The Squat Rack

             20 minutes into leg training, I have done everything in my power to prepare the quads, hamstrings, calves and all the smaller leg muscles for this moment. It’s time for squats. A few sets are done, to ensure perfect form and let the muscles adjust to the higher weights. The first working set begins, and the weight I place on my back is proportionate to how much I choose to push myself. The first set gets knocked out, the blood is flowing in my legs, and I feel confident. Next set, the weight is increased. My thoughts allow you to view 300 lbs the same way an obeist cake enthusiast sees that german chocolate fudge cake in the bakery window. Irresistible. I step under the bar, push my traps into the iron, stand and take a step back. Down I go, up, down, up, down, up. I blast through the second set, form still intact. I’m thinking about what lifts I am going to do after squats, but then I catch myself, “don’t worry about the next set, don’t worry about the next exercise. Just squat.” I look at the loaded bar, and in this moment, I begin to feel tired. But I still want to squat.

It’s mental. My body is ready, my body longs to prove itself. My mind simply fears change. I still want to put myself under the bar, allowing it to pull me to the ground, and then fight back and stand up. I do this every week.

Now the work begins. Third set, I’ve made it this far, let’s do this. Boom, in the face of adversity, I triumph. I succeeded when my mind had second thoughts.

Standing up normally would not merit anything near a glimpse of attention, but at this point it requires most of my focus just to stand up normally, legs are wobbling and the blood is just flooding them. Quads feel tight, hamstrings are begging me to keep them extended. But I’ve been here before. In fact, I’m here every Sunday, and this instance has become one of my closest friends. I actually look forward to this moment. Why? Is it because I enjoy the adrenaline rush I get when sending my body to fight a resistance twice its own weight? Maybe. Well, that’s just a bonus, actually. “Oh, it’s been a few minutes, time to squat again. Okay focus, get pumped! Make sure the safety bars are in place, I might not be able to get back up.” Mistake. I’ve seen that thought in the past, and I know it only implies the possibility of not getting back up. Of failure. Not this time. “Bars are up, but they are irrelevant, I WILL get back up.”

Set 4, the first few reps are easy, form is still on point. 6 reps in, and I’m breathing heavily. Sometimes even taking two breaths between reps. Now I’m at the 10^th rep. Form wants to break down, but I know my low back has no place in this lift. Standing, breathing hard, I tense my entire trunk, take a huge breath, and slowly lower myself to the ground. The bar is almost touching the safety racks. I begin to stand, but soon my upper body leans forward, and more pressure is set upon my low back. Damn it. I push through, and rack the weight. At this point, I’m thinking about that delicious post-workout feast I’ve been seeing in my mind’s eye all day long. I imagine what it’s going to taste like, and how much I’m going to enjoy it. Snap out of it. Earn that meal. Earn every single calorie you consume. Work for it. Make it count. I look at the bar, “it’s just you and me, baby. And I did NOT come here to lose.”

“Well then, what did I come here for? I came here, because I KNEW that in three minutes, I will be facing hundreds of pound of adversity. I will be in an all out war with the barbell, and even more so with my mind. My mind does not like this. My mind wants to skip directly to the post workout, even though it knows I still have leg presses, straight leg deadlifts, calf raises, lunges and sprints to do before eating. My mind is uncomfortable, it does not want to be here. It knows what I will be doing in less than 2 minutes time, and it desperately wants out. I bring my mind back to the matter at hand. “It’s me, and my body against my mind. My body wants this, my body CHOOSES to step under this weight, and fight it. “Why? Because it knows that at any given moment, it’s either progressing or regressing. If it’s not getting stronger, it’s getting weaker. It knows this, and my mind also know this but my mind is afraid. It doesn’t like work, or change or effort. Either I convince my mind to help me out and move this weight, or I tell it to shut up. There is no option that involves the mind getting what it wants, so it better start wanting something else.

T minus one minute. “Breathe, focus on your breath.” I’m breathing pretty hard, it’s difficult to focus on taking deep, slow breaths when your body needs the oxygen faster than that. I put in my headphones, to a voice calmly saying “it’s not talent, it’s not innate ability. It simply comes down to how hungry you are. How hungry are you to improve? How big is your appetite for success? What are you willing to do to reach your dreams?” A surge of power runs through my body, I explosively stand up and willingly place myself under the bar. My mind knows it has no choice in this matter, I’ve decided to squat this weight and that decision is final. Armed with passion and an iron will, I lower myself to the ground, and stand back up. 5 times. Now, I employ my greatest tool, my mind, to help me. I choose thoughts that motivate me, that keep me going. “Who am I? I am a champion!” Down, up. Come on Dylan, let’s go. “You’re already in pain, get a reward from it!.” I’m going for 8 reps. Thanks to my mind, I complete ten. I rerack the bar, drop to the floor and catch my breath.

My headphones are still in, but I do not hear them. I thank myself for pushing further, for making my muscles grow. I am now stronger than I was yesterday. But something doesn’t yet feel right. I don’t feel like a champion yet. I don’t feel closure. I have not felt the feeling that tells me I am done. The one that tells me “this is living. This is pure ecstasy, bliss, life. Fulfillment. Where is that feeling? I am only reveling in my thoughts of victory and success, my mind telling me I have achieved something. My mind. Damn it! I’ve been tricked! My mind is congratulating me, praising me, when I know that it’s sole motivation is to keep me from changing it, from reaching beyond itself. My mind does not want to think outside itself! It is afraid of that.

Then it clicks. A serene, yet powerful wave falls over me and encompasses the radius around me. The whole area with the squat rack, me and the platform is glowing, nothing else exists. I know what this means. I feel it now. I’ve paid my dues, I’ve come this far. Far enough to have a stronger body than yesterday. Far enough to have more will power and confidence than when I stepped into the gym. More than far enough by the average person’s standards to call it quits for a week. But I feel something now. The plates are still on the bar, waiting, calling. Game on.

With a supreme, yet not arrogant sense of confidence, I calmly step under the bar, knowing I have already won the war. My mind is no match anymore, it has fallen silent. It’s just my body and the bar, no mental barriers, no thoughts telling me to put the weight down. Just squatting down and standing up until my body can not. I begin. This has all of a sudden become easy. The weight is still really heavy, and my legs are beaten and struggling. But in a calm and empowering way. I stand up 5 times. Mind is empty, blank. Nothing to say, it raised its white flag long ago. By now, my legs are shaking, I feel my heart pounding against my chest. Standing, I take 3 heavy, deep breaths before sucking my stomach in, and dipping my tailbone to the ground. With a steady and fluid motion, I stand up, my entire awareness simply witnessing what my body is going through. No judgment. No encouragement, no resistance. Just awareness. Taking 4-6 breaths between squats, my quads are on fire and my hamstrings have given out. My glutes are fighting hard to keep my back side steady.

Why do I subject myself to this? Something most people would find masochistic, useless and egotistical? Honestly, I do not know. I could not give you a reason as to why I look forward to getting under a heavy bar and sitting down then standing up until my legs give out. I don’t know. I can most definitely tell you the vast and absolutely life altering results doing so has brought me, but I can not tell you why I do this in the first place. I just do, and I look forward to it. Conquering the fear of change that resides in the mind, transcending plateaus and barriers. Strengthening the mind, forging the body, making everything in my life that much easier. After a set like this, there is not one thing that remains unachievable to me. Not one.

My biggest barrier at this point is my throbbing heart. My muscles are demanding significantly more oxygen than my lungs are capable of bringing them. The carbon dioxide in my blood and lungs is rapidly increasing, while the oxygen levels are lowering. Lactic acid is building up in my blood, at a rate faster than it can be removed. I am breathing heavily, standing straight with a great steel weight on my back. I am struggling simply to keep breathing so I don’t pass out. One massive inhale, contraction of every core muscle I have the energy to contract, and down I go. This is heavy. Very heavy. My legs are beyond exhausted, my body is in major stress, my heart is beating at its maximal rate, working furiously to absorb every cubic millimeter of oxygen it can.

What causes me to stand up? Physically, it seems unlikely that I would be able to. Mentally, well the mind has been out of the picture for a while now. There must be something else, something that has the capability of pushing the accumulation of atoms, of cells, of organs and tissues that are my physical body. Something else that ignites the body into working beyond itself. Something that makes it possible for limits to be exceeded, for barriers to be removed.

I stand up. With the very last ounce of strength and effort in my body, I place the bar back on the rack, and collapse to the floor. For 5 minutes, I lay there. Completely wiped, drained, almost immobile. Exhilarated. In these moments, I feel something deep, something real. I feel what it means to be truly ALIVE. I feel deeply and totally fulfilled. One second of this feeling makes all the years of effort I have ever put into anything in my life worth it a thousand times over. This is the feeling of love. There is nothing egotistical about it, the mind is out of the picture. There is nothing selfish about it, it is a feeling of unity, of oneness. A feeling of power and success, not over others, not over anything or anyone. Simply awe, bliss, marvel, completeness. How I want to feel on my deathbed. Although I can claim victory over my body, my mind and the challenge I set up for myself, it feels nothing like that. I feel whole. There are no words capable of describing this feeling, or any feeling actually. But when you experience this feeling, you will know. This is the feeling of LIFE. And I brought it to myself.

I began caring about my physical appearance around 6^th grade. I didn’t think I was ugly or had an unaesthetic physique, but I began doing leg raises. I noticed my stomach begin to flatten out a little bit. It wasn’t until high school that I purchased a pull-up bar and began doing crunches. All that was cool but I don’t think it did much for me. I would occasionally use my dad’s 20 lb dumbbell to do biceps curls and the likes, until I learned a few more exercises. So at this point I was doing dips with furniture, goblet squats with the dumbbell, abdominal work and any other exercise I had heard/read about. I attained decent results, but never took nutrition into account with the aesthetics.

I took a weightlifting class as a freshman in college, and that’s when it hit me. My instructor was a grad student who had won several competitions (must have been powerlifting because he definitely didn’t look like a bodybuilder). He started me off on a program 3 days a week doing 3×8 of clean and press, bench press, squats, deadlifts, and 4 other complimentary exercises. I bombarded him with questions, many of which he was not sure of. I asked him if I could leave early, as I had finished my workout one day. He said “Dylan, you work harder than anyone in this class, you can do whatever you want.” I have never missed a day since, always planning around vacations and events that might prevent me from lifting.

Throughout freshman year, I was partially lifting to develop my physique, and partially because I enjoyed the health benefits from the sport, but my main motivation became the feeling of lifting a heavier weight than last time. I continued to rapidly progress, still following the same program, but discovering more resources, such as bodybuilding.com. I learned immense amounts of information from that website, and applied it to my training. I joined Xsports Fitness over the summer, and decided to switch it up to a higher rep/lower weight program in an attempt to lose some fat (I was probably around 13-14%). I followed it all summer, along with eating less food and being more physically active. When I returned to IU, I had reached around 12% body fat. I hit the gym and noticed that a lot of my lifts were much lower than they used to be. It took me a month on a lower rep program to get back to my original stats.

I have since tried many different lifting routines, namely staying in the 8-12 rep range. I have time and time again changed my schedule, altering the frequency, volume and intensity. I have tried dozens of different muscle groupings (which muscle(s) to work out which day) and have tracked a large amount of my progress. My bodybuilding has been interspersed with several powerlifting bouts, and many different dietary approaches. I consistently learn more about what my body responds best to and how it responds to all the different types of stimulus.

My most notable dietary experience was beginning Intermittent Fasting, as prescribed on the leangains.com website. This approach to eating not only tremendously helped my bodybuilding, but has done wonderful things for me in my day to day life. IF basically gives you a certain window of time in which you take in all your calories, and you don’t eat during the remaining hours of the day.

At first I started with an 8 hour window from 12-8pm. At first i was very hungry in the mornings, this lasted about 2 weeks. Gradually, the hunger subsided, and for about a month a only had hunger pangs for about 20 minutes in the morning.  I noticed I would always be hungry after 8 and before bed, so eventually I decided to push the window back from 2 to 10, so I could eat up until going to bed. This worked well for a while, and the hunger became less and less consuming. The next change came months later, when I decided to lose body fat. For convenience, I pushed the feeding window so it began post workout (around 5:30 usually) and ended when I went to bed (around 10). This 4.5 hour window made losing body fat really easy. I was up and about all day, not hungry. When meal time came, I would have usually 2 meals, and would actually struggle to meet my minimum calorie requirements. The combination of food I was eating (mostly fresh fruits and vegetables for carbs, sometimes spaghetti. Grass fed local chicken and longhorn steak) and rather large daily energy expenditure helped me drop from 12% to about 7.5% in months. The effects of stimulants and caffeine seemed to be accentuated. Keeping my carbs low (high enough to train intensely though) made me look really lean, I was lean entire time I was cutting. During this time, I was lifting 3 times a week, bicycling or walking everywhere (I don’t own a car) and doing a good deal of martial arts. I would take 10 grams of BCAA before working out, no food was ingested until after training.

Presently, I continue to explore different exercise and dietary avenues, building upon what I have already learned. I highly encourage everyone to keep searching for a way to progress, whatever the domain may be. There is never an end, always something that can be done to further approach your goal. The trick is to find it, because if you were consciously aware of it, you would probably already be doing it.

“There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and we must not stay there.” – Bruce Lee