Other motivations in weightlifting besides beating your own records?

August 11, 2012 7:40 PM

How can I regain my motivation for weightlifting, when it feels like I am going in circles?

I have been lifting heavy weights since 2004. I have used a variety of programs over the years - usually for six months to a year at a time, then I switch programs. I always include the main compound lifts, and hardly use machines. Recently I've been including some kettlebells.

In the first three or four years, I made steady strength gains, and I found that my main motivation for going to the gym was to see if I could beat a previous max. That happened often enough (every couple of weeks) to stay motivational. In the next few years, it happened less often, and some lifts (pull-ups/downs) totally stalled, but still occasionally I would beat a personal record, and knowing that might happen kept me happy.

Now it has been literally several years since I bet a record. I think my maxes might be near the top of what I can genetically do (as a not-naturally athletic female) without a super intense program and/or eating weirdly, which I am not interested in. (I already eat pretty "clean" and make sure I get lots of protein and take a multivitamin, but I'm not interested in egg-white omelettes, avoiding alcohol, protein powders, or cycling between gaining and cutting).

What tends to happen is that I gradually get close to these maxes (squatting 100kg, benching 47.5kg, deadlifting 100kg, 10 pull-ups - for sets of 8-10: my one-rep maxes are a bit higher), and then I get sick, or go on fieldwork for several months, or life just happens and I don't get to the gym for 6-8 weeks. When I come back, I start back below what I was at before, gradually build back up over a couple of months, and then just when I am approaching those maxes again, bam! another overseas trip/injury/illness). I don't think I'm getting ill or injured more often than usual (maybe once a year - and not injuries from lifting, usually). Fieldwork happens once or twice a year and keeps me away for a couple of months. It is unrealistic to expect myself to keep up regular body-weight exercise in the field. I have tried and failed and accepted that won't happen for a number of reasons.

I'm cool with not increasing my strength/muscle any further in terms of being happy with my body. I don't want to lose it, though, so need to keep lifting. But without the motivation of seeing improvement, it is hard to make myself go to the gym regularly. I have the option of going with a buddy, or on my own. I have tried motivating myself through allowing myself to listen to audiobooks/great music only at the gym, by making the gym a habit that just happens on certain days of the week so I don't even think about not going, by reading about the benefits of doing weight-bearing exercise, by thinking about how much money I am spending on my membership, and by treating myself to small rewards for going. But ultimately I want something about the workout itself to be rewarding, and it's just... not.

Right now I'm just back from fieldwork, my squats are back at 75-80kg, bench back at 40-42.5, deadlift at 70-75, and I'm managing 3 pull-ups (these tend to fluctuate more with my body weight than with my strength.) I am dreading my next few workouts because even though I'll probably increase those lifts each time I do them, the increases are still just taking me through a cycle I've been through so many times before. I feel like Sisyphus.

For a while I found some motivation in trying totally different programs that either included exercises I hadn't done before (clean and jerk!) so I didn't have past maxes to compare myself to, or that had other unusual features (supersets, negatives, etc). But I feel like I'm running out of new things to try, now.

Does anyone have ideas for how I can find motivation in the lifting I am already doing? If you have suggestions for breaking through this recurring plateau, that's cool too, but I feel quite pessimistic about that, so I still need ways to motivate myself in the meanwhile.

(In case it's relevant, I also do rock-climbing - but have similar issues with what breaks do to my abilities in this, and I ski now and then in winter. I cycle for an hour every day. I hate running and I can't really swim. I might consider other sports, but probably not :) )

posted by lollusc to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (13 answers total)

You sound like me! I was doing weightlifting on my own and not really feeling like I was getting anywhere. I was also getting bored by lifting on my own, and I wanted to work out in the morning but was having trouble with motivation that early in the day.

I joined the Crossfit gym near my house a few months ago and I love it, even at 7am. It's a much wider range of exercises than I was doing before since it combines weightlifting with gymnastics and there are lots of other motivated people around to compete against (both in your own head and with the weekend 'meets').

You sound like you're very goal oriented, and Crossfit is very quantifiable so you can set whatever goals you like and then measure against them. You can go for strength or speed and change it whenever you like.
posted by squasher at 7:55 PM on August 11, 2012

Response by poster: I would be interested in crossfit, but the only crossfit group/gym around here is half an hour drive from my house and I really super-duper hate driving. The gym I am a member of is right next door to my workplace. If I switched, I fear I would honestly never go.
posted by lollusc at 8:07 PM on August 11, 2012

Response by poster: Actually, just googling now, it seems a bunch of new crossfit places have sprung up since I last looked. It's pricey, though! Still, I'll think about it. Thanks!
posted by lollusc at 8:12 PM on August 11, 2012

I'd just try to set different goals. Also, I'd put aside the notion of you getting close to your genetic limits.
posted by zephyr_words at 8:15 PM on August 11, 2012

Response by poster: So what sort of goals, zephyr? That's pretty much what I'm asking about.

And I'm not wedded to that notion. It's a possible explanation. The other possible explanation is that it's not possible to get beyond those limits while taking several months off a couple of times a year. Either way, it means I'm not likely to make progress past that. So I need to find something else to focus on.
posted by lollusc at 8:20 PM on August 11, 2012

Not sure how much you weigh, but from looking at your numbers I doubt they're the limits of your genetic potential. I think what is most holding you back are the fieldwork trips. When you take two months off you can expect there is going to be a period of recovery to get back to where you were. But how you approach going back to the gym after them is going to determine how quickly you regain your old strength. In that relatively short period of time the decreases you see are not so much muscle mass (unless you're starving yourself) but detraining your CNS. If you are adopting a pretty unaggressive program like 5/3/1 after these off periods it would explain why it takes you so long to get back to your previous maxes and why you feel like you aren't making any progress.

What kinds of program do you follow to return to fighting shape after fieldwork? How many days per week do you go? What programs have you tried, and what are you currently following? Knowing more detail about what you've done and what you use to recover from the fieldwork periods would be tremendously helpful in figuring out what you might do next to improve your lifts. For some stuff, like Olympic lifting, you should not be stalling out only six months in if you're really committing yourself to it. Given how much of Olympic lifting is technique based there's no way you did it for six months to a year and achieved perfect technique, unless you just got bored with it.

But if you're burned out on lifting period, then it may be worth looking at trying different sports and seeing if training for those provide more motivation.
posted by Anonymous at 8:35 PM on August 11, 2012

Response by poster: I weigh 66-68kg. I usually train 3-4 days a week - I aim for every second day. Right now I'm struggling to get there even 3 days because of the lack of motivation. I guess part of the problem is that my motivation drops so sharply when I come back from a break and see how little I can lift, and then that means I work less hard at getting my fitness back than I would otherwise! (I know it's not likely to be lost muscle, and that's why it does return relatively quickly, like within a couple of months, but it's still demotivating. And then when I do get back to close to the my previous maximums, progress becomes super-slow, and I think I would have to stick to an intense program for months without a break at that point to break the previous limits. That's where it all falls down.)

Right now my program is 3 sets of 10 reps of the following (there's no shoulders because of an injury, but that's okay now, so I can probably put them in again):

DAY 1
Incline press
Decline cable crossovers
Wide grip pulldown
Seated row
Tricep press
Bicep curls
Kettlebell swings

DAY 2
Squats
Hamstring curls
Thigh raise
Leg press
Side bend
Calf raises
Kettlebell cleans

DAY 3
Flat bench
Chin-ups
Tricep press
Bicep curls
Bent over row
Dips
Kettlebell swings

DAY 4
Deadlift
Hamstring curls
Thigh raise
Leg press
Calf raises
Russian get-ups

When I say I switch programs every six months or so, I don't mean switching exercises (I maybe put in or take out a whole exercise or set of exercises once every couple of years). Mainly I mean that I might change from a four-day cycle to a three-day or two-day split, or switch to cycling between heavy days (higher weights for 5-6reps) and light days (lower weights for 10-12 reps) or some other tweak to make sure I don't get bored.

The Olympic lifts were the one time I really did switch in a totally different set of exercises, and I don't really know why I stopped - it was never really something I saw as a major part of my program. I just tried it for a year because I was bored with and stalled out on my "real" workouts. But I guess I could go back to doing Olympic lifts and stick with them.
posted by lollusc at 9:05 PM on August 11, 2012

Seconding CrossFit. You may not exceed your current PRs because CrossFit is general fitness, not strength training, but you should see an increase in motivation. The workouts are constantly varied, something new every day, which means boredom doesn't become an issue. Also, you'll be doing a lot of new movements and there will be all sorts of things you will be improving on. You'll be setting PRs every day at first in things like max double unders, 500m row, weighted dips and chins and the various benchmark WODs.

If you do try it, be very careful when you come back after a long break. CrossFit emphasizes intensity, and it's easy to injure yourself if you try to perform at a level you're not prepared for. Scale down your first few workouts, work your way back up and you'll be fine. Better yet, find a local affiliate to drop into when you're in the field.
posted by zanni at 9:26 PM on August 11, 2012

I totally sympathize, and I would suggest finding a sport of some kind that can provide some context to your weightlifting (assuming you don't want to just take up competitive powerlifting, which it sounds like you don't.) Anything with regular checks/goals/competitions would give you a better framework for keeping up with the more tedious stuff.

(And just to be clear, Crossfit is a sport. It didn't start out that way necessarily, but now it is definitely framed that way. If you go into it not realizing that, it's easy to jump in at the wrong intensity level for your personal life choices and end up injured and/or burned out.)
posted by restless_nomad at 9:31 PM on August 11, 2012

Best answer: Well, just from looking at what you're doing I'd say you have potential to go a LOT more with your lifts if you plot out your program right (and the progress you've made is great!). First, there are some rep schemes that are more ideal than others. In general, the smaller the muscle group, the more reps you want to use. The bigger the muscle group, the less reps. So your bicep curls and stuff are great for a 3x10, but 3-6 is better for squats and barbell presses, and 6-10 is better for back work, with the higher reps being pulldowns and lower reps for stuff like barbell rows.

You're saying you cycle reps, but do you just do the same number of reps for every exercise week after week, until you switch to a different rep scheme? Or are you playing with number of reps and intensity on a regular basis? The issue with just picking a singular rep scheme is by doing the same number of reps for long periods of time you are depending on your body to adapt in a linear progression method (i.e. be able to add more weight each week). That isn't realistic past being a beginner. You need to play a little bit with your rep schemes and the amount of weight you put on the bar in order to make progress.

From there, there are a LOT of different ways to take this programming wise. The easiest might be to go with simply waving intensity and volume. An example of this would be Texas Method-style, which likes to wave across a one-week period. There are templates in that article but it can readily be adapted to exercises you choose, and you could totally adapt it to a four-day program . The 5/3/1 method can produce steady progress for many people. There are a TON of other programs to try that I won't get too crazy about elucidating here (but feel free to MeMail me if you want more programming talk). So the bad news is it can be more complicated. But the good news is it can make workouts an awful lot more interesting.

But like I said, how you approach getting back into the swing of things after a layoff is important to how fast you recover. Whenever I've tried to go straight back into my normal programming after a layoff it is usually a depressing shitshow and I get so demotivated by how much my numbers have gone down I have no desire to return to the gym.

So this is what's worked for me instead: first week back is just getting myself to the gym as many days as possible and practicing my "big lift" movements. I play with the accessory work I like the most, and get sweaty, but the main thing is to doing some lower intensity, moderate volume work to get my body to remember how to do the movements. I don't go too crazy on intensity initially because I don't want to be completely crippled by DOMS (once after taking a month off I decided to do a high-rep squat workout that also included maxing out on fives and triples and a bunch of other dumb stuff. Couldn't walk properly for weeks. NEVER AGAIN)

After that first intro week I just hit volume and intensity hard. Generally four days a week. My main lower body barbell movements like squats and deads I do 5x5--so warm up and then do a 5x5 work set, trying to go as heavy as I can, increasing across sets if possible. My main upper body barbell movements like overhead pressing and benching I'm doing a 5x6-8. I like to do two lower days, two upper days, I do a main lift followed by a heavy accessory lift. So after squatting I might do hip thrusts, stiff-legged deadlifts, or weighted lunges. After pressing I might do a dumbbell incline press or barbell rows. For the "heavy accessory lift" I do a 4x8. Then I follow that with little accessory work, whatever I feel weakest at. But the point is to really blast my body. The volume combined with the higher intensity retrains my movement patterns and gets my conditioning back up. It works psychologically too because I feel like I'm getting a good workout in from pushing myself hard, and by not working on low reps I'm not reminded of how far I am from my maxes (like you, I find being far away from my maxes tremendously demotivating).

After 3-4 weeks of volume work I am generally back to where I was before the layoff (or at least very close) and then I switch to more traditional, strength-focused programming methods like I referred to above.

Sorry that was all so long! Anyway you might try something like that if you want to keep going with the lifting.

Regarding Crossfit, there are many, many issues with Crossfit that are but a Google away. I wrote this long comment on picking a gym, because if you go that route you definitely do not want to just go to whatever affiliate is in the area unless you like injuries.
posted by Anonymous at 11:45 PM on August 11, 2012

Best answer: schroedinger already gave you a great answer. I will add one small bit. While i think xfit is overkill they do one thing that is great for your problem, namely, give you lots of things to measure and improve. Doing a more hybrid workout where you mix your strength work with more metabolic conditioning can be really fun and will give you more to track than just the major lifts. Learning the Olympic lifts is really enjoyable, doing s little gymnastics type work is also quite satisfying and having some workouts to track for time is a nice break from lifting. just beware the injuries and be smart about pushing yourself. But i think mixing it up a lot more would be great for your motivation and strength.
posted by ch1x0r at 8:41 AM on August 12, 2012 [2 favorites]

lollusc, if you get interested in CF but the cost is prohibitive, you might want to look into Saturday free open gym hour--not sure how many boxes do it but where I am all of them offer it, where at 10am on Saturdays anyone is welcome to check it out for an hour for free.
posted by ifjuly at 10:59 AM on August 12, 2012

If you're interested in CF, I found it cheaper to do a few sessions at a local box, every now and then, and then the rest of the time use workouts from crossfit.com, http://gymnasticswod.com/, thewodshop or other sites. I benefitted a lot from having someone coach me on the Olympic lifts iniatially and go back when I want some new inspiriation/motiviation, but save a lot of money by working out at home or in a city facility most of the time, and the main ideas (working out different muscle groups and at a high intensity) can be replicated easily. Plus, designing my own program allows me to tailor it around my other activities.
posted by Kurichina at 10:19 AM on August 13, 2012 [1 favorite]