I was in my favorite public gym today. I was going to lift outside because the weather has finally broken in South Jersey and we had a 70-degree day, but I was out of the CBD gummies that the gym sells and damned if my body and brain doesn’t notice if I miss a day. So I ventured in and I was working some lat pulldowns/push-ups supersets, and in between sets I was looking around the room. I like watching people.

It’s like sitting on the boardwalk and watching people on a Saturday night in Ocean City, Maryland. I like seeing if they are working hard or just bullshitting. There’s the guy who is shadow boxing between sets. I bet you have that guy in your gym also. There’s the powerlifting girl who takes 20 minutes to get ready and 20 minutes between sets. All good people and most folks at this gym work hard. Everyone at the gym when I go, around 11 AM, is always super cool. I like it because a bunch of people have become my friends there, a bunch of stand-up people. And the gym has everything you need equipment-wise and you can use chalk and cuss out loud and nobody cares.

So I was looking around the gym and I saw one of the girls who is in there all the time training, and she’s squatting. She's a good squatter, she squats deep, she knows how to lift. Big legs, decent glutes, decently muscular. It's funny, but being in the strength coaching business for so long I was always around females who, when you told them their legs looked good or when you told them their legs looked big, they took it as a compliment.

A few times I have put my foot in my mouth to regular citizens. I made a female coach cry one time when I told her that her legs had gotten bigger. I didn’t know that she was sensitive about her legs getting bigger. Doesn’t everyone want bigger legs? I was at my kid’s little league baseball game a few years ago and I saw this woman who I have never met sitting in a lawn chair. She had muscular quads and hanging hamstrings. Of course, I walked right over to her and I said, “Look at those quads! Do you compete?” She looked at me like I had lost my mind and said she just works out some.

Then a man who turned out to be her husband came walking over. He introduced himself, and Oblivious Old Me said, “I was just complimenting your wife on her quad size!” He looked at me quizzically but didn’t seem to take offense. However, I changed the subject because I felt a little foolish. When I tell people what I said to her, they ask, “What the hell is wrong with you?” I just say that she had nice quads, and I had to tell her.

Back to the girl that I was observing in the gym, squatting. When I have seen her squat, it's usually in the 155-185 pound range. She was doing 205 when I saw her today between my sets. The reps were decent – maybe not IPF deep, but decent. She’s pretty serious, and doesn't screw around when she trains. She must be a social media influencer or something. She is always filming herself with a tripod. Can you believe that people carry a tripod and film themselves all the time? I can see having someone film a top set that is a personal record or a form check, but setting up the tripod, making sure it's perfect, every set? Strange.

(People, girls especially, have changed their behavior in the gym. They think nothing of wearing crazy, see through stuff and actually checking their butts out in front of everyone in the mirror. I’m not complaining, of course, just noticing the difference.)

So I did another superset, and I was looking around and the squatting girl had 215 pounds on the bar. She does that for a single, and it was easy. Then I did another superset and then she asked two competing powerlifter females to spot her, saying that she is going to 225 pounds for a max now. I had one more superset to do, so I finished it and I was ready to watch the max attempt. She is walking around, telling the girls that she is scared. And she keeps saying it over and over again, “I’m scared, I’m scared.”

Right then, I knew she was going to miss the weight. How could she get it after her brain told her body that she is scared, over and over? Her whole body knows that fear has invaded it! So the girls are trying to get her pumped up and she is repeating the mantra, “I’m scared, I’m scared.” I almost yelled out, “Stop saying that! Why are you saying that?” I've had athletes who missed a rep because they were scared, you know the whole act-like-you-are-trying-then-collapse-back-down-and-make-an-excuse thing. Like, “I came forward a little bit and lost it,” when everyone knows that didn't happen – that fear won the argument.

I think a little nervousness is OK, like a little excitement. But if you step under a heavy weight and are thinking what if this happens, what if that happens, you are screwed. I remember one time when one of my assistant coaches at Penn, Collegiate Weightlifting Champion Brett Crossland, told a kid who had just missed a personal record attempt, “You ain’t weak, you are just scared,” and he was right. I remember spotting this college kid one time who was doing the old 20-rep squat program. His all-time goal was to do 300 pounds for 20 reps. He got the 19th rep and quit on the 20th. This was 20 years ago, and it still bothers me. Now the guy is a neurosurgeon, but damned if he didn't puss out on that 20th rep.

Get it any way you can, I don't care how you get it up, don’t quit, man. Fucking good morning that thing up, just get it. But he didn’t even give it a try. Straight to the bottom, complete with the scared look while he stays there, at the bottom. I remember that World powerlifting champion and my boss at the time, Dr. Rob Wagner, and I just looked at each other, then we looked at the kid and then we walked away. What else could we have done or said? And the kid knew it too. I bet he still thinks about it between surgeries. That’s like getting all the way to the moon and you can’t manage to plant the American flag.

I think that you have to say aggressive things to yourself, or at least positive things. I used to say things like, “Fuck this weight” and I’d tell myself that I was a Berserker getting ready to go on the warpath. I’d think about how other people have done much more than the weight on the bar, and they are no different than I am. For the deadlift, I would constantly say to myself, "just get it to your knees, just get it to your knees,” because I knew that if I just got the weight to my knees, I would complete the rep.

On the squat, I’d constantly say to myself, “Don’t quit, don’t quit,” because I have had reps where it seemed like the bar stopped on the way up and because I didn’t quit, I completed a seemingly impossible rep. On the bench, I would just get mad at something, not any particular thing, I would just conjure some anger out of somewhere and then I would say, “Break that fucking bar in half,” which made me think of keeping the elbows in during the lift, and then I’d think about putting fingerprints in the bar because I was staying so tight and squeezing the bar so hard.

Many years ago, a professor at the University of Temple, J.B. Oxendine, designed a chart that listed optimal arousal levels in sports. Archery and golf were on the bottom as slight arousal, but lifting weights? That was at the top of the chart, and listed at an arousal level as “extremely excited.” I have been fascinated by “psych” forever, probably because my father taught Sports Psychology at the University of Maryland. I remember asking him how fired up I should be when lifting maximum weights. He said, “Once you learn the skill of the movement, you should work yourself up into a blind rage.”

I love that: Blind Rage. I have to believe that when you get into that state and your form is good, the chance of you crushing a weight is much higher than when walking around the gym telling people how afraid you are. I have written before about my former training partner, Big Chris, who would get fired up for a set by imagining someone in the gym was talking bad about him. He would definitely work himself into a blind rage.

Also, when I was spotting him on the bench, he wouldn't let me look at him. I had to turn my head. Which doesn’t speak to getting fired up, but does speak to how strange Big Chris was back then.

Maybe saying that they are scared over and over before they try a maximum attempt works for some folks, but I doubt it. In my opinion, it's better to act like a Berserker in a blind rage, ready to pillage the village and stomp some ass before you crush the rep.

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