they lined up with the marks on the barbell, squatted down and wrapped my hands around the knurled portion of the bar. I sat back, rolled my shoulders backwards to engage my lats, and gave a slight tug to pull the slack out of the bar. I then took a deep breath, braced, and pulled up.

The bar left the ground...all of two inches. My right quad went, "STOP!" and I obeyed: I dropped the barbell.

We called it then. My 1RM for this class was 175 lbs.

I was not upset at all though. I was simply glad that I had listened to my body: there was something tweaked in my right quad and it was better to rest it now while it was minor than try for a maximal effort and really injure myself in the process.

I didn't get to attempt bench press that day because by then we had run out of time for the Strength class. The WOD was coming up next and it was all snatch barbell complexes that I was super excited to work on as well. Again, not upset: my upper body strength for bench press is pretty wimpy right now and I'd rather build it up some more before truly attempting my 1RM for it again.

This all happened about a month ago.

Yesterday I pulled 190 lbs in the deadlift for reps...conventional.

190 lbs on the bar.

And so continues my journey with the barbell. :)