Life lessons from Powerlifting – by Joe Robinette

This is a guest blog post from one of my online clients, Joe Robinette. Joe has been with me for quite some time. He started with me weighing well over 300 pounds and has since dropped to under 275. In his weight loss journey we stuck with the tried and true principles of strength training and it paid off for him.

From the write-up for his last meet on August 31, 2019:

Joe Robinette had his PL meet yesterday, he weighed in at 275.

He ended with:

Squat – 425 pounds with a 23 pound PR
Bench – 360 pounds – 10 pound lifetime PR regardless of weight (his prior best was earned at a BW>300)

His DL opener put him at a 40 pound total PR

D – 480 pounds – not a PR because we decided to go for a lifetime PR on this lift at 525 and missed it at his knees. (he hit 500 in the gym but he really wanted to go for 525 so we attempted it)

8/9 with a 63 pound total PR since March.

Joe sent this to me via email with this message:

Last thing, and this is random but it’s been on my mind because it’s coming up on the two year anniversary. Do you ever have guest blog posts? I attached a little something I wrote about how lifting and dieting can help you get through the harder parts of life. It could be total shit, I haven’t written anything besides process documents for work in decades.

I love that he put himself out there like this and wrote down his thoughts.

Joe deals with his own depression battles, maybe these words will resonate with you.

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Powerlifting. It’s a simple sport – pick the barbell up and put it back down. It teaches you life lessons if you listen long enough.

When the weights get heavy, or on the days the last thing you want to do is workout; you have a choice to give up and not finish the lift, or be lazy and sleep in an extra hour. But fighting through the weight and having the discipline to workout when you don’t feel like it carry over to other aspects of life.

At my last job I went through the most difficult 6 or 7 months I’ve had in my career. Without the discipline I learned from powerlifting I would have ended up having a complete mental breakdown (and still almost did).

A member of my team and someone I sat across from every day for two and a half years killed himself almost two years ago.

Seeing his empty desk every day afterwards, having to do his job on top of mine was almost impossible to deal with. Much like powerlifting there were good days and bad days, but I kept showing up. There were countless days I cried at my desk, I had panic attacks in the evenings because I didn’t know how to do his job, and the workload was overwhelming.

I kept grinding through, just like I do when the barbell gets so heavy my limbs start shaking.

Cultivate the discipline to exercise and eat healthy, and it will serve you well when life gets hard.

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