Resilience Lifting

Powerlifting is an intense hobby of mine. Here's how I think about it that makes it radically different from stereotypical "bro culture."

[This is what ChatGPT thinks I look like.]

The so-called “bro culture” has been much in the news lately. President-elect Trump went after this subculture, successfully, and now Democrats are wondering how to capture them in 2028.

This culture means different things to different people, but when I picture its denizens I imagine something like a 20-something year old who pounds protein shakes, maybe has a Joe Rogan tattoo, has a strong opinion on Jake Paul’s “fight” with Mike Tyson, maybe uses anabolic steroids but denies it, and works out with technique and form that put them on a collision course with debilitating back and knee injuries.

Except for the protein shake (I swear by Ryse, especially their blueberry muffin mix), I am not that kind of weightlifter. In fact, I worry about those guys (and gals; contrary to stereotype, weightlifting is increasing in popularity for men and women alike). Not to paint with too broad a brush, but these lifters who are focused on specific outcomes—aesthetics, perhaps, but especially short-term strength gains—aren’t practicing the same sport as me.

Today’s post is about how I, a tenured professor who spends more time thinking about central banking and parenting than on any aspect of bro culture, approach weightlifting for longevity. I call it “resilience lifting.” It might look the same in some ways to gym-rats-slinging-gear, but it’s completely different. It is the difference between MMA and tai chi. They are the ones getting broken and bloodied in the octagon. I am the old man doing Tai Chi.

After reading this post, I hope you will join me at 5am in the park.  

Before I jump in, a note of humility. I am an amateur lifter. I have been doing it for ten years, but I am neither competitive nor particularly elite. What follows, including the terminology I use, is a description of my own approach to this world. I deeply love powerlifting, but what follows only partially overlaps with an epistemology of expertise. Mostly what follows is an ideological commitment to making sense of an area of recreation filled with important gaps in our understanding. In other words, your mileage may vary, buyer beware, proceed with caution, this information does not constitute investment advice, etc etc etc.

Gym Rats Slinging Gear

Among the many problems with testosterone-fueled powerlifting, besides the predominance of performance-enhancing drugs (i.e., “gear” in gym parlance), is the focus on short-term outcomes. (Here, I mostly mean the weights being lifted. While there is some application to those who lift for aesthetics, I will leave the bodybuilders aside since their sport mostly mystifies and repels me.)

I call this outcome-oriented approach to powerlifting “ego lifting.” Ego lifting occurs when you are either driven by outcome vanity—hitting a certain strength goal on a specific timeline.

Ego lifting, I can tell you, is very fun. It is also extremely dangerous. When you make specific outcome goals, especially when they fit into certain calendar parameters, your risk of injury skyrockets. The first time I pulled a 400 lb deadlift, for example, my friend captured it on video. I was lifting to The Beastie Boys’ Sabotage. I hit liftoff at exactly the screeching beginning of the third movement of the song.

It was amazing. I also strained my back and couldn’t touch the barbell for 8 weeks.

Resilience Lifting and the Safest Exertional Threshold

Resilience lifting is the name I give to the opposite sensibility. I lift for resilience when I am indifferent to outcome and focused, meditatively, on how my body feels at every step of the lift. To get the most of resilience lifting, I aim for another piece of PCB-invented neologism, the elegant exertional threshold. The elegant exertional threshold is the point at which no more safe lifts, with perfect form, can be accomplished.

Now, “lifting to failure” is a familiar concept from weightlifting and is actively encouraged in most forms. I have found that “failure” is so hard for me to gauge without linking it to an outcome that I needed something else. In resilience lifting, what I am after is not strength failure, as is practiced by ego lifters, but to form failure. I want to lift beautifully. I am trying to get perfect elegance in the way that the lift occurs, building full-body strength in these compound lifts in a way that feels amazing and extremely challenging without inducing injury.

For a squat, I reach elegant exertional threshold when my knees turn inward to support the lift because a perfect squat pushes the knees outward. Shaky knees mean I haven’t really cleared the weight safely.

For a deadlift, I hit the elegant exertional threshold when I divide the lift into two—with hips popping up before the load clears my knees—rather than a single movement. This produces the rounded back, which is what happened during my first 400 lb deadlift. (That video is fun to watch because I love the Beastie Boys but traumatizes me given the form failure; I should never have attempted it.)

For bench press, the safest physical threshold is met when the heels come off the ground. This is easiest for me to hit, perhaps because of my own idiosyncratic body mechanics (short arms, short legs, long torso), but my hips immediately let me know when the lift is harder than my pecs and triceps suggest.

Powerlifting like an old man doing Tai Chi

Whatever else one can call this—powerlifting for longevity, resilience lifting, something else I will make up later—one can see how different it is from bro culture. To begin with, it is much slower paced. It is also functioning on a much longer time horizon. You measure outcome progress in years, not months. The numbers on the barbell become the instrumentation for the real goal: art and elegance. This is why I called powerlifting more “ballet than monster trucks.”

When I execute this style of weightlifting, I don’t feel much in common with Joe Rogan or Jake Paul or that whole crowd altogether. I feel instead like those old men doing Tai Chi I used to encounter on my walk to the subway in New York at 5am when I clerked on the federal appellate court. I often wondered what it was that they had figured out that the rest of us had not. I think I know now.