Written by Team Juggernaut
By Brandon Lilly
I am not writing out a diet guideline that I follow just yet because as this article will disclose, I know that 98% of the people who read what I do for diet would read it and never put it to use. So I’m gonna cover this first.
Lifting Without Emotion
I want to start out by saying that I really hope you finish this article and try to digest what I’m telling you. A simple analogy: Imagine a polished boxer gets into a fist fight with a guy that he bumped into at a bar. The boxer probably isn’t going to get overly excited, and act purely with anger. What happens when the boxer gets hit? He stays focused. What happens when “Angry Joe” gets hit? He gets more angry and becomes more reckless.
The point of the story is this, great athletes succeed through repetition of their craft. Watch a training session with Russian weightlifters, my favorite being Klokov, there is no stereo pumping music, there is no yelling and screaming on every attempt. There is just intense focus and a reliance on training to lift the weight rather than digging deep into the pit of emotion.
Please don’t get me wrong there is a time and place to bring emotion to the bar, but truly great lifters harness it. I see young lifters go up to the bar, yell, and scream, all the while those very actions are depleting energy stores. Approach the bar loose and focused. Run through your mind what you need to do. I’ve always said a lifter who can think his way through a lift rather than react to a lift is a lifter who is going to find long term success.
Try it for a few weeks, harness your emotion. When under the weight, focus on how things feel, try to slow each lift down in your mind and learn to process what your body goes through each and every rep… Trust me, when the meet roles around you’ll be much better for it because you’ll be a thinking lifter and the emotional drive of the meet will be enough to guarantee you rise to the occasion.
