5 things lifters are wrong about, and what their coach sees instead
Your coaches at MWBC have spent years on the gym floor, as athletes as well as coaches, watching lifters train. Over that time we start to see the patterns that keep coming up for athletes, and how these misunderstandings are potentially holding a lifter back.
A handful of beliefs show up again and again, held by lifters who are working hard and getting in their own way without realising it.
Here are 5 of them, and what you should be focusing on instead.
You think a good session is a session you don't miss
We think technique breakdown is another useful data point in a session. When the bar drifts forward off the floor, when your pull runs out of speed, when you can't hold a receiving position in balance, that error is the lift telling us exactly what to work on next.
When you miss, your first question is usually why you couldn't get it. Ours is what the miss is showing us, and what the next block needs to look like because of it.
A day where every lift goes up smoothly and easily often just means the weight was light, and as we know, not too many sessions go that way.
You think the program is set in stone before you arrive.
We write your program as a best guess of what we want you to endeavour to achieve, before we've seen you walk through the door.
You carry things into a session we can't always plan for. The 4 hours of sleep, the work or uni deadline that ate up all your time this week, the shoulder that's been painful since Saturday, the headspace you brought in with you.
Some days the plan on paper is what we go with after the warm-up, and you execute it untouched. Some days we're rewriting it before you've even made working weight, and that rewrite is all part of our job.
Stop assuming that if you don't hit your program as written, you are failing. Adjusting on the fly is part of the coaching process.
You think the session starts when the working weights go on the bar.
We're already reading how you're moving on your empty bar and your warm-up sets.
The positions you find at 50% and 60% decide what's going to be available to you at 90%. The way you move light tells us whether today is a day to chase a heavy single or a day to bank good reps and head home.
Rushing the warm-up to get to the working sets is how a lifter arrives at them feeling average, then spends the back half of the session wondering where it went wrong.
You think getting stronger is a physical problem with a purely physical solution.
More volume, more intensity, better food, more sleep, those things all matter. But the single biggest impact on any session is the headspace you bring with you through the door.
The same lifter, on a day where you're already mentally written off, will miss lifts you shouldn't. On a day you turn up present and open to being coached, you might surprise yourself with what you're capable of.
We've watched a lifter add 10 kilos to a clean and jerk inside a month with the only change being how they spoke to themselves between attempts. We watch your headspace as closely as your positions, because over a month it moves the bar forward by just as much.
You think this session will make or break you.
A flat day feels like proof you're going backwards. A good one feels like everything is finally clicking.
One session, brilliant or terrible, barely shows up in the arc that actually builds a lifter.
Progress climbs in a crooked line, with long flat stretches and sudden jumps, and the thing that carries you across the flat parts is turning up the same way on a great Tuesday and a rubbish Thursday. The session you want to wipe from your memory is one of those few 100 sessions that, stacked on top of each other across years, are the only thing that ever moved your numbers.
All of these errors come back to the same thing.
The number on the bar gets most of your attention. We watch everything around it: the miss that shows us what to fix next, the warm-up that decides how the session goes, the headspace you carried in the door, and the months of training stacked up behind today. Those are the things that move you forward. You focus on the lift in front of you, and we'll keep watch on the rest.
Ready to train with coaches who see you?
If any of this sounds familiar, come and experience what it feels like to have a fresh set of eyes on your lifting. We're offering a free one-on-one session at MWBC where we'll work with you on the floor, not just hand you a program. No commitment, just coaching.
Book your free session today- LINK
