by Felicia Woron //
As a powerlifter, my evenings usually consist of filling out the Excel doc provided to me by my coach. Today, I find the row that says Paused Deadlifts, one of the movements my coach has prescribed for me to help improve my regular deadlift. I type in the weight that I lifted for my top set––138 kg––and then the RPE, or “Rate of Perceived Exertion”: a subjective estimate of how difficult it felt (a higher number indicates increased difficulty). Whoops! I type to my coach under the notes section. These were probably closer to an RPE 8 than RPE 7. Sorry, I misjudged how difficult they would be.
And then I pause, and smile a little wryly to myself. I don’t know any other part of my life in which I would apologize for working too hard at something.
I think of my friends who tell me about how they begrudgingly attend fitness classes, where trainers yell at them to push harder all throughout the workout. I think of my days as a teenager on the swim team, where my coaches would yell at me to swim faster all throughout practice. I left high school so burnt out by swimming that I have not been able to jump into a swimming pool for enjoyment since. I think of my early days of lifting, where I pushed myself close to failure almost every session, and saw my initial improvements give way to injuries and a plateau. And I think of med school, where I am utterly, mentally exhausted by the sheer amount of information I am expected to absorb and regurgitate on an unrelenting weekly basis, and already questioning whether I truly want to become a physician, not even a year into my training.
Later in my lifting career, I learned a transformative concept, and one that has gained significant popularity in the powerlifting world: fatigue management. To me, this concept is simple, yet brilliant. The idea behind it is that if you push yourself too much, too frequently, you will put your body under too much stress to keep making improvements. You will not be able to recover appropriately to handle the stress of the next training session, and this will even put you at great risk for injury. Instead, fatigue management means that you strategically push yourself close to failure only at certain times during a training cycle. Training is still centered around progression, but most of the time, you work with submaximal loads. You even take “deloads”––intentionally easy training weeks meant for recovery––on a regular basis. Furthermore, you are usually encouraged to autoregulate your training. If my coach prescribes a bench press at RPE 8 (about two reps away from failure), and I’m feeling really well-rested, energized, and strong that day, I might choose to take 80 kg. If I’m feeling stressed, defeated, and exhausted, I can decide to take 75 kg instead. It doesn’t mean that I’ve gotten weaker, it just accounts for the fact that outside factors, like sleep, nutrition, and stress, might affect my ability to perform that given day. This doesn’t mean I get to be lazy whenever I want to, but it means stress and exhaustion aren’t punished: we try to minimize them as much as possible, but ultimately, they’re expected, and adjusted for.
And it works. I am still getting stronger, over three years into powerlifting. But more importantly, I think, is that I feel nowhere close to burnout. Unlike few other things in my life, I am excited for the long haul. Because I am not always asked to give my all, I know with confidence that I always have more to give. If I am prescribed to squat at RPE 7, I get to sit and wonder, with incredulity, what I could do for a max effort RPE 10, and I constantly look forward to the day I will get to try that. When I inevitably start to feel mentally and physically fatigued, I tell my coach, and we pivot to a deload. And then, a week later, I am ready and excited to start pushing myself again.
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