Parts is Parts

One of the coolest things about weightlifting – well, for me – that keeps me coming back and never really being bored, is that there is always room for improvement… when you first start lifting weights the goal is to push or pull more and more weight… and then you realize that the pursuit of greater strength and pursuing the strongest your body can be is not merely in the amount of weight that is moved but it is in proper body position (foot position, knees, hips, shoulders, spine, neck, head position, etc. etc.), muscular engagement (core, back, chest, blah blah) and in the consistency of movement.

In fact, ignoring position, muscle engagement, and movement will often lead to injury and will always prevent the body from achieving its potential. This is where we get “stuck”. When we are young, we just want to see how much we can move... FORM BE DAMNED! I’ve just continued to do that – whatever means necessary to pull weight… and I have been stuck.

In January of this year, I was doing a deadlift and saw myself in the mirrors… back curved, shoulders wrapping forwards, “turtle” head poking up and out, butt tucked under… no wonder even light weight was getting harder to move. Even at 49, I was acting like all I had to do was just pull harder!! Force of WILL to make that bar move!! What I’ve learned since is that, If we want to do more… push beyond our current plateaus, then returning to refining and improving our position, movement, muscle engagement by breaking down the lift into smaller stages and identifying “problems” …

So, the last 9 or 10 months have been really hard for me.

I have been breaking down my lifts into the component parts… making sure i can see myself from the side and in front… I’ve been watching my lift and feeling what good form is, taking note of where I’m strong and really understanding where I’m weakest. I’ve been doing little sets of things like straight legged deadlifts, snatch grip deadlifts, “Dimmel” deadlifts, front squats, good mornings, etc. etc. focusing on great form and body position, going through the dialogue of engaging my muscles (hey, it helps me to “talk” to my core and my traps, etc.). I don’t do a lot of weight on these, just enough to work that “space” directly. I even dropped the weight on my heavier days to a place I could lift it without compromising the form… so I had to reduce my “max” for a period of time.

That was hard… was I getting “weaker”… at my age, losing strength is a hard thing to “make up”… the conversation internally around the paranoia of falling backwards is consuming… the ongoing challenge to part of how I have defined myself – I lift heavy weight – even though I KNOW no one but me really cares…

This was a big step for me - taking the time to work on the body’s position and allowing the proper movement to become the focus… and giving myself permission to let the weight itself become secondary. In that time, I’ve gotten stronger, hurt “less” and felt overall better… and in the last few weeks I’ve returned to my previous max… and I still struggle daily with letting it go.

When I work with start-ups or businesses where the owner and the founder have reached a “plateau” or are stuck or if the business is starting to fail or fall backwards, I go through a very similar process… we take apart all the steps and stages of the business or of key processes (usually, we end up looking at all the processes) and start to review where there are potentially some deviations from “best practices” often it is the result of a “short-term” work around that has become “how we do things”. I become the mirror and as they go through their “world” I reflect back where there may be room for improvement.

Often, like in lifting, this means focusing on smaller steps inside of a process in order to get stronger (better, faster, or eliminating… whatever) at the weakest places. I work directly with the folks responsible for those aspects of the business. Sometimes it is a lack of training, sometimes just a bad habit, sometimes laziness… Often it is because the boss has only focused on “get me that number” rather than “what do we need to get better”. It is hard to take a step back… it is difficult to set aside the “end result” to work in the steps (even if that end result is getting smaller or is stuck while the competition is growing).

When we start out, it is easy to just “muscle through” to push no matter how “ugly” to the end result… I will work on doing this right later, I need to get this out… but usually that “later” never gets attention… or worse, it becomes “it has always worked in the past” or “we’ve always done it this way”. These become mental barriers to which we become emotionally attached. It is hard to break these down.

It is difficult to set aside how we have defined ourselves for so long… but to progress, for things to improve, for business to survive, it requires an ongoing focus on defining and then pursuing perfection in movement, in position, and in the proper engagement of all resources.