The Elegant Exertional Threshold
More in my series on powerlifting. Herewith, the key difference between pain and maximal exertion
Seriously, I love this image of me that Chat GPT has. You know it’s fake because I deadlift barefoot; otherwise, it’s like looking in a mirror!
A few weeks ago, I wrote about “resilience lifting” and tried to make the argument that powerlifting as I practice it is much more about meditation, elegance, and craft, and much less about testosterone, ego, and bro culture. Earlier still I called it more ballet than monster trucks.
That all being said, powerlifting is not calisthenics. It really is about finding one’s frontier of exhaustion and pushing that frontier as much as can be done, safely. Because I am an inveterate neologizer, I call that frontier the “elegant exertional threshold.”
The key to its discovery in weightlifting is to know the difference between destructive pain and productive discomfort. That difference is the point of this post today.
As usual with my fitness posts, I want to note the caveats. The overwhelming majority of fitness-related content on the internet is hot garbage. This post might in fact be part of that garbage. I am an avocational lifter and have no genuine, professional expertise here beyond my own home gym and my own hobbyist’s enthusiasm. That said, my home gym is pretty extraordinary and I am rather obsessive hobbyist, so take all of this with the salt and the pepper that you need to make sense of it for you.
The difference between pain and exertion
The goal for my lifts is to maximize over time what I can move without failing perfect form. This is what weightlifters mean by “progressive overload.” The difference for me is that I do not lift to movement failure. I lift to form failure. If form starts to shake, then I stop immediately. I have reached my elegant exertional threshold. (Form-failed lifting is inelegant, is my point.)
Even so, my lazy dumb brain sometimes asks me to skip reps or sets not because of form failure but because lifting heavy is very hard and my lazy dumb brain would rather I do things that are much easier. The problem is that when I give into that aspect of my lazy dumb brain, powerlifting is no longer productive. I am much better off doing something else.
This is the dilemma that I have to navigate. How can I make sure I am exerting everything I have without exposing myself to destructive pain?
That navigation is my powerlifting philosophy. I aim to master the practice of separating pain from exertion, avoiding the first but maximizing my time in the second.
The difference is everything. Pain is the emergency warning system for a resilience lifter. Any pain of any kind during a lift is a sign that the lift has failed and that the reps or weight must be adjusted (or the exercise abandoned). To mention again the first time I deadlifted 400 lbs, I knew immediately that it was a failed lift and that I had done it wrong, even though it was successful in that I fully moved the barbell. I felt pain that I should not have felt; I lifted anyway. The pain wasn’t bad in the moment, but it was there. (The next day it was howling and I did not deadlift again for two months.)
Avoiding pain is the one rule to rule them all. When I feel pain in the gym, I must stop the lift and make adjustments to ensure longevity in the lift for years to come. That is the key for me in the art of resilience lifting. That is the way that powerlifting becomes a mechanism for injury prevention rather than injury inducement.
But feeling exertion maxing out my central nervous system is a different matter entirely. I don’t sprint away from that sensation. I want to sprint toward it.
Most people I would wager have never experienced that difference. If pain in weightlifting is the body’s warning system that you are not where you should be, maximum exertion is the body’s cheerleader saying that you are now in the process of doing the real work. It was (and sometimes remains) very uncomfortable for me. But spending time at that threshold is not only important, it is the entire reason to take up powerlifting.
Without that full exertion, you will not gain strength or muscle or longevity. Weightlifting becomes instead a somewhat boring and pointless form of cardio exercise. If you are lifting weights below exertion, you are better off taking up another sport altogether.
My gym buddy, the baby giraffe
An example illustrates why and how to overcome our resistance to the exertional threshold even as we are mindful of the pain. Almost four years ago, a friend from church asked me to invite her husband to the gym with me to get him to lift some weights. Her husband was a good friend too and I was game to try. But remember, I take this stuff very seriously. If social time was the reason to invite, I was much more interested in taking my buddy to play some pool or ping pong or go on a walk. You know: casual stuff.
If we were going to lift, I needed him to catch my religious sense of the potential.
The problem was that my friend was a tennis player who had never really lifted weights outside of high school in his life. I decided to show him the three key compound lifts at light weight just to give him a sense of what I did in the gym. We used extremely light weight.
It was a tragicomic experience. He looked like a baby giraffe, wobbling around as he tried to find the right form, almost passed out, and complained more loudly than I had ever heard him complain, before or since. He kept asking (at a rather loud volume I should say; we were at our YMCA, in the days before my gym became the PCB Temple of Gains worthy of a Philadelphia tourist stop lower than the Liberty Bell but higher than the Comcast building): “Is this right? This doesn’t feel right! Am I going to hurt myself here? Should my legs be like this?” (Also, I should note: my friend is a loyal reader and gives permission to share this post. Hi there Baby Giraffe!)
He found the right form and still hated the lift. But not because he was in pain. He was brand new to the sensation of a compound lift at an exertional threshold. It was deeply foreign and uncomfortable; he wanted it to end as quickly as possible.
I predicted he wouldn’t show up again.
I was wrong. For reasons that neither he nor I really fully understand, he decided that he would master powerlifting. Over the course of one year my friend went from wobbling like a baby giraffe lifting a fraction of his body weight to deadlifting more than twice his body weight. He beat one of the key milestones in powerlifting, the 1,000-lb club, more quickly and efficiently than anyone else I have ever seen. Today, after hundreds and hundreds of hours together in the gym he is one of my best friends, my gym partner, and has even become my trainer on my own quest to the 1,500 lb club.
What my friend learned that day was the difference between pain and maximum exertion. When we both neglect this distinction—usually in favor of ego lifting, pushing through the pain—we injure ourselves. When we don’t, we have amazing workouts. The numbers take care of themselves.
Master the process, celebrate the outcomes
There’s a good life lesson in all of this. The key is for me to get in the reps, but not for the sake of the repetitions themselves. The key is to become so self-aware that I can tell when my body is capable of more exertion (whatever my dumb lazy brain will say) and when my body is warning you of a weakness in a joint or auxiliary muscle. Learning to reorient my goals away from outcomes (that are filled with randomness and factors outside of any reasonable control) and toward mastery of process, the very experience of maximum elegant exertion changes fundamentally. The exertion becomes the joy. The outcome is simply a benchmark to help track the exertion, not the other way around.
Look, I am still after the 1,500-lb club. That’s the mother-of-all-outcomes. I even want to do it before I’m 50. But that’s not really the goal. My goal is to see just what my physical organism can do when it is properly, elegantly, efficiently trained in the face of maximum effort.
The journey is the destination and all that.