The name of Ray Williams is apparently at least somewhat well known in the USA, at least for those who are familiar with and follow collegiate football. Since I do not follow gridiron in any meaningful way, I had no clue who he is until earlier this year.
Then I saw footage from last year of him squatting, benching, and deadlifting at the IPF Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, OH. And my jaw simply hit the floor.
The dude walks out with over a THOUSAND pounds on his back as if he’s doing warm-up lifts. And while his depth on his second and especially his third squat are a little shady, there is absolutely no question that his depth on the first squat was good.
Ever since then, I have been watching videos of his lifts and featured him a couple of times in my usual Monday compilations as part of the “Gym Beasts” segment.
Rarely has the term, “beast”, been appropriate than in this case. Ray Williams is a straight-up savage with the weights. All you have to do is watch footage of him lifting to realise that this guy is one of the best powerlifters ever.
I came across an interview done with Mr. Williams in which he gave details about how he got into lifting, and what he does to be as good as he is:
Watching those squats, all I could say was… “wow”.
Put aside the fact that he definitely did not hit depth on either of those over-1,000lb squats. If he wants to, he absolutely can crush a 1,005lb raw squat:
That is the kind of squat that makes jaws hit the floor. He squatted that kind of weight with just a belt and knee sleeves – not wraps, sleeves – right down to below parallel.
Not for nothing did longtime reader Dire Badger once remark that “Power lifters are like demigods among mortal men”.
For me, the most interesting part of Ray Williams’ interview is the part where he talks about the mindset that you have to have in order to lift weights that the human body was simply not designed to lift.
He is right. The human body is a truly remarkable creation, and it is designed and built to endure hardships far beyond what most of us can imagine sitting on our couches and in our computer chairs. With sufficient time, training, and willpower, a man can hike continuously for mile after mile while carrying 40, 50, or even sometimes upwards of 60lbs of equipment on his back. He can endure intense heat and terrible cold. He can harden his body to resist all manner of attack from unarmed opponents. He can learn how to fight against armed ones and survive, and even triumph.
The human body is certainly designed for hard work – a fact that too many of us forget, wasting our lives and our potential away while sitting on the couch and stuffing our faces full of processed garbage, or insisting on destroying our muscles and our strength through endless cardio and inflammation-inducing hearthealthywholegrains.
But the human body is not designed to squat, deadlift, and bench press such crazy weights.
That is where the mindset of a savage comes in.
As Mr. Williams points out, there is a dark place in the mind of every powerlifter, into which he must go in order to lift those kinds of weights. While I can only lift perhaps a third of the kind of weight that Mr. Williams can, I know all too well the darkness that he speaks of.
As I have pointed out more than once, the value of the iron comes from the pain that it inflicts upon you – or, more accurately, the pain you inflict upon yourself. But, in order to endure that kind of pain, one must be willing to face a dark and terrible truth:
The pain of discipline that one endures from lifting such weights is far less than the pain of regret that one endures from not lifting them.
The hard truth is that every powerlifter is, at some level, damaged. We really are broken men. As elite powerlifter George Leeman once pointed out, boring happy people who are content and satisfied with their lives do not concern themselves with lifting insane amounts of weight. To be a powerlifter, even just an amateur like me who simply tries to lift to stay fit and strong, requires a mindset fundamentally different from that of the average man on the street.
That is because the average man cannot and will never risk the kind of pain, injury, and trauma that can come from lifting these weights.
There is a darkness in every lifter that I know, a terrible savagery that lurks deep within their hearts. We all have a beast caged within us, raging to be set free, to be unleashed upon the world. We fear what will happen if we ever lose control of that beast and let it simply roam free, unchecked by any self-control.
We do a pretty good job of keeping that at bay most of the time. We function normally and easily within society. We smile and laugh along with everyone else because that is what normal people do.
But, when we enter the gym and face the squat rack… we become very different people. We let that beast out of its cage. And it howls and slavers, delighted to be set free.
The consequences for getting in the way of that beast are scary, to say the least. If you have ever seen a serious powerlifter doing squats or deadlifts, you know what I mean. You know “the face” – the look of barely repressed bestial rage that makes such men look like they are about to murder someone. And if you do happen to get in the way of someone doing seriously heavy lifts, chances are better than even money that you will seriously regret it.
If you have ever heard the roar of a lifter who has achieved a new personal best after struggling mightily to get the weight back up, you know what I mean when I say that these men are not quite healthy in some way. It is both reasonable and accurate to think that we have something wrong with us. We stand in the corner of the gym, lifting insanely heavy weights, embalming ourselves in chalk, and making the ground quake every time we complete a heavy lift. Surely, you would think such men are batshit insane.
And the thing is, we would not have it any other way.
The iron is an absolutely merciless teacher. It tolerates no excuses and permits no weakness. It has no patience for our frailty. It respects only achievement. The only thing that the iron is interested in is: can you lift me?
If you cannot, the iron does not care about you.
If you can, then the iron grants you the greatest reward that it can possibly bestow:
It forges you into something as unbending, as resolute, as expertly forged, as it is.
For it is an eternal truth of the iron that you become that which you work against. And in order to be the best, or at least the very best that you can be, you have to work against the iron – which really means that you have to work against yourself.
The greatest lifters that I have ever seen – like Ray Williams – are straight-up savages in the gym, but they are really good and decent people outside of it. That is because the gym is the crucible in which their character flaws and impurities are burned away, and where their bodies and, more importantly, their minds, are reforged and bonded with iron.
Ray Williams is an example of a man who failed to learn the virtues of hard work, self-discipline, and righteous conduct early on in his life. The iron helped him find these things, and today he is one of the greatest lifters of all time – a man who lifts Biblically heavy weights at speeds that simply defy comprehension. He is the very definition of the gym beast, and as such is an example and a role model to lifters everywhere.
1 Comment
I top out at about 513 (at 45), but when someone asked me once how to tell if you can be a powerlifter, I had two questions.
Have you ever broken a bone? If the answer is yes, you probably are not built right for truly heavy lifting. I got genetically lucky, my family NEVER breaks bones.
The second question is, have you ever willingly done something horribly painful to yourself, for no real reason other than curiosity or because hurting yourself is absolutely necessary? (In my case it was cutting a piece of cable out of my leg during an emergency. Hurt like hell but I'd do it again.) If the answer is, again, no, you probably don't have the mindset to be a powerlifter.
However, to have nice big muscles that impress the ladies it only takes a little time each morning or a couple of years moving furniture or something. It's not impossible to be strong, but being a powerlifter takes a special sort of stupid. I like lifting hard, but even _I_ do not have enough stupid to be a real lifter.