After casually lifting weights in college, Team elitefts Athlete Lily Starobin decided she wanted to get into a strength sport. She knew about bodybuilding and powerlifting, but for her, it was an easy choice:
“One of them involved dieting and the other involved sweaty men with big titties listening to Pantera, and that sounded a little bit more down my alley.”
She taught herself starting with YouTube videos — a time when she distinctly remembers getting crushed with a quarter on each side in a Smith Machine.
That was the moment she decided she just might need more help, so she sought advice from other powerlifters and bounced around until she found herself working for JL Holdsworth in Ohio, where she met Sheena Leedham, who then invited Lily to the S5 Compound.
“I guess I just lasted long enough that Dave started talking to me and took pity on me because he saw how terrible I was — before I came out here, I did not squat 200 pounds, never squatted 200 pounds. I’m pretty sure my bench was like 145, and I think I just pulled 300 pounds for the first time a few months before coming out here.”
Whether or not it was out of pity, Dave Tate took Lily under his wing and has been doing her programming and, in her words, turning her into “a less shitty lifter.”
Considering that last year she got her first pro total in multi-ply at 140 pounds, it sounds like she has certainly become a less shitty lifter. That journey has been documented in her training logs — which are full of puns, and according to Lily, are the funniest logs on the website.
While we can neither confirm nor deny her claim to be true, you can decide for yourself by reading Lily’s training logs.
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