This is an article is about how I train. Despite the title, and despite the fact that I use the term “we” a lot, it’s really based on my own experiences – although I’ve had enough conversations with other high-level lifters to know I’m not completely alone. I’ve been hesitant to write articles like this one for two reasons:

I think it comes off as very pretentious.

I don’t like to recommend people train exactly like I do, because I think it increases the risk of injury and frustration.

However, one reader commented that most of what I write is geared towards beginners and intermediates, and that he wanted to get some insights into more than just the basics. I think that’s a totally fair criticism, and, besides being entertaining, I think it can be useful information when applied appropriately.

Before continuing, I want to make very, very clear that your level of skill has nothing to do with how long you’ve been training. There are elite guys and girls who have been lifting for only a year or two. There are beginners – many, many beginners – who have been lifting for decades. I’m not going to get into what I consider “elite” in this article, but for what it’s worth, I didn’t consider myself elite until this past year (2017), despite winning big meets and putting up top-5 totals before then.

We Push Harder than You

Look, this isn’t a knock on ANYONE. I think a lot of people have this (misguided) idea that if you train harder than other people, that means you’re more motivated, or success means more to you, or you have more willpower, or more pain tolerance, or a million other things that actually have nothing to with getting stronger. Of course you need to be motivated and disciplined if you want to be an accomplished lifter – just like you need to be motivated and disciplined if you want to be accomplished at anything in life. But as far as I know, there are no awards given for “most motivated,” and outside of maybe a monastery, there’s no such thing as a discipline contest.

So why even bring this up? Because learning to train hard is a skill that takes time and focus to develop. It doesn’t happen accidentally, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It has very little to do with desire or motivation and lots to do with practice. You’ve probably noticed already noticed this in your own training! Sometimes, you’ll do a set and even though you feel good and feel strong, you hit that wall, and no matter what you do, the weight doesn’t move anywhere. Maybe you’re doing a set of bench presses, and you’re cranking out reps, and then all of a sudden you stall halfway up. And it doesn’t matter if you push until your eyes bug out of your skull – that bar isn’t going anywhere. So you let your ass shoot up in the air, get the bar high enough to make it back into the rack, and call it a “good gym lift.”

But when you watch really strong guys and girls on Instagram and YouTube, you very rarely, if ever, see this type of thing. It seems like they can just keep pushing and grinding, and yeah, maybe the bar slows down a little bit, but otherwise, every rep looks exactly the same.

There’s two reasons for that. First, high-level lifters have practiced their technique enough that even when they’re pushing all-out, they’re still able to maintain near-perfect form. When you’re just starting, you probably have a huge list of mental cues for performing a lift – cues like keeping your chest up, keeping your glutes tight, bracing hard, and many more. By the time you’re elite, you’ve run through those cues so many times that you no longer have to think about them – they just become second nature. You want to know my list of cues for the deadlift? Here you go:

Be patient.

That’s it. So when I’m doing an all-out set of deadlifts, I don’t have to think about my glutes or my chest; I just have to remember to be patient. And, since I don’t have to spend mental energy on keeping good form, I have the headspace necessary to evaluate my level of effort and how hard I need to push – so that I very rarely try reps I won’t make.

There’s a second reason: high-level lifters have almost always built very balanced strength. When you don’t have any glaring muscular weaknesses, it’s both easier to maintain good technique and easier to keep a steady bar speed, which leads to smoother reps, even at very high levels of effort. Contrast this to the beginner with a massively strong lower back but no glutes or hamstrings. This lifter is more likely to stall hard just out of the hole on a squat, so when he misses, it’s pretty abrupt, and pretty darn ugly.

We Get Pretty F*&!ed Up… And Keep Going

One of the most common questions I get involves dealing with injuries, and I almost always recommend backing off. That’s partly because it’s impossible to diagnose anyone over the Internet, and I’m not qualified to diagnose injuries in the first place, and I don’t want to give advice that might exacerbate someone’s already unfortunate situation. But it’s also because 99% of the time, if someone’s asking for injury advice, it’s because they’re beginners who have not learned how to listen to their bodies.

I actually hate that phrase, because your body is actually going to tell you very little about your situation. Yes, there are some signals that you should be aware of: pain (obviously), fatigue, loss of appetite, insomnia, and many other feelings can all indicate that something’s up. But understanding where those feelings come from, and what to do about them, can only come from experience. For example, I’ve lifted long enough and had elbow pain so many times that I can tell the difference between when my elbows are sore and it’s safe to push through, and when I need to back off because I’m risking a little bit of tendonitis. I can’t verbalize that difference, and I can’t teach someone else how to discern it, but it’s very obvious to me which is which. The same goes for other signals – like when I’m feeling fatigued before a heavy workout. I know pretty well when I’m fatigued enough to need an extra day of rest and when it’s okay to push through.

That’s a hugely important skill at the elite level, because by then, you’re dealing with loads heavy enough to cause pretty serious injury when something goes even a little bit wrong. The last time I seriously misjudged my level of fatigue was before a heavy workout leading up to the US Open about a year ago. I decided to go ahead with the workout anyway, and ended up with a (very minor) pec tear that forced me to take two weeks away from benching during a critical time in my meet prep.

When I say “two weeks away from benching,” though, I really mean two weeks away from heavy benching. I was in the gym the next day doing some presses with the bar to try and get some blood flow through the area and speed healing. Because here’s the thing: elite lifters know they’re going to get injured, accept that they’re going to get injured, and (sometimes) push through anyway. But they know their bodies well enough to do so!

I hate to even write this section, because I know some beginner is going to hurt his pec, read about how I went and benched the next day, and decide that’s the right thing to do. It’s not! When you’re injured, the margin of error you have to work without worsening the injury is incredibly small. Pros can work with small margins of error; they have to, all the time. They get injured in the first place because they’re constantly walking a fine line between moving heavier weights and reaching the limits of their bodies. That’s why it’s appropriate for them to (sometimes) work through injuries. Beginners, intermediates, and even some advanced lifters aren’t anywhere close to their physical limits. They get injured because of a lapse in technique, or a lack of balance, or some other fairly major shortcoming. They don’t have the experience necessary to work with small margins of error, and so pushing through an injury is likely to make it worse.

We Compete

This one seems pretty obvious, but it’s important, because as soon as you start training to compete, the game changes. First, you realize that gym lifts are meaningless unless they improve your competition lifts. No one cares what you can pull in the gym if you can’t put up big numbers on the platform – so it’s somewhat rare to see an elite lifter try to put up a one-rep max outside of a meet. (That’s starting to change a bit with social media, where big lifts get more attention, and more attention helps attract sponsors. It can be hard to find a balance sometimes!)

In fact, once you’ve competed for a while and realize how much variability there can be in meet-day performances, you realize that getting things perfect in training isn’t all that important. I’m sure you’ve seen the guy who has to bust out the singlet and kilo plates for every workout, and who insists that if every rep isn’t to competition standards, it doesn’t count. Not surprisingly, this is also the type of guy who hangs out at the beginner or intermediate level for years, content to add 2.5 kilos to his total every couple of months while placing consistently somewhere in the middle of the pack at local meets. Contrast that to the elite lifter who gets a ton of flak on Instagram for cutting his squats half an inch high or doing touch-and-go reps on bench – but consistently puts up world-class numbers at meets. The latter person knows what counts and what doesn’t, and knows his body well enough to train accordingly.

Again, I’m obviously not saying that every elite lifter does this. Some train to competition standards every session. But they do so because they know it translates into better meet-day performances, not to meet some arbitrary standard of perfection in the gym.

How to Become an Elite Lifter

So: how do you get from where you are now to elite? Well, hopefully this article has made it pretty clear that in my opinion, you do that by learning about and understanding your body. If you haven’t already checked out my Unf*ck Your Program videos and course, I’d recommend you start there – and, as a thank-you for reading my first post, you can use the code "FIRSTBLOG" for 30% off!

No matter how you choose to go about your training career, your ultimate success is essentially going to come down to patience and consistency. I wish I had a sexier answer, but the reality is that most elite lifters trained for years, even decades, before reaching that point. I started lifting in 2001. That means it took my sixteen years – over half my life – before I reached the point where I considered myself to be elite.

The one other suggestion I have, if you want to become a better lifter, is to start competing (if you don’t already). It really does change your mindset, expose you to new people and new ideas, and challenge you in new ways. All that adds up to faster gains – but that’s a topic for another article.



