Mental skills and personal experiment (13): greater self-awareness

The first powerlifting week was over yesterday. To be more precise, Friday.

The heavy workout days were Monday (bench press), Tuesday (squat) and Friday (deadlift). I already reported what happened at the bench press heavy day.

The squat day surprised me. Unlike the bench press, in which I believe I lost very little strength, the squat felt heavy. Besides that, I decided to train at the fancy health club that sponsors me, and not at my original team gym. I never actually learned how to properly wrap my knees. I always had someone there to do it for me – and they are the best, at Paraisopolis. At the health club, I must wrap my own knees. No one knows how to do it and the best they can do is watch.

Tuesday turned out to be a contest between knee wraps and myself, where the wraps had were far better prepared. After the second attempt at actually squatting with my own wrapping, sound common sense indicated I should give up. So, I just called it a day in terms of heavier training and made it into a “knee wrap training session”. Interesting, though, is that I was able to actually concentrate on the work, in spite of the expected frustration with the weight. I was actually pretty satisfied.

Wednesday and Thursday were much more complicated. Thursday would be the great day in which I would be teaching a course on powerlifting to Physical Educators at the Health Club. The reason for this was a project designed by the general Manager to create a “powerlifting product”. It was a lot of responsibility, the product is actually my brain-child and all the administrative procedures went wrong – it seems we have trodden a few toes. I really have a hard time understanding unspoken confrontation.

There was no workout Wednesday, and also no sleep. Thursday became quite a successful and productive professional day and a total athletic disaster. I managed to do three exercises (I had taught four classes, two of them included practical lessons in which I lifted a lot). I did accomplish the “summoning of mental achievements” into the session itself for the first and second exercises. The third was irregular and when I started the fourth I realized I was “cold” inside: there was nothing to summon. The bar never left my chest.

Friday was deadlift day. A new member of the team decided to learn the lift while I was training. That means requesting my attention to teach it. To my surprise, my lifting itself was pretty easy, needing just a few seconds to focus and execute the lift according to what had been previously rehearsed.

The level of self-awareness during the lifts is far beyond what I had experienced even on the best of my past training days. The ability to “look inside” while lifting seems to be natural.

The funny thing is that after deliberately quenching and struggling to keep quenched the tendency to become an observer during mental rehearsal, I think I learned to actually observe myself while physically performing an action. I am really not sure about this. Might be just a much more accurate self-awareness, but my impression is that I had a little movie of myself performing the lift while actually doing it…

Weird… something to be further explored.