HustlingHat93's Road to 123lb and Weak to Strong

[oldnattychris]

@hustlinghat93

I am terrified of having to hit 5+ with 127.5kg/281lbs

To be honest, I struggle with this too, which was the reason for my cheeky “fix”. I don’t have a good answer for how to deal with this form of pre-training, psych-out stress, so if you come up with something, please do let me know.

I’d love to be excited in anticipation of [insert exercise here], but the opposite is usually true. And then I do it, and it’s usually not as bad as I feared. But that rational fact doesn’t seem to be able to quell the irrational emotional response.

I think the answer must be something in the region of something Cyrrex wrote in jdm135’s log:

@Cyrrex

The others have spoken to technique, I will speak to the psychology. Either you are controlling the bar, or it is controlling you. In that video, it looks like the bar is squatting you, not the other way around. Go up to it like you own it, get BOTH FEET under the bar during the unrack and lift it off like you are the boss. You should feel such a brace in your entire body that it does not feel heavy at all when you take it off the rack. This is half the battle.

The rest of the thread is worth reading too, as there’s some good advice there, including about leaving reps in the tank.