I have been coaching for 20 years, and specifically involved with powerlifting for 10 of those. Over those years the sport/hobby of powerlifting has lost its way. My first ever exposure to powerlifting was at Total Performance Sports when it was in Everett. There were large tatted dudes squatting in a mono lift wearing potato sacks and blasting heavy music.
They forced me to join the rotation and coached me up every time it was my turn. We had to take off a lot of plates and switch out bands, but no one cared. They treated me like they treated everyone else. This is how I learned how to squat, bench, and deadlift. I am forever grateful to these people for this experience. It was also a lot of fun and made me want to compete.
These days, people just find an online coach, join the Instagram community, and train in commercial gyms by themselves with headphones on. They compete once and then decide that they want to coach powerlifting alongside every other Crossfit coach and personal trainer.
I had a master’s degree, spent time in division 1 weight rooms, and had 10 years of experience training people, and I didn’t know anything about getting people strong. TPS taught me the basics, and then I became a student of Sheiko’s for 3 years. I hungout with Louie for a weekend to understand conjugate better and how to appropriately prescribe GPP work, and I surrounded myself with a lot of coaches that have lifted and coached at a high level in this sport for a long time. These opportunities I am grateful for, and everyone I coach should be grateful for them.
No one does this anymore. People just regurgitate what they read on Instagram, which is surely a regurgitation in and of itself, and call themselves a powerlifting coach. The information available online has gotten exponentially worse over the years. The coaching has gotten exponentially worse over the same amount of time while cost for that coaching has skyrocketed.
Powerlifting used to be where everyone came together to work on making each other stronger, but has turned into this politicized bullshit where every time someone says something someone doesn’t like we are cancelling a federation and starting a new one, and at times trying to cancel individuals.
I am a convicted felon, and my first training group had 2 sheriff department officers in it. Now when people want to argue against something I say, they say “Well he is a felon” as if that discredits my experience and knowledge. I have been blacklisted from gyms because of my past when many greats in the sport spent time learning how to get strong in prison such as Jim Williams, the first to bench 600lbs.
I know this immature bullshit between raw and equipped, drug free and on gear, and which federation is best has been around forever, but that has only gotten worse as the sport has grown. We now have grown ass adults making memes to try to convey science they don’t actually understand and to make fun of different ways of training to discredit it so that people will choose them as a coach.
We should be getting stronger because the knowledge of training can be more easily shared, but instead we are just getting more people into the sport that are built for it and finding more of the freaks. The new training techniques that these coaches are spewing on the internet aren’t new, but have been around for decades, but they just didn’t have the knowledge to know that. It is new to them, but not to the sport. We are getting stronger, but we are also getting dumber.
The good news is that the pendulum always swings back. Powerlifting will hit a peak of people joining, the coaching market will start to flame out, and the sport will recalibrate at something closer to what it used to be. Powerlifting takes place at gyms, not at meets with $150 entry fees, $20 coaching passes, $10 for your mom to sit there and be bored to watch something she doesn’t understand, $75 membership to an organization, plus a few hundred dollars in equipment to look good for the photos they try to get you to order.
The internet powerlifting scene will always exist to piss me off, but people are looking for connection. We have less of that these days, especially with many people working remotely. Lifting is a way that we can connect with others. You will see more people training together on the same program to enhance this experience.
As price continues to exceed value, we will see people compete less often, especially if nationals is out of reach, and we will see less people hire coaches for $300+ per month because they compete less often, and the 20% of the average age of powerlifters have maxed out credit lines. This will help rid the internet of people putting out information that are not qualified to do so. There will always be some, but it will get better.
I have watched the political correctness movement come and go and come and go, and eventually people get sick of the overly politicized bullshit. That stuff will go away in time.
Powerlifting will get back to police officers training with criminals because that is what it is at its core. It is not an individual sport, but a group sport where people come together to push each other and make each other stronger. The people doing that are the ones that will outlast the bullshit and keep pushing that message forward. It is about pushing each other to work harder than we would alone. It brings like minded people together.
As I have been more open about my traumatic past and criminal behavior, I have had more genuine conversations with other lifters than I did in the previous 8 years. A lot of us with similar backgrounds are drawn to this goofy sport for some reason and it allows us to find a community that is often difficult to find.
Powerlifting is fucking awesome. What we see on the internet and at meets is not powerlifting. That is as real as the powerlifting coaches at those events (incase you aren’t following around, it is not real at all). Hopefully this reaches just one person and makes them think a little bit about why they choose to participate in this sport and how they go about doing it. People competing in powerlifting have increased, but the number of powerlifters in the sport is approaching extinction. However, there are a few out there that, and I encourage you to seek them out and jump in their rotations. That is where you get strong and learn how to help move the sport forward in a positive way.