What I Like About Powerlifting

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I’ve always been a runner, a solitary thinker who sifts through ideas on a trail, but as I moved through my twenties, I became more and more of a fair-weather runner. In winter I would put in the obligatory thirty minutes on a treadmill at the Y, but sometime after my first daughter arrived, I started thinking I needed to do more for my health, to try to stay in shape to be a capable father. I started taking Bootcamp and TRX classes at the Y, and this new calisthenics routine worked well for a couple of years.

Around the time my wife was pregnant with our second daughter, one Bootcamp instructor had the class doing deadlifts, and I struggled to lift the barbell with 45s—a big plate on either side, 135 pounds total, a good starting weight for deadlifting. I felt weak and started looking up proper form on the internet and talking to a pal I knew who weight-lifted. I found out my friend could deadlift about 400 pounds, which really made me feel even weaker. I’d stumbled onto a whole new world of fitness.

This is an essay about powerlifting, but it’s really an essay about what happens to you in middle age. Somewhere between twenty and thirty-five, life becomes more fragile. You don’t spring back like you used to. You can’t take for granted the relationships in your life, or that your friends who are in stable relationships will remain in stable relationships. You age out of the time of weddings and into the time where people struggle: with jobs, with having a child, with divorce. Older relatives start passing away. You might see a health scare. You want something to latch onto.

Most people who decide to take up lifting eventually discover one of two programs, Starting Strength or Strong Lifts 5×5. Both programs have the same general philosophy, which is that heavy weight for five reps is the way to build strength. Trainers in most gyms seem to promote lower weight for higher reps, perhaps out of liability concerns. Barbell training does require good form and some dedicated planning, but it also brings clarity to your gym routine. Low weight with high reps promotes hypertrophy—big muscles. High weight with low reps promotes dense muscles—a.k.a. strength. That was appealing now that I was regularly carrying around a toddler and all her gear.

In addition to sets of 5, the introductory lifting programs lean on a principle known as linear progression, or linear progressive overload. The idea is that if you squat a certain weight on Monday, you will stress your muscles enough that they need a couple of days of repair. When you go to squat on Wednesday, your muscles will have strengthened enough to lift a little more weight than they did on Monday. On Friday, more weight still, and so forth. There’s a limit to how far this type of approach can carry you, but most of us are completely untrained and will respond for a few months, and have the potential to get very strong, very fast.

After our second daughter was born, I let my gym membership lapse and set up a squat rack in the garage. My wife soon started joining me out there in the evenings, after the kids went to bed, and for a few years now we have been working out together, with a focus on the big three of powerlifting—squats, presses, and deadlifts. We end the evening drenched in the summer, and we need a space heater in the winter, but it’s been a consistent time for the two of us. Our children have slid through ages, from the naps and diapers of babyhood to the opinions and demands of preschoolers. Anyone who has gone through that in a marriage knows times get tense. You might stop communicating. There’s nothing like moving heavy weights around for a few hours a week, just the two of you, to find a kind of nuance in your marriage you never knew existed.

We both have hit some general plateaus. I’m nowhere near a 400-pound deadlift like my pal, though I hope to pull that weight around my 40th birthday. Still, we’ve both gotten much stronger than we ever were before. The real goal is to stay agile enough so we don’t wrench our backs while schlepping our children around. I also want to make sure I go into old age with some solid dense muscle so that when I start to shrink and shrivel up like a raisin, I won’t break something just from getting out of bed in the morning.

What I like about powerlifting is that it requires focus and planning, and has measurable results. There’s no more futzing around, going to the gym when convenient, and if you do go to the gym, there’s no more wandering around, doing a little leg press if the machine is free, and then maybe a few curls, and then maybe finishing up on the treadmill so you feel like you really got a sweat going. No, with powerlifting you know what you have on tap every day, and how much weight to put on the barbell, and how many reps and sets to do. Then you either lift the weight or you don’t. You track your progress over time, and you either lift heavier season by season or you don’t.

That kind of objective measurement is in short supply these days. We live in extremely fraught times, where technology is accelerating at an astonishing pace— and our culture is changing equally fast, albeit in fits in starts. By temperament, I prefer slow, incremental, but lasting change, yet every day there is some new scandal, some new qualification for being “woke,” and the new thing, as I write this, is “cancel culture,” when the Twitter mob comes for you and actively works to get you “canceled”—i.e., to silence you, get you fired, bury you. These are fraught times that make little sense, day-to-day. Things have gotten slippery and gray, which makes you want to hold onto something tangible.

Hence, powerlifting. You see in your workout notes, week by week, whether you put in the work. The days you felt a little sniffly and took it easy, or skipped the workout altogether. You see where you were being lazy, and you see, in black and white, the limits of your own body at a given time. Lifting more weight—from 135 to 185 to 225 to 275 to 315 pounds—takes work: hard work, disciplined work. It requires a habit. Three days a week every week for months on end. One hour, three times a week may not seem like much, but maintaining it consistently is where the wheat separates from the chaff.

At the end of every year, you have an objective accounting of what you have accomplished, or where you’ve slacked off. You watch the time pass, your hair starts to gray, your children grow up, and it’s all there in your notebook: a life measured out five reps at a time.

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