I bombed out of Nationals once.

Three squats. Three red lights. I stripped gear after each one trying to figure out what the judges needed from me. By the third attempt, I was in briefs and a singlet. Still three reds. My coach turned to the judges and asked what was wrong with the last one. They told him my depth was excellent.

Three red lights. No total. Done.

I know exactly what that feels like. The ride home. The silence. The way your mind runs back through every decision you made that day and every decision you made in the months before it.

And I can tell you this without any hesitation: the last thing you need in that moment is somebody kicking you while you're down. That should be obvious. It should not have to be said. But the way things have been going in this sport lately, it apparently does.

So let's talk about what this sport is actually supposed to look like. Not the drama. Not the callouts. The standard.

How You Treat Someone When They're Down

There is a version of trash talk that has always been part of competition. Two lifters are going back and forth before a meet. Rivals pushing each other, talking noise, competing hard on the platform. That has existed as long as there have been meets, and it has produced some of the greatest lifts in this sport's history.

That is not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is the moment after a bomb out, after a missed lift, after a bad day, when somebody who already knows they fell short is sitting there in the wreckage of something they worked months for. That is not the time to pile on. That is not a character flex. That is a character failure.

I have watched people bomb out, go nine for nine, pull incredible numbers, and miss everything in between. I have seen lifters at their absolute lowest points. What I learned from watching and from being there myself is that the people who stick in this sport long-term, the ones who actually build something that lasts, are the ones who understand the difference between competing hard and being spiteful.

Competing hard means going out there and trying to beat the other person on the platform. You use that competition as fuel. You post your best numbers and see where you stand. That is what this is supposed to be about.

Being spiteful means you wait for someone to fail and then use their failure to elevate yourself. It means treating someone's worst day as an opportunity. That is not competition. That has nothing to do with being strong.

Kenny Patterson and I trained together at Westside for years. We talked trash. Constantly. That was part of the culture, and we both knew it. But when a training partner missed a lift, when someone was dealing with an injury, when the day turned bad, you spotted them, you got them back under the bar, and you moved forward together. The trash talk and the real support were not contradictions. They existed at the same time because both came from the same place: we cared about the outcome.

The people who only show up for the wins are not competitors. They are spectators who found a way to make it about themselves.

What Coaching Actually Means

I have spent a long time coaching people. I take that seriously. Not because of the totals it produces, not because of what it does for any brand or platform, but because the person on the other side of that coaching relationship is trusting you with something real.

They are trusting you with their time. With their body. With goals they have told almost nobody else. When a lifter comes to you for coaching, your job is to earn that trust every single day. Not just on the days when they're performing well enough to make you look good.

If you are coaching people, every single person on your roster matters. Not just the ones with the highest dots scores. Not just the ones who are going to be on a big platform anytime soon. All of them. Because the standard you hold yourself to when nobody is watching is the actual standard you have.

If you only call your top athletes back, if you only give real feedback to the lifters who can make you famous, if the rest of your clients hear from you once every few weeks with something that amounts to "looks good, point your toes out," then you are not coaching. You are collecting people.

There is also something worth saying about the way some coaches talk about their own athletes. I would never say I made any of my lifters. That is not how this works. They come to you with what they already have. Your job is to help them find more of it. A good lifter who improved under your coaching did so because they put in the work, and you provided an environment and a system that supported that work. The credit belongs to both of you. But the athlete is always the one walking up to the bar alone.

When a coach starts treating athletes like trophies, like proof of their own greatness rather than people they have been given the responsibility to develop, the relationship is already broken. The athletes who thrive long-term in this sport will eventually figure that out. Sometimes it takes longer than it should. But they figure it out.

What Competition and Community Actually Are

Competition without community breeds toxicity. Community without competition breeds complacency.

Both things have to exist at the same time. You push each other. You try to beat each other. You hold each other to a higher standard by showing up and going hard. And at the same time, you understand that the person across from you on the platform is part of the same thing you are part of. They are not your enemy. They are the reason this matters.

When I was coming up, I wanted to beat the best. But I also needed the best. Without Louie, without the guys at Westside, without the people who pushed me harder than I could push myself, I would have found a ceiling a long time ago. Real competition sharpens you. Spite just drains you.

The coaches and athletes who try to make this a zero-sum game, who treat every other person in the space as a threat, who respond to anything that sounds like criticism as an attack, are going to burn themselves out. You cannot build something real on that foundation. You can get attention for a while. Attention and legacy are different things.

Legacy is what you pass on. It is the athletes who went through your program and came out better, not just stronger. It is the people in this sport who looked at how you carried yourself and decided to carry themselves the same way. It is the knowledge you gave freely, the standards you held yourself to even when nobody was watching, and the honest accounting you kept of where you fell short and what you learned from it.

The Standard Worth Keeping

I have had bad days on the platform. I have had bad days as a coach. I have made decisions I would change if I could. That is part of being in this sport for a long time. The record is not perfect and it should not be. What matters is whether you looked at the failures honestly, took what you could learn from them, and kept going with more information than you had before.

That is the Live, Learn, Pass On part of this. It is not a slogan. It is a framework for actually getting something out of decades in this sport rather than just spending them.

Live it. Fully. Including the bad meets, the hard calls, the relationships that didn't go the way you wanted them to.

Learn from it. Honestly. Without rewriting what happened to make yourself the victim.

Pass it on. The right way. Which means passing on something worth receiving.

The standard for how you treat people when they are struggling, how you take care of every athlete who trusts you, and how you compete without letting ego turn into cruelty, that standard does not regulate itself. It only holds if the people in this sport decide to hold it.

Some of us have decided.