An enormous crowd of spectators watched, intently, as the final bench press attempts of the day were being taken on the platform before them. In the "L" shaped warm-up area, which was wrapped around the outside edge of the audience, I was making my way through a sea of lifters and helpers.
They were packed shoulder-to-shoulder around deadlift stations. As I weaved in and out around them and turned the corner, I spotted one of my lifters, Jordan, rushing toward me, frantically.
"Tarra needs you. She can't stand without her knees cramping up real bad. She's out in the hallway," he explained, visibly upset.
"Alright."
When I got to her, Tarra was crouched down against a wall, with a couple of people around her and her eyes were scanning, looking for me. She was panicking.
"Come on. Hold on to me."
I picked her up and walked her over to the bench where we had our bags. I handed her a big bottle of V8.
"Just relax. Sit here and sip this until I get get back."
You'd think after ten meets, ten water cuts and ten recomps, she would know the importance of staying hydrated afterwards, but Tarra is the type who likes to put her hand on the stove, once in awhile, make sure that shit is still hot.
Sometimes a coach's job is damage control.
I have to remain in my role, even when these things are personal to me. And these things are always personal to me, because I am close with and I care about all of my lifters, especially this one. Many, if not most of my readers here on elitefts know that Tarra is my girlfriend.
Before you start calling me a hypocrite, since I've advised so many times against girls allowing their boyfriends to be their coach, let me take you back about four years to when she hired me to do one-on-one strength and conditioning work with her for softball.
You see, I'm not just some random guy who decided he was going to coach his girlfriend. I actually started as her coach. It's my profession, not a hobby. That's how we met.
Back then she'd never performed a deadlift or touched a barbell in her life. The only reason she became interested in those things was to get in better shape for her sport, and it sure worked. She went from getting cut from her team the year before we met, to being National Collegiate Player of the Year, and First Team All American the last year she played. The goal to get better at softball had been lined up and knocked down. Somehow, along the way, the barbells and the deadlifts became more important than the softball. They became much more important, more important than most things.
I'm sure a lot of you can relate to that: the influence of a barbell.
It sneaks up on you. One day, you're lifting weights to help with a sport, or to get in better shape. Then, before you know it, you wake up in the morning and it's the first thing you're thinking about. It's always there, in the back of your mind, part of your identity.
You're a lifter.
Just like it happened to you, it happened to her. She found something inside herself she didn't know was there. More than just an inherent talent for lifting, a drive to improve, and an obstinate determination to prevail.
The first time I tried to teach Tarra how to deadlift, we had 95 pounds on the bar and I had to lower it to 65, because she was falling all over the place with it. I'm laughing, thinking of it, but she did not think it was funny, believe me.
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Let's fast-forward a little bit. She recently pulled a 500-pound deadlift in a full meet, and she has one of the most technically proficient conventional deadlifts I've seen in 20 years of doing this.
I know you're probably laughing to yourself like "OHHH he's just a proud coach" or "proud boyfriend," and sure, I am both. But the shit is still bone hard fact. There are many videos out there and I'll include one in this article.
Now this begs the question: How did we get from the first picture, losing her balance with under a hundred pounds, to the last one, smoking 500?
And that question leads us to the reason I wrote this article. Tarra is a textbook example of someone taking the 5thSet ball and running with it, forever.
I think it was Louie Simmons who said "everything works, for awhile." Well, I've always had the goal in mind of making 5thSet something that was sustainable. By providing enough moving parts and putting the emphasis where it should to be, I have done that.
There is no need to ever do anything else.
Something I talked about before I released the book was that I had found a way that you could take a beginner, put them on the program and make them intermediate, and from intermediate, make them advanced, and from advanced, masterful, without ever changing the methodology that lifter follows. I've actually had some people try to argue with me on that.
Well, meet Tarra Oravec. From the first session, where she was falling down, to the conclusion of our story, she has never used any program but 5thSet.
She is the definitive beginner-to-master archetype I was talking about. And there are more examples than I can count, with more coming in every day. On the other side of the coin I've already shown in a previous article, a lifter I work with, who was already advanced, moving up 20 spots on the all-time list using this system.
Let's go back to the meet. I left Tarra, cramping up, sipping on some V8. She had already downed about 24 ounces by the time I returned with some bio-freeze to rub on her cramping VMO's, so I had to switch to slowly sipping water. After massaging the lineament into all of the muscles around her knees, I instructed her to get up and walk around.
As scary as this picture looks, it's very minor compared to some of the nightmares I've seen with water cuts gone awry. This was a result of failure to follow direction, plain and simple. Lesson learned, and I doubt she will ever have to learn it again.
Her goal had almost slipped her grasp for a second time. You see, just five weeks prior to this day, Tarra totaled what would have been 1200 pounds, if not for two reds on a squat that might have passed in just about any federation.
I told her what I tell any lifter in that situation. Come back and erase any doubt. Well, she was here to do that, and the scariest part of her quads cramping up was the idea that her 1200-pound total could very well be sand through her fingers, yet again.
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Not this time. The more she moved, the better her legs felt and the better they felt the more she sipped. She sipped so much, in fact, that as we began her warm-ups for deadlift, she was having trouble getting down to the bar without feeling like she'd puke.
I put my hand on her should and said "if you puke, you puke. Just don't come down until the lift is complete, once you're up there."
We both laughed a little, but I was serious.
Her opener was a smoke-show, which bolstered her confidence and strengthened her resolve to finish this. So far she had a 435-pound squat and a 280-pound bench press on the books. Our planned second attempt for deadlift, 485 pounds, would lock up the total we came for.
When the announcer said that Tarra Oravec was on-deck, I began to chalk her hands.
"Why are you here?"
"My 1200-pound total."
"It's waiting on the bar."
I walked her to the platform, gave her an external cue to focus on, and pushed her out there. She set herself up in front of the bar, dipped her knees down once, twice, and then finally reached down and took the bar in her hands.
As soon as she dropped her hips to pull, I knew it was in the bag. Locked out beautifully, returned to the floor under control. Mission accomplished.
Tarra is on a roll, but she is still nowhere near her potential. Reaching one's maximum potential of strength is not the sort of thing that happens overnight. This holds true no matter what ways or means are used to achieve it. Knowing that, longevity would seem to be a fairly important consideration for any lifter who wants to last long enough to get there.
Understand that it is going to take a long time to get there. You can see that for a powerlifter, quick results on the short term are far less important than the long term success of a program. Consistency trumps everything.
For example, Tarra's first meet went well. She totaled 830 pounds at 181. That's pretty good, all things considered. However, over the next ten meets, she would make consistent progress, hitting a PR total at every single showing, and ending with a total almost 400 pounds greater than where she started, just three years prior. That's an average 37 pound PR on her total per meet. That's only and average of 12 pounds per lift, per meet. She did it by degrees, not huge jumps.
It bears repeating: consistency trumps everything.
And how do you remain consistent? By employing sustainable methods.
You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce the direction I am heading with this. 5thSet is the shit. Everyone does not have the potential to be an all-time great, but everyone can make consistent progress with it. I truly believe it's the absolute best systemized method of training for powerlifting in existence, and that anyone who doesn't agree with me just hasn't tried it yet.
