Why powerlifting is the greatest strength sport, and why everybody should powerlifting program...
well, kind of.
I don't really think EVERYONE should use a Powerlifting program but I do feel anyone who does strength train and those who are just starting out could gain very much from using a Powerlifting program if only for one mock meet.
Let me explain.
DYNAMIC CORRESPONDENCE
I believe this to be true and so have many strength coaches over the years. Throughout the whole time that I've been in the sport of powerlifting, and consulting with strength coaches, being in the strength industry, one term has always popped up to the top when it comes to strength and conditioning in sports. That is, "Dynamic correspondence," or better defined as how well is what you're doing going to carry over to the sport that you're actually involved in. If we're speaking about the sport of football, this would be defined as how well is the training that you're doing, the exercises that you're doing, going to correspond to what carries over to the game of play.
Using the same concept of dynamic correspondence and how well will exercises carry over to the sport or game of play, let's take a step back for a second. Let's look at training programs across the board. Regardless of what sport it is, what exercises are most common? From what I've seen in my three decades in the industry, two of the most common exercises I see in training for any sport is the squat and the deadlift. I will argue and say the bench press as well, but I also will agree to disagree because I do know that many coaches don't believe that to be true. Many strength and conditioning coaches or sport coaches won't use the bench press at all. I'll put it in for now, but I have no problem for those pulling it out. We're still dealing with two of the big three movements, the squat and the deadlift.
If you're a young athlete or you're new to strength and conditioning, what best way to learn the squat and the deadlift rather than from a sport that the main competitive objective is to increase the squat, bench, and the deadlift? To increase the squat, bench, and the deadlift, the only way that they can absolutely do that is to be able to become stronger at it and more efficient at it, so learning how to train it. Also, learning how to build technique in it, and learning how to become more muscular efficient in doing it.
If you're looking at dynamic correspondence as being a principle of the strength and conditioning program, and all programs use the squat and the deadlift, wouldn't it make sense for the younger athletes to become involved in the sport of powerlifting which excels in teaching, building, and demonstrating the squat, bench, and deadlift? Those are going to be compound movements used in ANY training program with any sport they're going to do moving forward. The squat, bench, deadlift, and other compound movements like presses are the cornerstone and the building blocks for strength for anybody. While many will say that bodybuilding isn't a sport, I will label it as one here as to note that learning the big three is one of the best way to build the base strength and size required in the sport down the line.
NO SPECIAL SKILLS, TALENT OR EQUIPMENT REQUIRED
You don't need any special skills or talent to get started. All you basically need is a barbell, weights, some type of squat rack, and a bench. Items you can find pretty much in any gym, and that's it. As far as the skill and the talent, if you can put your bar on your back and squat down, and lay on your bench and press, or pick a bar up, you're starting. From there it's just refining the technique. Which means that this is a sport that regardless if you do any reading, or work with any coach, or do any type of studying, or anything at all, and all you do is go in your garage with a barbell, and a plate, and a bench, and a squat stand or squat rack, you will learn how to become stronger in absence of all those things because you will have to begin to figure shit out on your own.
This is how the majority of lifters got started. They didn't get started with YouTube videos, articles, and online coaches, and all this other stuff. They got started just by figuring shit out on their own. They get stuck and happen to push their knees out one day and, "Oh, shit!" They end up breaking their PR by fifty pounds, thirty pounds. They kind of figure out, "Hey, maybe if I push my knees out my deadlift will go up," or, "My squat will go up," or whatever. Regardless of the talent level, being able to be in a sport where you can just figure shit out on your own is a huge benefit to the sport, because it doesn't take all the coaching, and all the study, reading, to get started that so many other sports do. A lot of people can train alone for their whole entire careers, and progress all the way up to the top level just by doing that.
COMMUNITY
The next item is community. The powerlifting community is a community that it really doesn't matter who you are, or what you're like, where you're from, or what you do, there is a subculture within the sport that you're going to relate to. If you're a nerd, if you're a jock, if you're a extrovert, if you're introvert, if you make a million dollars a year or you make ten thousand dollars a year, it's all irrelevant because weight is weight. Everybody is after the same thing, and that's to get stronger themselves. When you're part of a community that the main goal is to get yourself stronger, then other people in the sport support that same goal when you're around them, that they want to be able to see you get stronger.
Even at the top levels, the guys who are competing, they want to win, they want to win more than anything, but they also don't want to see the guy that they're going to beat have a bad day. They want to see them have a good day as well. If they get beat because they have a bad day and the opponent has a good day, they're going to be happy for the opponent for having a good day because we're all fighting the same battle. Everybody is fighting the same battle, everybody is on the same path, everybody has the same objective. It's all shared. That's the commonalty amongst everybody in the sport, from the person who can only squat the bar and collars to the person who is going to squat the biggest weight of the day. The same goal, the same objective applies to all and because of that you have a community of support that you typically aren't going to see in any other sport.
Does that mean that the sport doesn't have it's bickering and debates? Yes, it does. Every sport does, every family does, everything does, every business does. Everything does, that's just part of moving forward. That's part of freedom of speech, it's part of expression, it's part of making the sport better. Something that a lot of people forget, is having the ability to able to say what you don't like about the sport, and be able to do that and not have that hurt your performance in the sport, is another benefit. It's another reason why the sport is so good, because you can express your opinion and it's not going to impact how you're going to perform in the league. The judges are still the judges, the weight's still the weight.
When you look at the community of powerlifting as a whole, when you are inside the bubble and you're inside the sport, you will see the bickering and you'll think that the sport is falling apart, and it's fragmented, and a hundred other things that get debated. This is no different, it's no worse, it's no better than any other sport. When the bomb hits, which recently just happened with the Ed Coan situation with the seminars in Sweden, what do you see? You see the whole sport, 95% of the sport, get behind the guy. Think about that for a minute. What other sport would that happen in? Toss that around for a minute. That's another reason why powerlifting is such an awesome sport.
BUSINESS, WORK AND LIFE LESSONS
In "Under The Bar," where I took all the lessons that I learned in powerlifting and the weight room, and described how I solved them in the weight room, and then was able to apply them to business. So much of what we learn in the sport of powerlifting: in moving forward and the roadblocks that we hit, overcoming injuries, overcoming sticking points, being fully prepared for a meet and having a terrible performance, being unprepared for a meet and having a great performance, consistency, the ability to do work, the ability to know that even though all the work you have to do yourself still relies on other people to be able to help you get to where you need to go, all these principles, virtues, and values that we learn in the sport of powerlifting, all carry over into business, and more importantly, into life.
When you can have a sport that teaches all those values that carry over in life, and all you have to be able to do is to think back to the gym and understand, and be able to take those values and apply them to the current situation that you're in, in business and life, that is a huge asset as far as my argument on why powerlifting is such an awesome sport. Most sports are going to teach these values, and virtues, and so on, but I strongly believe that team sports teach differently than individual sports. I'm not saying one is better than the other.
The argument can be made on both sides. For kids, I actually would recommend being a part of both so they can see and learn the values from each. People who tend to be more introverted, in my opinion, fall more towards the individual sports. They need to look, and should look, to see what they're doing in the gym when they're making progress, and they're moving forward, and they're reaching their goals, to see how they can use those same principles in their job, work, life, to be able to move forward there as well. They're going to see there are so many commonalities that carry over, or have the dynamic correspondence as I spoke about in the first part of this blog, to their life.
TRAINING WITH PURPOSE AND CONFIDENCE
Powerlifting is going to bring a purpose to your training. For a lot of young athletes, having a purpose to their training is going to make a significant difference in how hard they train and how committed they are to the task at hand. If they're just going in the gym to workout so they can get bigger arms and a bigger chest, or whatever it's going to be, they're not going to be as committed as if they're going to go to the gym because they know they're going to have a competition in twelve, sixteen weeks, or whatever it's going to be. By putting a purpose, or a, "Why," behind what they're doing, is going to begin to put those building blocks together for them to be able to do that same thing with other sports that they participate in later down the line, or in the future, or once again, later in their life.
It's one thing to just go in the gym and workout. Many people do that, probably millions of people do that. I don't know, I'm not going to look it up to be able to tell. A lot of people have success doing that, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that people that go into the gym and go in with a reason why, or a purpose, or they go in to actually train for something, are going to have greater success and greater results than those that are just going in to workout. This, in part, will also carry through in building more confidence, which is another aspect that we want to develop in young athletes as they're coming up through the sport.
You develop confidence by achieving long-term and short-term objectives. As they see themselves getting stronger week after week with their accessory movements, their supplemental exercises, and even their main lifts when they go to compete, their confidence is going to increase because they're seeing they set an objective, they trained for it, and then they achieved the objective. The more times that happens, that pattern begins to be ingrained. If you train for what you want and you believe in what you want, then the chances of getting what you want significantly increase over just going in and winging it, or just going in and just doing whatever work needs to be done to be able to get the job done.
Carry this through and push forward until they're in other athletics later on in life, or they're in their job that they've been hired to do. The person who has a job that they've been hired to do, who's just going to go in and kind of wing it, kind of like working out day after day after day without really having a why or any type of purpose, more than likely isn't going to move up very far in the position that they're doing. They're not going to excel at the skillset that they're trying to develop, and they're not going to be moving forward in that company or even moving forward in any other company at all.
Compared to the person who's going to go in with a reason why, and a focus, and a purpose on what they're doing the work for, they're going to be able to build more passion for the job that they have. They're going to be able to work smarter, they're going to be able to work harder, they're going to be able to move up faster. They're going to be able to move up either in that company or in another company at a higher level compared to the person who's just winging it.These are all things that you learn in the sport of powerlifting that can carry through into all areas of life, as well as preparing the athlete for other sports down the line.
TAKE AWAY: Powerlifting will make you strong(er)
Here is a great video of Ed Coan and Steve Goggins (legends of the sport) speaking about how awesome the sport is.