Assessing and Correcting Failures

When a person fails at a lift, there could be dozens of reasons as to why. One could guess and wonder, but the truth is if you spend your effort in an a way that fails to address the core problem, it's effort wasted. One of my favorite things is to attack weaknesses, but before you do, you have to know what the weakness is. Taking aspirin all day won't help if you've got the flu.


A few caveats: firstly, we're talking about max effort stuff. Form will break down on repetitive effort because of muscle exhaustion, not necessarily any of the things we talk about here. Secondly, we always talk about how on ME attempts, form will go out the window. While that is true to an extent, ignoring systemic form errors will not be good. For example: with the problem of squat-mornings, if you have it ingrained as part of the lift, that's bad. If it happens as a consequence of straining on the way up, that's less bad.


That being said, I would suggest a priority of assessment to determine things:

1. Form- do you have pretty good form? Have someone cue you, watch you, coach you until it's automatic. We all have form weaknesses, so learning cues and being coached will help, especially early on. Yes, falling forward in the squat can be a sign of weak abs or lower back or whatever you think it could be, but sometimes it's just that you haven't learned to arch hard and consistently. You wind up squat-morning the weight. If it's form and you think it's musculature, you might get really strong abs that allow you to squat morning a little more weight rather than learning the actual form and squatting a lot more.

2. Spot failure or Sticking Points- where do you fail? There's tons of references for if you fail here on this lift, this is why, so I won't enumerate. Googling the phrase "sticking points deadlift" will give you ideas for that. Going back to falling forward in the squat- maybe your abs and lower back do need more work. Add in the accessory work here to help with this. In fact, this should be a guiding reason for your accessory work- what are my muscular weaknesses? There are some other issues that play into this- different muscles taking over, not being able to utilize core muscle, etc, but those are for a different post.

3. Lack of neural conditioning- perhaps part of the reason you fail is because you don't practice the actual movement pattern enough. This is one of the reasons I love the Westside Method. Hitting squat and bench twice a week ingrain those movement patterns. This is related to form, but it has more to do with frequency. The better a lifter you are the more important it is you lift often to keep up the pattern and be able to increase the weight. Now, every time isn't ME or even DE. You may just do a 5x5 squat with 50% of your 1RM on days you don't have a ME squat.

4. Mental toughness- are you just not grinding? Is it wimping out when you could finish? This is one that's hard to teach. I have a post that I'm working on addressing the idea of developing mental toughness that will actually teach you a few tricks that I've had success with. I'm going to try and avoid fluffy posts that promise to address a topic but never give you ideas of what to do.


5. Form- let's face it, even the most advanced lifters have form issues. Get on it. Few of the strongest guys have never lifted with somebody to help. Being great requires external critiques by others who are stronger or smarter. If you have a 500 lb squat, don't listen to the kid who quarter squats with 315, and don't ignore the guy who can only do 315 but clearly knows his stuff. Distinguishing between them isn't always easy, but keep a look out for phrases like "ignites metabolism" or "stability balls" and run the other way.


Failing at a lift is almost never a bad thing (assuming you can avoid injury). Failures should be viewed as opportunities to grow, but you need to assess them correctly. 

Intro

What's up?

I'm byukid. I post on reddit and t-nation. I'm  working on getting stronger and better at everything I do. This blog is just a place for me to post some general ideas about training, recovery, programming and nutrition. I figure if SilverHydra can have his own blog, why not me?

I can't promise consistent updates, but you can check up on my training here (fitocracy) or here (t-nation). Those both get updated pretty consistently.

My philosophy isn't radically unique: lift heavy things a lot, lift heavier things, lift not as heavy things faster, and hammer weaknesses. I will go over how I brought my bench up from 315 to 365, got my squat from 545 to 605, and my deadlift from 555 to 585(I'll be straight up, the deadlift is my favorite, but worst lift) all in 3-8 weeks.

I lift at the BYU gym and occasionally with some other powerlifting types. I'm eyeing a competition coming up early next year in Nebraska. Utah needs its own competitions though, because the closest ones are 8-10 hours away.

And so that's that for the intro.

Stay strong, stay swole, stay growing.