Mindset Manual
Mindset Manual
Olympic Weightlifting can be one of the most daunting sports in the world. There are several reasons for this, the main reason, you know exactly how good you do on any given day. There is a weight on the bar, some days you do more, some days you do less, but no matter what, you know exactly how training went. Not only that, but you know exactly what kind of shape your competition is in by seeing their training via social media. When it comes to more mainstream sports like basketball, football, and soccer, the closest you can get to definitive numbers is stats. But with these sports there is always more that can impact the skill level someone is on outside of the stat sheet. For example there are players in the NBA that can make or break a team without blowing up the stat sheets. That impact can be found through a variety of different things, like locker room presence, defensive presence, IQ, and so on. With weightlifting it does not matter how good you are to your teammates, how much you can squat, how long you've been doing it, the only thing that matters is how much you total.
In weightlifting we have 6 lifts that we do on the competition platform, 3 opportunities in both the snatch and the clean and jerk to lift as much weight as we can. This adds pressure, hundreds of thousands of training lifts done in the gym, all for 6 total attempts on stage. How do we get control of all that pressure? How do we create habits in training that allow us to have confidence when it's time to show up. We're going to break down several different tenets that will allow you to gain control over your mentality and win the fight against a negative mindset on training and weightlifting as a whole.
1st. Ownership
This is the biggest one, taking ownership of everything that happens in the gym and on the competition platform is the first step to gaining total control. The way we do this is simple. Everything that happens is your fault. Everything. Even the stuff that's out of your control, and I know that might sound like a crazy concept but this is how we formulate a mentality that makes us feel like we have the ability to control the uncontrollable.
Being a young guy when i came in to the sport, this is what i struggled with the most. I had a bad meet? Oh, that's because i had a rough weight cut, travel was rough, i had an injury going into the meet, blah blah blah, excuse excuse excuse. I had a bad training session? That's because i didn't get enough food before, i slept like shit the night before, this programming is too tough and i'm too beat down. Those were the typical excuses, lets analyze.
Rough weight cut, this is my fault. Why would I even set myself up for a rough weight cut? I know exactly when the meet is, i know exactly what i need to weigh and exactly what day and time i need to weigh that much several months out, the only reason the weight cut was rough was because i slacked off and wasn't disciplined with my diet early enough which led me to using poor methods to make weight, skipping meals, severely dehydrating myself. None of that would have happened if i acted when i should’ve and dialed in months out.
Travel was rough. This is my fault. Why was it rough, having a 4 hour layover? Back started hurting on the flight? Landed late? First of all, everyone has to travel, everyone, so that alone is a lazy excuse. That's like saying “I had to compete on a rogue bar. I hate rogue bars.” News flash, everyone has to do that, and everyone has to travel. Second off, you are the one that booked the flights, You could have saved some extra money or booked the flights sooner and given yourself a more optimal situation, Back got tight from being on the plane? Stretch as soon as you get to your hotel room, get up to go to the bathroom a couple times, walk around, do something about it, Take ownership. As soon as you own the situation you will find ways to work through these issues. if you accept it as your fate, you lose control, the situation begins to control you.
I had an injury going into the meet? This is my fault. I lacked in my recovery during parts of training where I should've been dialed in. I had some tweaks that I should've paid attention to, instead of mobilizing, foam rolling, researching what the problem is and how to fix it, i sat on my couch, scrolled through tik tok, and banked on the problem going away. There are so many things you can do about it, the biggest thing is communicate with your coach. Coach isn't listening? We can blame that on the coach right? Wrong, you are the one that chose that coach. Take ownership and put yourself in a more optimal situation.
Every single excuse has a solution, when I hear an excuse I can always rebuttal with a “Why didn't you do…” The moment you start making excuses is the moment you no longer have control over your weightlifting career, that is the moment weightlifting starts to control you.
This goes for meets as well, some meets are not going to go your way, not every prep is perfect, not every meet is perfect and that is what keeps this sport fun. If every single meet was great and every athlete had a perfect meet every time they lifted, it would be boring. But this brings me to my next point. Bad meets are the best teacher on earth. Adversity in the grand scheme of things accelerates progress like nothing else. But, that is only if you take ownership of the situation. If you make excuses, you are going to circle back to doing the exact same shit that gave you that bad meet in the first place.
I'll dive into a recent experience I had. My meet at the american open finals absolutely sucked. 2/6, total way lower than any of the max out Fridays leading up to the competition. What happened? Well i'll tell you. 8 days out from meet day, my last max out session before the competition, i dislocated my elbow on a snatch, it was minor, it popped back in immediately after the lift. But I couldn't lock my elbow out for a couple days after that. Wasn't able to hit even my openers during my taper week and had to dial back almost every session. This injury was completely my fault, i was neglecting mobility, my upper back and shoulders were getting progressively tighter as the training cycle went on. I knew that and assumed everything would be fine. All the time i spend hunched over my computer paired with daily hard training and laziness when it come to what i needed to do outside of the gym caused that injury. Did you see me post on social media about it? No. Why? Because that is no reason to have a bad meet, because it was 100% my fault that the injury happened in the first place. That feedback was all i needed. If i had a great meet i would have made no adjustments and something worse could have happened down the road. Now I know what I need to do in the future. I know the reason it happened in the first place was because of me and only me.
Owning your mistakes + Learning From your mistakes = Growth.
2. Ego
Lately I have seen a lot of people praising humble athletes, and yes, being humble is an admirable trait. But I look at it this way. You should be humble in victory, humble in defeat, but absolutely bullet proof in prep and in training. You are the main character in your story and you need to act like it. Something I tell my athletes who come to me and ask what it takes to truly progress and become a good weightlifter. Develop the ego of someone who is as good as you aspire to be, work until your accomplishments justify it. This all comes down to belief in yourself, and every single person on earth has every right to believe in yourself.
I walked in to high school a gawky 6ft tall 120lb stick bug. No muscle mass, pretty much the weakest guy in every situation i was in. I signed up for weight training my first year, never lifted weights before and couldn't bench the barbell, couldn't squat 135 lbs. A Lot of people will experience that and know that they are not cut out for the sport, that could not be less true. It's easy to look at someone's movement, pre existing strength, natural athleticism and think they have tons of potential. But I truly believe what you can do physically carries 0 weight on what you can accomplish. Everything, and I mean everything comes down to your mentality. I will take the kid that can't hold a bar over his head who has a kobe bryant mentality over the lazy D1 Linebacker any day of the week.
There are several reasons for this. The big one being that the athlete that lacks natural ability is going to be able to adopt a workers mentality. If you have unlimited natural ability, things come much easier… obviously. You rise to a high rank in any athletic endeavor you do without having to do a fraction of the work that the less gifted have to do. But to be the greatest you can possibly be takes 100% effort, and if you are accustomed to putting in 100% effort because you were not a gifted athlete from the jump, you are already on your way. You are used to the work you put in, you are used to nothing being handed to you because every single kilo you put over your head was earned through hard work.
Another reason is, this is weightlifting. At the pinnacle of this sport, the best thing that happens to you is maybe you get a $1000 dollar stipend from USAW and get to travel to some meets, maybe you build up a cool following and get recognized at some gyms you drop in at. but beyond that, there is almost nothing. It's not the NBA, you don't earn multi million dollar contracts, you don't get huge endorsements, you don't have thousands of fans wearing your name on the back of their shirt. There is no huge prize, and the best thing a coach can see is a weightlifter who wants to be the best that they can be purely because they want to. Nothing more, they don't want all the things that come along with it, they want to be the best for no reason. That is called intrinsic motivation, an unrelenting obsession with something that has no guaranteed payout.
Developing an ego is not an easy thing to do. I am going to give you a step by step process on how to do this. First things first, start treating yourself as if you are a good weightlifter. What I mean by this is anytime you do something that might impact training, ask yourself, “would a great weightlifter do this?” if the answer is no, do not do that. Changing your behavior is how you begin to morph your mentality, how you behave becomes who you are, and if you begin to behave like a champion, you will start to believe that you are a champion. If you are up at night scrolling through tik tok mindlessly with 6 hours remaining until that alarm goes off. Turn the phone off and sleep, great weightlifters don't waste their recovery on useless shit. If you are bored and want to crack open a beer but you have training in the morning, take the beer in your fridge and throw it away. Alcohol with training the next day is not something good weightlifters do.
Next thing you do is take your training seriously. If someone asks you if you want to do something before training that involves you getting your heart rate up and being active, save it for after training or don't do it at all. Those things can be going for a hike, playing basketball, going to a yoga class. Prioritize your training. Make it mean something to you, that is how its done. That is how importance is created, and if your training is important to you and you prioritize it over everything, you will start respecting yourself more because of the lengths you are going to to be great. A common question I get when I say these things is “Aren't you worried about having to sacrifice so much just for the sport?” No. The answer is no. and that is because all of these little things that i can do that will bring me momentary bliss will not benefit me in the long run, you are going to have to make sacrifices to become great at anything, and weightlifting just happens to be one of the most demanding endeavors on planet earth.
I have sacrificed alot for this sport. I left home within a month of graduating high school to go train full time at mash elite with Nathan Damron and Tom Summa. We moved to bum fuck no where north carolina with no money and made it work. How many friends did i hang on to from high school? 0. I even missed my own high school graduation for a weightlifting meet. I missed family vacations because i had to train. I missed time with friends, i've spent the several thanksgivings alone in my apartment eating meal prep. These are the things that happen if you want to be great.
People talk alot about balance, balancing social life, work life, with gym life. If you make sure that you are balanced you are not going to look at yourself as a savage that is destined to be great in this sport. You are going to look at yourself as a person that goes to the gym. You need to look at yourself as a weightlifter. Making sacrifices, pushing yourself on a regular basis, and prioritizing training and recovery is how you start to build an ego, when you do things that the greats do, you will start to expect greatness out of yourself.
Another concern you may have, “is all this worth it if i'm not sure if i'll ever achieve what i set out to do?” Yes. It is worth it. Take it from someone who did not achieve what they set out to do ‘yet’. I would not trade the time or the energy that I put into this sport for anything. It has taught me more about life and myself than anything else I have ever done. It is an experience that is truly rewarding in more ways than just accomplishments. You begin to value yourself, respect yourself and even admire yourself more and more with every day you invest in pushing yourself to be truly great at something. You wake up every single morning with drive and purpose, there is not a day that goes by that you don't look forward to. It is the greatest thing that you can possibly do for yourself. Why go through life treading lightly? take risks, allow disappointment and failure to become a possibility, you will achieve nothing unless you truly set your mind on something and attack with every ounce of energy you have.
3. Accountability
Holding yourself accountable is very closely related to ownership. But this form of ownership happens before the fact. This happens before the outcome exposes itself. Holding yourself accountable is something not a lot of people do because it takes some form of humbleness. “But didnt you just talk about ego?” I did. But part of having an ego is to look at your actions and saying “What the hell am i doing? I am better than this.”
This comes down to the little things, it's easy to look at the little things and think they don't matter much but they carry more weight than meets the eye. We’ll start with an example. You get home from training, you sit on the couch, open your phone and start scrolling. What you should really be doing is getting up and making that protein shake. It's not that you forgot because you are sitting there with that thought lingering in your mind. But for some reason you are not getting up and doing anything about it. How hard is it to make a protein shake? It takes 1 minute, consumption takes 1 minute. 2 fucking minutes of your day and for some reason you are convincing yourself its something you dont need to do. Well here's the thing, it isn't something you need to do. It is something you should do and the reason you havent done it yet is because you are being fucking lazy. Plain and simple, you are not acting like the weightlifter you aspire to be, you are acting like the weightlifter that is jealous of other people's progress. I don't care what your excuse is, I don't care if you don't need to do it. Get up and do it. Prove to yourself that you can at least do that.
This branches off to other things, you have to get to sleep but one more episode of whatever show your watching is only another 30 minutes. How hard is it to pick up the remote, turn the tv off, and shut your eyes. That takes literally 5 seconds but people push it off and absolutely ruin their sleep. Why? Because the show is more important than the progress you make in the gym? Because if you don't turn off the show and get to sleep, that is what that tells me. “Only 30 minutes of sleep is not going to make a difference.” Ok. 30 minutes of sleep every night is 3.5 hours of sleep a week lost. About 15 hours of sleep lost across the month. That is 2 nights of sleep. When you have a bad max out day at the end of the month “would this have gone differently if i had 2 extra nights of sleep” The answer is yes. The little things are sneaky, they are borderline negligible but in the grand scheme of things they could make all the difference. A skipped meal a day is about 20,000 less calories a month. A skipped protein shake a day is 750 less grams of protein a month. Not stretching for 20 minutes a night before bed is 10 hours worth of mobility work lost a month. The little things carry just as much weight as the big things, therefore you should treat them with the same amount of respect. We go to the gym everyday, we brush our teeth every day, we shower everyday. You can build habits, but building anything is not effortless. So have some respect for the time you invest in the gym, and build habits that support it. It will make all of the difference.
4. The dog mentality
This is one that a lot of coaches do not agree with me on. It's because science does not support this, but I have been around great weightlifters, and one thing they all have in common is the dog mentality. The dog mentality is defined as such; if there is work to be done, you get it the fuck done, regardless of what happens outside of the gym. This is such a broad concept but it matters more than anything else. As a coach this is the main thing I look for in athletes. Are you willing to push through adversity, are you willing to get in the gym and train when everything is telling you you shouldn't. Are you going to perform when the time comes despite what cards you're given leading up to then.
Let's go through some examples and these are real examples that I have seen from my athletes or have gone through myself.
Car breaks down, you have to go to the shop, you don't have a ride to the gym and you are stressed out about the whole situation. There is an option to get to the gym and train, you can ask people you know from the gym for a ride, or, one of my athletes ubered to the gym to get the work done. I mean this when I say this, I have eternal respect for this athlete because that action showed not only me, but it showed them how dedicated they are to what they are doing.
Couldn't sleep, only got 2 hours of sleep. This was me for the first half of my weightlifting career. From a young age I have dealt with insomnia, later in life I found that there are lifestyle changes you can make to regulate this and it's something I no longer deal with, but up until I was about 21 years old I'd be incredibly lucky to get 8 hours. I'd say 50% of the time, I would be lucky to land a 6 hour night of sleep, there would even be phases where I'd go 2-3 nights without getting any sleep. All of this was dealt with through the most important years of my weightlifting career. If I took a rest day or took it easy in training every time I had a bad night of sleep, you wouldn't know my name, you wouldn't be reading this, I probably wouldn't even be a weightlifter anymore. There is work to be done, that is a constant, that will never change, that is a staple in your life if you call yourself a weightlifter. To prove that it can be done, here's a story.
My best competition total of my career was done at the 2019 American open. I flew into Salt Lake City, Utah on Thursday, I competed on Sunday at 6am. From when I touched down on Thursday to when I competed on Sunday, I collected a total of 6 hours of sleep. It was my last big insomnia episode. The night before I competed, I fell asleep at 9pm, woke up at 10:30pm and could not fall back asleep for the rest of the night. I remember lying in bed and I typed out this big long story post about how I was going to pull out because of my insomnia. I read it top to bottom before posting it, and by the time I got to the bottom I was disgusted with myself. I remember asking myself “Is this really you?” I deleted the story post, jumped up, got some food in me, and watched weightlifting on my phone until it was time. I weighed in, got more food in me, slammed 2 bang energies and let it ride. To this day that is still my comp PR total. I took home silver in the 109 kg category. Every single meet I've done had a more ideal build up to that one by a long shot, but when you ignore all the obstacles that life is throwing at you, it's just you and weightlifting.
5. Belief
I have made several comments and posts online about how you have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain from believing in yourself. I have gotten responses like “why would you get someone's hopes up if they don't have the genetics to be a top level athlete.” Nothing, and i mean nothing has aggravated me more than that comment. The first step in becoming great is believing that you are capable, that comes first. If you don't have a firm belief that you are someone that is capable of achieving what they set out to do then you have 0 chances of becoming anything. You don't become the best weightlifter you can possibly be by accident. You don't become good at anything by accident. You have to believe that it is already in you and you are years of hard work away from expressing that. You have it in you. Every single human being is made up of the same stuff. Tissue and bones. If you walked into a nursery would you be able to pick out the baby that is going to be great at weightlifting? No, you wouldn't, we are all equally capable. Yes there are genetic freaks out there, but I can't count how many times I have seen the genetic freaks get beaten out by someone who is a hard working machine.
We have one shot at life, you have a certain amount of time on this earth and it would be a disservice to yourself and the life you live to think nothing will come of the hours you spend working at something. There is one equation that has held the test of time. Belief + Action = Results. The more you believe in yourself and the more action you take, the more profound the result. This is something that has never ever failed. Half of that equation is believing in yourself. Develop a huge ego, work to justify it. There is no wrong way to go about this. yes, you may be annoying to some people because you are confident. But the only people you are pissing off are the people that dont want to see you become that person you believe you are. Prove those people wrong, and more importantly. Prove yourself right. Believe in everything you do. Believe in yourself, believe in the work you put in, believe in the process of weightlifting. believe that effort will always reward you. If you are in the gym every week putting in work, you are doing what needs to be done for results to show. It doesn't matter what it is, you could be doing the dumbest programming but if you are in there putting in work, banking hundreds of reps day in and day out, you are doing what needs to be done. It is ideal to optimize what you are doing in the gym through proper programming. The most important thing is that you are there working. That is 90% of the battle, and if you have accomplished that you are most of the way there.
The brain is a computer, thoughts are its programming, if you think something, the brain is going to run that programming and make it a reality. I retired because I truly believed my knee was simply too injured to move forward in the sport. Fast forward 2 years, I am back and to be honest with you my knee feels amazing. Have I done anything drastically different? Not really, i replaced the back squat with the front squat but beyond that? Nothing. I do all of the same stuff I did when my knee was practically inoperable. The main thing I did differently, I changed the way I thought about it. This is what i told myself when i got back to training; “My knee can hurt all it wants, i dont care anymore, i am going to lift until i physically cannot lift anymore.” and just like that, we haven't had any issues since. The amount of anxiety I spent worrying about if I was going to reinjure my knee was gone and so were my knee issues. I threw caution to the wind and just went for it, and that is exactly what you need to do with your weightlifting career. It doesn't matter what happens, you are going to try your absolute hardest, you are going to do everything right, and you will become the best weightlifter that you can possibly be.
Summary
When you break everything down there are 5 tenets to follow.
Ownership - Everything that happens is your fault. Once you take ownership of everything, you develop the ability to control everything.
Ego - Enter every training session with the idea that you are fully prepared for the work at hand no matter what. You are the hardest worker you know starting now.
Accountability - Cut the laziness, you are not that person anymore, you get up and do what you have to do the moment it needs to be done.
Dog Mentality - It doesnt matter what life throws at you, when you walk in that gym it is time to put your head down and go to work, invite pain, invite adversity and use them as an opportunity to prove to yourself how tough you truly are.
Belief - Dream big, you are just as capable as every successful weightlifter out there, if you take anything from this, its this, you are truly capable of more than you imagine.
If you abide by these tenets, you will succeed. Weightlifting is a constant battle with the man in the mirror. you can easily be your biggest enemy,
but you can also be your greatest ally. If you get your brain working for you rather than against you, that will open up the floodgates and progress will begin pouring in. It is vital that you stick to this mentality no matter what. Especially when training gets hard, take ownership. know hard training will pass. be accountable with your actions that help with training and recovery. Put your head down and continue busting your ass. Believe the hard times will pass, because they will. No progress is linear, the hard times are more important than the good ones and if you find yourself struggling, that means you are on the right track. Keep your mind right and don't stop pushing.