You're Stalled At a Mediocre Total Because You Half-Ass Your Training

If I had to give a one-word answer as to what separates intermediate lifters from advanced lifters, it’s this: Intent. Every rep, every set, every training session, and every training block is an opportunity to make yourself better. By executing your training plan with intent, you refine your setup, your execution of the lift, and your mindset around your training. Intent allows us to get better even on our bad days, because we’re refining the process that will allow us to become great. As a coach, these are the 3 areas I want to see intent from my athletes during their training. 

Warm Up:

I get irrationally angry when people arrogantly half-ass their warmup as if they’re too cool to be seen squatting with an empty bar. If you’re going to be doing 4-5 warmup sets before your first working set, that is your opportunity to refine your setup, run through your mental checklist to make sure you’re prepared to execute once the weight is heavy, and to build the skill of performing that exercise. Lazily un-racking and re-racking your warmups while holding no tension through your set is a great way to guarantee your working sets feel like shit. Want to get better? Take every rep of every set seriously. Stay mentally engaged in all of your warmups, working sets, and back-off sets; execute with intent and watch your skill and strength improve. 

Program:

Executing your program with intent is the fastest way to get better. What do I mean by that? I mean doing your program as written and communicating with your coach about your results. Some of you reading this find it fun to do heavy sets of SBD, but then when it comes to your secondary lifts on the back half of the week you dog it, rush your pauses, rush your tempos, and execute the lifts in a sloppy manner because you’re too proud to take some weight off the bar. An elite lifter would execute their pause bench with intent, making sure to pause through their warmup sets, pause for the prescribed amount of time, and not get sloppy with their execution in order to have a weight on the bar that strokes their ego. Long-term progress requires identifying and improving your weaknesses. If I identify a weakness and prescribe an exercise to improve that weakness, I expect that exercise to be executed with intent so that you get better. 

Mindset:

Intent is driven by your mindset. I understand not wanting to be in the gym, being distracted by your personal life, and by not enjoying your training. What I don’t understand is why anyone would want to spend 90-120 minutes in the gym and get less out of their training. If that amount of time is going by anyway, you might as well suck it up and execute your program with intent so that you don’t end up spending hours in the gym per week to not get any better. 

Most people don’t stall out in their progress because they’re at the physical limit of training their body can tolerate. They stall out because they overlook the little things, they lack intent in their execution, and their mind fails them before their body. It can be a hard pill to swallow, but maybe you don’t need to be doing more, you need to be doing better.