Weight Training Over 50

Strength Building: Practice the Invisible Skills

Strength Building: Practice the Invisible Skills Realizing your full potential for lifting heavy weights or doing some other feat of strength is dependent on being able to mobilize your muscles to do a very difficult movement. The most important action in producing...

Practice Like a Pro: Work on the Small Details of Performance

Practice Like a Pro: Work on the Small Details of Performance If you have been competing in powerlifting for a long time or playing another sport that requires precision movement, you will find that it is usually the small details needed for peak performance that...

Use Your Attention to Maximum Benefit

Use Your Attention to Maximum Benefit Your conscious attention is one of the resources that most people squander. For those of us who lift heavy weights, losing sharp mental focus can significantly diminish our efforts. Having sharp mental focus enables us to devote...

What can weightlifters learn from “Moneyball”?

What can weightlifters learn from Moneyball? In the past few weeks I have been reading books written by Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball the classic study of how the Oakland As were able to use statistical data to gain a competitive edge in searching for...

Learn to listen to your body: Key to building strength and endurance

Learn to listen to your body: Key to building strength and endurance Back in the 1970s the first US based research on factors impacting sports performance emerged. When the running boom was in its early stages, a few psychologists began trying to figure out what elite...

Practicing things you don’t like: The key to improvement

Mid Life Hard Body Practicing Things You Dont Like: Key to Improvement Sadly, the universe does not care about what each of us likes and doesnt like. Our opinions and preferences dont have an impact in the physical world. This inconvenient reality means that to make...

Small Changes that Make a BIG Difference

Small Changes that make a BIG difference and a hard to believe story from long ago Regular readers of this column know that one of my enduring bits of advice is that working to achieve near perfect lifting technique is the only way to realize your full potential. It...

Turning 82 and Still Powerlifting

Reflections on turning 82 and still powerlifting I turned 82 this past week and am getting ready to participate in Bull Stewarts August 20 Bench Press-Deadlift meet at Alki Beach in Seattle. That sounds strange even to me. Im truly blessed to still be able to lift...

Making Improvements as an Experienced Lifter

Making Improvements as an Experienced Lifter We are all aware of how easy it is for a beginning lifter to make significant gains in the first two months of training. Beginners can show a massive improvement in a short time. When you begin in a weak and/or...