On Mental Blocks in Training

When I first started lifting weights I was probably 13 or 14 (8^th or 9^th grade). I actually hated doing upper-body early on (still kinda do to be honest – minus climbing, of course). I was a hockey player and had fairly strong legs, even without any prior training. But my upper-body was incredibly weak in comparison (still is). When my friends went to bench I’d usually head to the leg press or try to work on improving my deadlifts. Eventually, however, I caught the upper-body training bug. When you’re a teenager and you start adding muscle mass to your upper-body you end up wanting to do more upper-body (after all who doesn’t want big biceps? – even on the most grueling of training days there always seems to be a little extra left in the tank for an arm pump).

Anyways, once I caught the bug my friends and I were on this race to bench 135 for 10 reps. Some days we would get 8, others 3. We would put our most focus and intensity into “chest day” trying to be the first to get this goal (ALWAYS on Monday – because you wanted to be fresh from a weekend of not lifting weights). Big wheels for 10 on the bench became such a big deal that we were psyching ourselves up during the school days talking about it. But for some reason we just could not reach the goal.

My best friend would come to the gym with us, but never lifted weights. They didn’t even require him to get a membership because they knew he wasn’t going to touch a weight. He referred to himself (only semi-jokingly) as our “team spotter”. He would hang with us, spot us, and get a protein shake with us after the lift (in a sense he was earning the shake with all the spotting he had to do on our failed attempts). One day, when the gym owner wasn’t looking, he decided to hop on the bench. Again, he was never actually lifting weights with us. We thought for sure he would get crushed by 135 (after all we had been training for so long and couldn’t get it for 10). We all assumed he was joking, but he told us he was tired of watching us fail at something that couldn’t possibly be that hard. Without a care in the world, he lifted it off the rack and pressed it for 10 reps. We were all stunned. He gave us a shrug that basically said, “Told you it isn’t that hard”. After that, not only did we start doing 135 for 10, but we were doing it for multiple sets of 10. And then we quickly progressed to 185 for sets of 10. I’ve spoken on this in other articles as well, but we were essentially creating a mental block for ourselves (that, and beginner gains of course…a topic for another day). My best friend (especially back then) was very spontaneous with his decision-making (essentially he was a wild card) and had no expectations of what was “heavy” or “light”, “hard” or “easy” – he just picked it up, pressed it, and put it back where he got it from. It’s comparable to lifters going heavier than expected when they miscalculate pounds/kilos. The mind is incredibly powerful, and although I don’t think you can magically bench more if you lessen your expectations of yourself, you may be hindering performance simply by overthinking something.