Your perception of powerlifting is probably wrong.

Not because you don't know the sport, but because you're letting social media define what you think the sport actually is.

That's a different problem than being uninformed. You can know how to squat. You can know how a meet runs. You can know the difference between a good spot and a shitty one. And you can still walk around with a completely warped picture of who is in this sport and what they're like.

Because you didn't build that picture from the sport. You built it from a feed.

Run the Numbers

Around 100,000 powerlifters compete in a given year. But that's not the powerlifting community.

That's the people who paid an entry fee and showed up on one specific weekend.

You have people who competed last year, two years ago, or five years ago. You have people who competed once and never competed again. You have coaches, gym owners, former lifters, and thousands of people who train like powerlifters but will never step on a platform.

Add the handlers. The guys wrapping knees in the warm-up room. The spotters and loaders standing on a platform for nine hours for a t-shirt and a hot dog. The meet directors. The parents driving a kid to a local meet at 6 AM. The people who trained for a meet, got hurt in week nine, and never made it to the platform at all.

That number is WAY bigger than 100,000.

Now start going the other direction.

That's your sample size. That's the group you've been using to draw conclusions about an entire sport.

Twenty Comments and Two Assholes

Yet people will read 20 comments, see two negative ones, and start forming an opinion about "powerlifters today" or "what the sport has become."

That's fucking insane.

Two comments out of twenty. Twenty comments on a post that a few thousand people scrolled past. On a platform that a fraction of the sport even uses. Written by people who chose to spend a Tuesday night arguing with a stranger.

And that's what you're calling the sport.

Negative weighs more than positive. Always has. Eighteen people can say good lift and two can say you're a disgrace, and you'll carry the two home with you. That's not a character flaw. That's how attention works. But you have to know it's happening, because if you don't, those two run your entire read on things.

Here's the part nobody accounts for. Those people are self-selected. Nobody assigned them. Arguing online is the activity they showed up to do. They aren't a sample of powerlifters. They're a sample of people who argue.

You're taking an extremely small, self-selected group of people and using them to define an entire sport.

The Guy Talking the Loudest

Years ago, I ran into a guy who couldn't cut it in three well-known powerlifting groups in his own area. Three. He got zero respect from the local lifters, and it had nothing to do with his numbers. It was the big mouth, the inconsistency, and the lack of balls to train hard and help anyone else in the group.

About a year later, I see the same guy on a powerlifting forum, talking shit about everybody, running a full I'm-the-man routine.

A couple of phone calls later, there were three of us laughing about it.

Nobody reading that forum knew any of this. To them, he was just a voice in the sport. To the people who actually trained near him, he was a guy who got run out of three gyms.

That's the gap between the two worlds. Online, you get the volume. In person, you get the context.

This Isn't New. Only the Platform Changed.

I've watched this cycle four times now.

In the '80s and early '90s, the magazine authors caught the heat. The biggest, strongest guys in the gym would say those writers didn't have the education or the experience to talk about training. Some of them didn't. Some of them absolutely did. They just had the ability to take what they knew and put it into words that reached past the walls of one gym.

Then came the online articles and forums. Everyone had a voice. For the first time, lifters all over the world could trade ideas instantly. It was wild. Unfiltered, raw, sometimes flat wrong, but it was progress.

Then blogs. Then YouTube. Then social media.

Each phase changed who got heard and how the information moved. The core never changed. People wanted to learn how to get stronger.

And every single phase had its own small pile of people yelling about what the sport was supposed to be. Different platform. Same behavior. Same tiny percentage.

The Question I Used to Ask

Forums were supposed to work like the warm-up room at a meet.

That was the whole promise. A place set up like the lobbies, the gyms, the hotel rooms, the bars and restaurants, where lifters and coaches actually congregate. That's where the real learning happens. It doesn't come from books, journals, or articles. It happens in real time, in real life.

It mostly didn't work out that way. Too many people got bent out of shape over how other people felt. Most would rather gossip than talk about training.

I stopped reading most of them years ago. But I knew a lot of the strongest lifters and best coaches in the world were still posting on them.

So whenever I talked to one of them, I asked the same question.

Has anybody on there ever asked you a training question?

The answer surprised me the first few times. Then it stopped surprising me, and I quit asking.

No. Never.

What they were asked was what they thought about somebody else's squat. What they thought about some federation. What they thought about what one guy said about a third guy.

Not one training question. Ever.

So they left. They had better things to do.

And when I asked whether they would have answered training questions if anyone had bothered to ask, every one of them said yes.

Sit with that for a second.

The people worth learning from walked out of the room. What stayed behind was the arguing. And then everybody started using what was left behind to define powerlifting.

What the Sport Actually Looks Like

I'll give you the version I've seen.

Years back, I got an email asking if a group of our sponsors could come up and train for a day. It was a Saturday. Around eight of them showed up.

At the time, I had a beginner crew training with me, plus a group of retired meatheads.

Three different generations of powerlifters, in one gym, in the middle of nowhere. They trained. They talked about training. They told stories. They busted each other's balls.

Everybody became human.

The sponsors grew up watching videos of the retired guys. They showed up and found out we were no different than they were, which meant they could be better than they were. We stopped being images on a DVD and started being guys dealing with the same injuries and the same frustrations they had.

The beginners looked at the sponsors exactly the same way. Same realization, one rung down.

And the retired meatheads got to be part of something for a day. We got to pass on the stuff you don't see online. Not the day-to-day training information. The small details. The tiny mistakes that took us years to learn.

Nobody argued about a federation. Nobody was filming a take.

Around that same stretch, I did something I should have done decades earlier. I went to a small meet.

I spent years, decades really, lifting in big meets and never once attended a small one. I had completely lost touch with the grassroots of the sport.

What I saw there was guys chasing their own records. No pressure to hit some number so they could win, rank, or make a list. They just wanted to beat what they'd done before. I watched a guy from our group pull a PR deadlift he never expected to get. He reached for something slightly out of his reach, took it, and owned it.

That's the sport. Not the thread.

What This Is Actually Costing You

Most people involved in powerlifting aren't arguing online. They're training. They're coaching. They're working. They're raising families. Some still compete. Some don't. Some never will.

They're just not telling you about it every fucking day.

Here's the part that should actually bother you.

If you get all fired up about something you read online, the only person whose life you improved is the person who posted it. That's the entire transaction. They wanted a reaction. You handed them one for free.

You paid with your time and your headspace. They paid with nothing.

Time is the cheaper cost. The expensive one is what it does to your read on the whole thing.

You start training toward a room that doesn't exist. You get self-conscious about a number because two people called it weak. You skip a local meet because you decided the sport is full of assholes. You quit posting your own training because you don't want to deal with it.

You let 1% of the sport push you out of the other 99%.

Social media isn't reality. It's a modern-day tabloid.

The comment section sure as fuck isn't reality.

Where to Actually Look

If your picture of the sport is wrong, the fix isn't finding better comments. It's going where the sport is.

Go to a local meet

You don't have to lift. Just go. Get into the warm-up room if they'll let you. I promise nobody in there is debating what powerlifting is supposed to be. They're wrapping knees, making calls, and handing out information to strangers for free.

Find a strength-friendly gym even if you have to drive

An extra 30 minutes is nothing. The size of the gym means nothing either. Ten people who are serious about what they're doing beat seventy people there for social hour, every time.

Go in an open-minded

You might know more than the people you're about to train with. More education, more time under the bar, more scars. Doesn't matter. For this to work, the answer is almost always in the middle. The infighting you see online hides the fact that those two far ends often train together, and both sides walk away with something.

Ask your questions in person

Ask them of somebody who can watch you lift while they answer. That's a completely different quality of answer than anything you'll ever get typed.

Stop reading the comments

Just stop. It costs you nothing, and it gives you back a piece of your head.

The Loudest People Are Not the Whole Room

Stop confusing the loudest people in the room with everyone in the room.

They're not the same thing.

The room is bigger than you think. It's full of people quietly doing the work. Coaching kids. Running a gym on thin margins. Getting under the bar at 5 AM before a shift. Coming back from a surgery nobody knew about. Training hard at 55 with no plans to ever compete again.

Not one of them is going to tell you about it.

That's not a problem with them. That's a problem with where you're looking.

Go find the real room. It's still there. It always was.

Live, learn, pass on…

Dave Tate / elitefts