Why Modern Powerlifting is Falling Apart

Dave Tate | Table Talk

I told every woman I dated the same thing before things got serious. Powerlifting is first. You'll always be second. I meant it. I was proud of it. And I paid for it almost to the point of losing everything that actually mattered.

We have that conversation a lot in this sport. Not the regret part. The pride part. Guys wear their obsession like a badge, and for a long time, I did too. But sitting across from a lifter who's navigating that same territory now, watching him wrestle with the same questions I refused to ask myself for years, I started to wonder how many of us are doing the same damage I did and calling it commitment.

That question kicked off a longer conversation on Table Talk that went well past the personal stuff. We ended up talking about the state of multi-ply powerlifting, where it's headed, and what's at the root of a sport that seems to be pulling itself apart from the inside. Watch the full conversation here:

When the Bar Comes Before Everything

My wife trained at Westside. Night crew. I trained mornings. I kept it that way on purpose. I didn't want her at my meets. I had this idea that the platform was my thing, my space, and if she was part of it, I'd lose something. Looking back at it now, that says a lot more about what I was dealing with internally than it does about any reasonable plan for a relationship.

Speed bench was Sunday. Easter falls on Sunday. There was not a single Easter I was there for in those years. Christmas can fall on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Sunday. Same math, same answer every time. The bar won. Everything else got scheduled around it.

The short version is this: I came close to losing my marriage. Not close like a warning sign. Close like it was almost gone. And it was only when it was almost gone that I realized I had nothing to fall back on. Not even lifting. I'd already started stepping back from competing. So I'd traded the family for the bar, and the bar was going away anyway.

What I eventually learned, the hard way and too late, was that real communication was never there. I heard what I wanted to hear. I framed every family conflict as small compared to a training session. The Easter basket will be there when I get home. That's exactly the kind of thinking that erodes everything around you until you're standing in the wreckage wondering what happened.

The underlying issue was simple. I was a selfish guy who had convinced myself that selfishness was discipline.

There's a version of that story that's actually true. Excellence does require a degree of selfishness. Anyone who's pushed themselves to elite level in anything knows this. But real selfishness, the kind that actually serves your goals, means building the right team around you. It means earning the support of the people closest to you, not ignoring them until they leave.

The Mentorship Cycle

Something else came up in this conversation that I've been thinking about since.

The lifter I was talking to described how his relationship with me shifted over time. He came to me initially because of numbers. The squat. The total. That's what made him pay attention. Not life lessons. He wanted to learn how to lift, and I had the numbers that said I knew something about it.

But somewhere along the way, the conversation changed. He started getting answers from me he wasn't getting anywhere else. Not about programming. About how to handle the other parts of building a life inside this sport.

What hit me when he described it was that I had lived the exact same experience with my own mentor. I watched someone who had the numbers I wanted, paid close attention, and slowly realized the numbers were only part of the story. I started getting something more from that relationship. The same thing this lifter was getting from me.

It's a cycle. And it only works in one direction. You have to earn the right to be heard by first being worth watching. Without the platform results, nobody pays attention long enough to hear anything else you have to say. The numbers get you in the door. What you do with the relationship after that is what passes anything forward.

What's Happening to Multi-Ply

Now for the part that a lot of people in this sport aren't going to want to hear.

Multi-ply powerlifting is fracturing. Not from outside pressure. From the inside.

Of the roughly 200,000 lifters who competed in open powerlifting last year, multi-ply and unlimited combined represent somewhere around 1,800. Maybe less. We're talking about one percent of the competitive population, maybe less.

And that one percent has more federations than any other segment of the sport.

Think about that. The smallest group is the most divided. Every other population in competitive powerlifting is consolidating. The bigger meets are getting the bigger competitors. The multi-ply and unlimited world is splintering further. Why?

The easy answers are ego and money. Both are in there. But I don't buy the idea that money is the main driver. If you own a powerlifting federation, you're not getting rich. What's left is ego, judging, and a genuine technical rift that the band shirt created.

The Band Shirt Problem

The band shirt itself is not the villain here. The shirt isn't inherently good or bad. It's different. The problem is what happened around it.

When band shirts came into the multi-ply world, the veterans recognized the pattern. They'd seen it before. The transition from canvas and denim to poly looked exactly the same from the inside. Most of those veterans rolled with it. The ones who didn't had already been through enough sport evolutions to know resistance was pointless.

But the band shirt brought something earlier equipment transitions didn't: a shorter learning curve. And that's where the real issue lives.

Multi-ply lifting has always demanded time. The gear is complicated. You don't succeed without help, without experienced people around you, without going through a long apprenticeship of failed lifts and adjustments. That difficulty was part of the culture. The camaraderie of multi-ply came directly from the fact that you could not do it alone.

Band shirts are easier to use. And easier use means people are reaching numbers faster, sometimes without developing the foundation underneath. We're seeing 1,000-pound bench presses alongside 700-pound squats. That imbalance tells you something. When your bench dwarfs your squat by that margin in an equipped lifter, the equipment is doing work the lifter hasn't earned yet.

The danger is real. The broken arms people are seeing in band shirt benching aren't random. They're what happens when you put someone into a system that has more carryover than they've developed the mastery to control.

Judging and Leadership

The judging inconsistency is its own issue, and it feeds everything else.

Bad judging at a meet reflects on the judges, then the meet director, and then the federation. That chain of accountability is clear. What's not clear is why the blame always seems to land on the lifter who made the lift while everyone above them avoids accountability for how it was called.

Consistent judging across multiple and unlimited would do more to stabilize the landscape than almost anything else. If lifters knew they were being held to the same standard regardless of where they competed, you'd see more of them adapt their technique to meet the standard rather than shopping for meets where the judging fits their current habits.

The deeper problem is leadership. Every issue in this conversation, the band shirt divide, the federation fracture, the judging inconsistency, traces back to whoever is ultimately responsible for whatever piece of this they oversee. If accountability doesn't exist at the top, it won't exist anywhere below it.

The people who leave one federation for another, frustrated by the problems, tend to carry the same dynamics with them. You don't fix a culture problem by changing your geography.

The Missing Goal

Here's the thing that stuck with me most from this conversation.

There's no meet right now. No singular event that the best multi-ply lifters in the world are all pointed toward. For a couple of years, it looked like the WPO would be that. The best converging on one stage. A pinnacle. That's what the sport has needed for a long time and what it briefly seemed like it might have.

That didn't hold. And without it, the top of the sport has no gravitational center. The best lifters are competing in different places against different standards with no shared stage to measure themselves against. If all you have are your own numbers, the sport becomes a solo endeavor. The platform is supposed to be a proving ground. Without a common proving ground, nothing gets proven in the way it needs to be.

This is solvable. Not easily, and not without the people at the top putting ego aside long enough to build something that serves the sport instead of their own piece of it. But it's solvable.

What This Means for You

Whether you're a multi-ply competitor, a raw lifter, or someone just building toward their first meet, the same principles run through all of it.

The bar will humble you eventually. Relationships, health, the sport itself, all of it will remind you at some point that nothing is permanent and nothing is guaranteed. The only question is whether you wait until something is almost gone before you figure out what it's worth.

Compete in both formats if you can. Build the foundation before you chase the big numbers. Demand accountability from the organizations you're part of. And if you're mentoring someone younger, remember why they came to you in the first place. The numbers opened the door. What you give them after that is what actually lasts.

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