For the past 10 years I’ve participated in the sport of Olympic Weightlifting. This sport is different to other forms of weightlifting, like powerlifting and general strength training. We focus on leg strength, mobility and flexibility to allow us to perform two lifts; the snatch, and clean and jerk.
Snatch - lifting a barbell from the ground to overhead in one continuous motion.
Clean & Jerk - lifting a barbell to shoulder height and then thrusting the weight overhead.
Olympic Weightlifting is a balance between technique and strength. As one of these increases, the other often decreases and it’s a struggle to get the two to line up together.
Across my time in the sport I have competed in local, state, national and online international competitions. I have dedicated countless hours to the sport, sometimes to the detriment of other aspects in my life but it is a sport I love to do.
The sport has not always been kind to my mental health, mainly due to that balance between strength and technique. Some training days can leave you feeling incredibly frustrated and then others ecstatic. The longer you are in the sport the fewer and farther between the days of ecstasy are.
Competitive athletes know the struggle of turning up day in and day out, just doing seemingly mundane training without any reward. It takes grit and determination to continue to face the adversity of training, to keep turning up, even when things are not going well.
I have been on a break from competing over the last 2.5 years to ensure I could focus on other areas of my life. For me this created a level of anxiety about returning to the platform. One that I found quite difficult to overcome and I kept coming up with and giving myself excuses for not competing.
The excuses I built up were based on knowing that I was not going to be as good as I used to be and that I would internally have to deal with not meeting my own high standards.
I felt like I was wasting so much of my energy ruminating over the decision to compete again, most likely it was more energy and mental fatigue than ultimately making the decision.
I decided to take action and ownership over how I felt about competing. I wanted to compete for me, not for anyone else, so decided to enter the next available competition.
I was nervous but excited to compete, the competition I chose was a small local club competition, which allowed me to build my confidence in competing again.
I enjoyed the competition more than any other competition in which I’ve competed in. This was due to me being more at peace with the expectations I had of myself.
There are similarities between what athletes experience and what we may experience in our everyday lives.
We all face adversity in our lives and quite often we don’t have the will power or desire to do hard things. Particularly when the reward is not going to be immediately present.
The best thing we can do is to take action, no matter how small. The small steps we take build and gain momentum, particularly when we start to see and feel the rewards of our actions.
My challenge to you is to ask yourself; what is the one thing you can do today that will have a positive impact on the outcome of your week?
For anyone interested in watching my return to the platform, here are the videos:
Snatch: 110kg
Clean & Jerk: 130kg
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