In June of 2011, I did two things that would change the course of my life forever. First, I moved out of my rather cosy, but quite expensive, apartment in Big Shitty, and moved across the river to the west, into what turned out to be a mistake. (I moved into a basement apartment – pro-tip, boys, if you ever see a “garden apartment” being advertised for a “good” price, JUST WALK AWAY. The lack of direct sunlight, and the noise that comes from upstairs, just ain’t worth it. Fortunately, my next two apartments in the same general neighbourhood were absolutely amazing. So it worked out in the end.)

And, second, I stopped dicking about in the gym and started powerlifting.

So here I stand (quite literally, since I like to work standing up from time to time), to narrate my journey over the past 10 years.

The First Steps

Before January 2004, I never went to the gym. The notion of “working out” didn’t make any sense to me. I grew up in a sedentary family that had (and still has) no understanding of exercise science. This was back before the days of YouTube fitness channels and the widespread availability of sensible lifting advice.

Seeing as I am very much one of Ye Olde Phartes, it is worth pointing out, for the young bucks among you, that back then, Teh Innarwebz was QUITE different – de JOOToobz was barely getting started, funny cat memes involving “kittehs” that “can haz chzburger” were taking off, and “video channels” weren’t really a “thing” back then. Most of what you got by way of “entertainment” on the web back then was mostly in the form of crude Flash cartoons that took an eternity to download even through a DSL connection.

So finding sensible advice about lifting and fitness was both harder and easier than it is today. It was harder because the process of research was still painfully slow. But it was easier because the amount of bullshit and nonsense out there was also significantly lower.

Even so, back when I first started going to the gym – waaaaaaaaayyy back in 2004 – I didn’t have a clue where to start. I just knew that I didn’t want to be a bodybuilder, so I didn’t want to lift heavy-ass weight. (Yeah, yeah, I know. In my defence, I do learn from my mistakes. Eventually.)

Symptoms of F**karounditits

I therefore started out by doing a lot of cycling, rowing, and weight machines. And I started seeing results fairly quickly. I got strong – at least, in terms of my ability to move things around on machines. (I know, now, that this doesn’t count for shit in the real world.) But I routinely looked over and saw these huge German dudes lifting serious weights in the free weights corner, and I always wondered what it was that drove them to get the results they did.

At no point did I connect the fact that they were doing heavy compound lifts, with the fact that they had massive amounts of muscle on them.

Things continued this way over the next 7 years. I never moved away from doing cardio and weights, and I never changed my diet away from a low-fat, high-carb, hearthealthywholegrains approach to food. After all, that was how I had been taught to eat my whole life.

But over time, I realised that nothing I was doing was really working anymore.

I lost a LOT of weight back when I first started lifting, simply because I was actually moving around and exercising. But then, after a few years, I’d put all of that weight back on – with interest. And that was despite the fact that I was exercising at least 5 days a week, either by running, or rowing, or doing chin-ups and chest flies with dumbbells.

I didn’t know it back then. But I was suffering from a severe case of what Martin Berkhan called “F**karounditis” in a classic article from way back in 2011. Put simply, I was not making gains because I was doing EVERYTHING wrong.

Walking the Righteous Path

So in January of 2011, I decided to start looking around for an alternative. And I found it through Google searches (remember, this was back in the days when Google wasn’t a completely insane evil corporation – they sort of provided something useful back then.)

I stumbled across a website called StrongLifts, run by a chap with a funny accent and odd writing style named Mehdi Hadim. As soon as I started reading it, I knew that what I had found was pure gold.

Mehdi’s advice was radically different from everything I had ever been taught. Instead of lots of cardio and light weights to infinity, his advice was really, really simple: lift heavy shit for set numbers of reps, and add weight every workout. Instead of confusing me with lots of different workouts, he simply said: do these 5 lifts, and nothing else. His programme was clear, precise, logical, and orderly.

It was like reading an engineer’s manual for strength. And that is an appropriate analogy indeed, because as I have said many times before, powerlifting is strength engineering.

I started with Mehdi’s programme and stuck to it religiously for the better part of two years. And I made huge progress. I combined Mehdi’s programme of heavy lifting and solid rest periods with the very best of good eating after discovering Mark SIsson’s The Primal Blueprint, which forever changed my approach to food.

I have never looked back. I eat and lift and move and rest like a beast, and it feels AWESOME.

The Didact’s Personal Records

Here are the best lifts that I’ve ever notched up, along with approximate dates as to when I achieved them:

• Squat: 365lbs (165.91Kg), August 2013
• Deadlift: 465lbs (211.36Kg), February 2015
• Bench: 245lbs (111.36Kg), probably around April 2016

Since then, I have significantly scaled back my lifting efforts and I no longer follow anything like an SL5x5 programme. This is not surprising. The SL5x5 programme is for beginners and will give them gains at astonishing speed. But every lifter has a different body and will adapt to the weight loads differently. Eventually, once the “n00b gainz!!!” set in, you have to move on to programmes better adapted to your body, lifestyle, diet, temperament, and – not to put too fine a point on it – injuries.

These days, my squats top out at about 325lbs, my deadlifts at 445lbs, and my bench press at about 225lbs. And I am very, very careful not to overstress and overburden my body – I have to be, because of what follows:

The Price of Iron

None of these gains have been easy, straightforward, or free of pain. In fact, these past 10 years of lifting seriously heavy shit has come at a very high price.

My entire left side is a complete mess. My left shoulder has NEVER recovered fully from a serious dislocating injury from over 12 years ago – caused by my idiotic and ill-fated use of a Smith machine, by the way. Both my left hip and knee bear long-term injuries caused by muscular imbalances and significant stress exacerbated (though not caused by) powerlifting.

I have hyperextended my right elbow in a groundfighting training session. I have experienced a serious contusion injury to my left index finger that stops me from extending it fully and bending it to the same degree as my right index finger, caused by checking a kick the wrong way during tag-fighting which jammed the bone into the joint really hard.

Now, almost all of those injuries have come from martial arts, NOT lifting. But my body has had to compensate for them, and that has proven challenging in many ways. I have adapted my training routine to deal with those injuries, but it is not easy.

Far more serious, though, are the back injuries that I have sustained through lifting with bad form early on, back in 2011-13. And that genuinely was my fault. However, it turns out that I was already fighting against my own body in many ways to lift the kinds of weights that I do.

It is easy to see what I mean when I use pictures. Today I’m going to show you actual MRI scans of my own spine. I did an MRI in, I think, about March last year, and it proved to be quite revealing.

This first photo is of my spine from the back:

And the second photo is from the side, of my lumbar spine:

The results are clear as day – my spine curves slightly, which means that I have scoliosis, and every single disc in my lumbar spine bulges out a bit.

Oh, but wait, it gets worse. My scoliosis is almost certainly an inheritance from my grandfather, who was completely flat-footed and had chronic spinal issues his entire life. My father and I both have serious back issues as a direct result of this – I also have relatively flat feet (though not as bad as Ol’ Granpappy Didact), and that means that I can’t lift anything like at my full potential, because my lower back literally can’t handle it.

The combination of scoliosis and bulging discs means that I MUST stretch out my back every single day, and stretch it again before I work out. I don’t mind, because I want to make sure that I can keep lifting for many years to come.

None of this should be taken to mean that you should not lift. That’s idiotic. There is NO better or faster way to get strong, fast, than by lifting heavy shit in a careful, safe, and sensible way. I have written numerous articles on how to lift with good technique over the years, and I recommend that you search them out and read them. You can start with my Beginner’s Guide to LIfting series, which breaks it all down – see the Ecumene page for details.

Powerlifting is Strength Engineering

So why do I keep lifting, ten years later and with a body that has significant wear and tear?

It’s really simple:

Lifting makes me happy.

Powerlifters are a very strange bunch. As I have said before, powerlifters are broken at our core. There is something really wrong deep down in every one of us.

Most people would not gain satisfaction from lifting hundreds of pounds off the ground or on our backs, roaring like bears while embalming ourselves in chalk dust and listening to thrash metal through headphones with expressions on our faces that make us look like straight-up axe-murderers. Most people would find that sort of thing to be quite disturbing.

Powerlifters are not most people.

This insane shit makes us happy. More than this, powerlifting is the most potent application of the science of strength engineering that you can find. It is a simple, direct, no-nonsense approach to strength that takes the most fundamental principles of movement of the human body and codifies them into programmes that get you strong, FAST.

Lifting will change your life, as it changed mine. It made me stronger and tougher, both physically and mentally. Every time that life has beaten me down, I have turned to the iron – because it doesn’t do pity, or sympathy, or nonsense.

The iron respects ONLY achievement. It rewards ONLY effort. The iron is cold, unfeeling, uncaring, and totally indifferent to your plight. And because of these things, the iron is the single best teacher that you can have.

The iron will not lower itself to meet your pathetic, snivelling, whiny standards. YOU have to elevate yourself to meet it.

And when you do that, you will grow up in a very, very big hurry.