How to PR Forever
Lifting weights is one of the best activities you can do for your long-term health.
Most people begin lifting weights to improve other facets of their life: to play with grandkids, to participate in meaningful hobbies, and to improve the capabilities of their bodies. What began as an activity to supplement other activities quickly becomes the main focus. As a coach I rarely see newbies with strength goals, they have outcome goals. Here’s an example of how assessments typically go:
New Person: “I want to be able to pick up my grandkids.”
Me: “That’s an awesome goal, your grandkids will love when you pick them up.”
Very rarely (never) will a new person walk in and say, “I want to deadlift 200lb so that it’s easier to pick up my grandkids.” Deadlifts are a great exercise to improve your ability to pick things up off the floor, but initially, most people don’t care about how much weight they lift.
Once they experience the benefits of lifting consistently for a few months, they become addicted to the feeling of hitting a PR. You feel like a superhero when you warm up with weights you used to struggle to lift. Because of how fast initial progress happens, newbies are left unprepared for how long this process takes after the “newbie gains” have worn off.
When you first start lifting weights it’s not uncommon to lift more weight every training session. Every training session turns into every training week, then every training block, and eventually you get to the point where it requires multiple training blocks to hit PRs.
Like anything else in life, the more advanced you are the harder it is to improve. If you’ve been lifting weights for a few months, I’m sorry to be the one to inform you that your progress has already moved the fastest it will ever move. From this point forward you will have to continue to work harder for each additional pound on the bar, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.
Relying on hitting PRs to stay motivated to train is unreliable at best. Because PRs can be so hard to come by, it is more reliable to embrace the process of training for those PRs if you’re looking to stay motivated and disciplined enough to train for years. There will be great training sessions followed by miserable training sessions, awesome blocks followed by awful blocks, and an unpredictable number of obstacles that will try to throw you off track. Falling in love with the mindset and behaviors that lead to a stronger, more resilient, more disciplined version of yourself is a guaranteed way to ensure you hit more PRs than if you just focused on the numbers alone.