Powerlifting - why start and continue with it in training

Or why everything starts and ends with it

Me, Atlanta, 2011, a world champioship, by one of the federations.

To be honest, I did try to start from a different point. The garage needed some work to become a garage gym, and it hasn’t been done since we moved here. Not the most inviting environment to train in. The AC - essential for my life - is not installed, the place is cluttered and dirty, and so, for one year, I kept away from it. My first attempts to exercise after August 2022 were with bodyweight exercises at home, sometime in 2023. My strategy was to design a really basic little routine and gradually build on it. It didn’t work. Pain was at its worst then, and, believe it or not, these little bodyweight exercises hurt much more than a squat or a deadlift. There was much more instability in them, especially around the hips, and soon I abandoned the project. By the end of the year the pain had changed, with the lumbar area more affected than the hips, and, although still managing pretty intense flare-ups, I could finally walk again. That was awesome. Not being able to walk, from 2020 to 2023, exacerbated the feeling of being trapped, stuck, and locked up. Walking again smelled like freedom, autonomy, and self-determination. Soon the warm weather came back, and walking outdoors, again, had to stop. 

A couple of months ago, in May, I went to Planet Fitness twice. It was weird. Ok, and weird. Pain bothered me, the new machines bothered me, my body bothered me. I planned to keep going there twice a week, but that didn’t work either: the first time I had transportation problems and couldn’t go, I headed to my garage and started to lift.

I remember that first session. It was like suddenly “things” were falling back into place. What things, I don’t exactly know. I remember the weird feeling of squatting, and how it felt, at the same time, “unusual”, and extremely familiar. Same with the bench press and the deadlift. That familiarity felt like home, more than any experience I had since I left Brazil in 2015. There was something I recognized there, something… it was me! There I was - older, weaker, sicker, but still me, now I could see.

When I started writing about powerlifting, back in 2006 or 2007, people were intrigued by my description of the lifting experience as “transcendent”. Lots of people were intrigued because lots of people read what I wrote then. First of all, because I existed in the world as an independent individual, a professional, a scientist with her own career, a teacher, and then an athlete. And what I described about being inside a lift looked a lot like a psychedelic or meditation-induced altered state experience. I was talking about a radical integrative experience, making powerlifting a radical integrative practice for me. It is that for other people, too, and I met some along the way. For others, something similar happens with mountain climbing, or running, or jumping. 

There were several stages to this transcendent experience, and the climax was what I called the “perfect lift”. The perfect lift is not defined by the heavyness of the loaded bar, but by something that happens while it is going on: at a heightened level of focus, my awareness of everything expands out of myself, and suddenly I am one with the Olympic bar - and the ground, the bench, and maybe even me are not separate things anymore. I become movement itself. Strength itself. That is absolutely glorious, and very rare. Worth pursuing for the rest of my life. 

In those early writings, I described how the perfect lift and its transcendence didn’t last long, and soon I was back into myself again. However, while it was happening, I didn’t feel time the same way, and space and the limits of things exploded into completely different experiences. It was a timeless, spaceless state. Maybe it lasted only fractions of a second, but I experienced it as eternal.

To the inevitable question about my use of psychedelics, yes, I did make use of them since I was a teenager and still do, but the perfect lift is performed only when I’m totally sober, and I’m sure there are no flashbacks. 

It’s a very relevant and very meaningful body experience. Nothing substitutes it. I guess we can safely say that this, alone, makes the power lifts the best choice as a starting point for recovery and retraining for me. 

I still believe that the power lifts, as well as the Olympic weight lifts, are awesome tools in training in general: they are highly transferable to other motor tasks, they are standardized gestures, favoring skill development and safety, and they are free weight movements, addressing coordination, proprioception, spatial awareness, and agility. I need all this back in full power, of course. The lifts are not the only items in a trainer’s toolbox for that purpose, though. Other tools and other strategies could be devised.

Not for me. Maybe at another time. Now, I guess, I need the strength, the power, the stability, and the coordination that the lifts provide, but I also need integration and meaning, and apparently, only the lifts can give me that.