True story:
Late 2011, I decided to enter a powerlifting meet.
Why?
Ego.
I’d been lifting for a shade over two years at the time and thought myself some sort of athlete.
In reality, I was nowhere near ready, and, frankly, my attending the competition would be utterly disrespectful to the men and women who had trained far harder for far longer than I had.
A quick glance at the numbers people in my weight class were putting up told me as much (I was squatting around 170kg, benching 105kg, and deadlifting 180kg for singles at a bodyweight of 85kg – lightyears below what the top competitors at this local, amateur competition were doing).
However.
Instead of doing the smart thing and pulling out of the meet, I decided to try and “brute force” my lifts up to the required standard.
I won’t go into the specifics of what I did because experience tells me there are people out there who are dumb enough to take my warning as an instruction, but suffice it to say it involved handling weights I had no right to lift.
Predictably, things went very wrong.
About a month and a half out from the meet, I was doing barbell good mornings and felt a dull “pop” in my hamstring just above my knee. It didn’t hurt, but I immediately felt tremendous instability in my hips which was enough to tell me something serious had happened.
So I went home and took a nap, hoping it would feel better when I woke up.
It did not feel better.
In fact, the back of my leg was black and blue and I could barely bend my knee.
There was also pain.
Lots and lots of pain.
I complained loudly to one of the gaggle of student physiotherapists at the time, and he kindly suggested I go to the hospital suspecting I had torn my hamstring.
Obviously I didn’t follow his advice because I was a pigheaded 21 year old whose self-worth was intrinsically linked to his ability to lift.
And so, in the days and weeks that followed, my leg got a whole lot worse. The burning lightning of sciatica was nigh on ever present and was accompanied by the sensation of shards of glass coated in lemon juice being ground into my spinal cord (the latter becoming a blight that would plague me for years).
What lesson can be taken from this sorry experience?
Aside from the obvious “don’t lift stuff you’re not ready to lift” and “see a doctor and follow their advice when injured”, it’s worth noting that this probably wouldn’t have happened had I trained my back using the methods described in my inventively titled book, “The Back and Legs Bundle”.
The great irony is, using them may also have facilitated some of the gains in the three powerlifts I so richly desired, so I would have looked like less of an idiot on the platform. (As it happens, I pulled out of the meet altogether because I could barely train at all, much less attempt one rep maxes in the big three.)
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my lifts would have gone up as far as they needed to in the limited time I had. But there would probably have been some boost and, in any case, I’d have felt safer under the heavy loads thanks to a more robust (and handsome-looking) back.
As it happens, “The Back and Legs Bundle” is on sale until Wednesday the 9th at 23:59.
A couple of things to note if you are interested:
1) The book is expensive as far as books go, even with the discount (but it’s still cheaper than a large bag of whey protein from some brands to give you some context), and,
2) This is a compilation of two issues of my paper and ink newsletter “The Phil Tyreman Letter” plus some bonus material. So if you own one or both issues of the newsletter, you need to carefully consider if the content you don’t already own is worth the asking price.
A detailed breakdown of what’s inside is on the below-linked page, and you can claim the discount by entering the code HORSE at the checkout:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/bundle/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman