How to Train for Powerlifting During Periods of High-Physical Stress
If life was a utopian experience, we’d all have unlimited time to lift, no stress before and after training, be able to eat the meals we want to eat, when we want to eat them, and sleep and wake up when we wanted to. As much as I wish it was, for 99.99% of people out there, the truth of the matter is we all have other commitments day to day and sometimes we come to our wits end in terms of what to do. I started powerlifting in 2018, when I was in college, and in the summers I worked a very demanding physical labor job that required me to be up early, on my feet pretty much the entire day and carrying fire rings and other heavy things off and on that entire time, so I have some experience here. Beyond that, I work with several individuals that work manual labor and they have been able to progress very smoothly (eventually) despite what some would deem as an extreme negative asset to their training, as well as others who are playing different sports concurrently to their powerlifting training.
In this article, I will seek to find a solution for you, how to scale your expectations in terms of performance, and then some practical examples to tie up any loose ends.
Manual Labor Jobs
For sake of a concrete definition, we will define manual labor as any job or commitment that requires you to lift things, be on your feet for extended periods of time, and in general, requires physical exertion, consistently. The job I held was campground maintenance and any given day myself and our crew would lift 30-60 fire rings a day that weighed 30-40lbs each, we’d have the off job here and there of transporting 200+ bundles of wood off trailer, we’d be assigned places to blow leaves with backpack blowers, and then every once and a while we’d have to carry heavy things like full tables and concrete bags for mixing. In a vacuum, this does not sound like much, but remember, when you are doing all of this BEFORE a powerlifting workout, it can be quite daunting. The following are considerations if you fall under this category and want to continue progressing and whether or not that is something you should even expect.
Things like hydration, food intake, and recovery, need to be locked in more than you would typically need.
Well, duh. But you’d be surprised, when someone is honest with you, about what they do, or fail to do, during the day before their training session. I learned the hard way that burning the candle at both ends, 100% exists. The way I have always conceptualized it is the “stress cup” analogy, where each stressor you engage in pours a set amount into that cup each time. So, you have your work day, a stressor, then you engage in a grueling, higher volume workout, mega stress there, then, let’s say you undereat, underhydrate, and then you stay up until 2am, knowing full well you have to be in the next day at 8am. If you were working a desk job, maybe you can get away with this, but you open the door up to very obscure injuries and lack of progress when you are not taking care of the other side of the equation. In any one session, I would say hydration is the biggest variable. This does not mean just water either, if you are sweating, you will need to be on double-time with things like sodium and potassium, something I have learned people in the manual labor field do a very poor job of. Chronically, the sleep is really the ace card. I have found if I am able to at least get enough sleep each night, you can “band-aid” things like undereating for an extended period of time.
Be open to being creative or unorthodox with your training split and be open to doubling down on work days.
For a long time, I was of the mindset that, my days off from work, I should push hard as I don’t have any manual labor to do and can give my full energy to the training. Good intentions, yes, but let’s break this down further. Let’s say you work a typical 5 day work week with 2 days off and your training week is 5 days per week of gym work.
Monday - Work + Training
Tuesday - Work + Training
Wednesday - Off work, but heavy or high volume training
Thursday - Work, no training
Friday - Work + Training
Saturday - Off work, but heavy or high volume training
Sunday - Work, no training
When you look at it this way, and remember, we are assuming work is manual and physically intensive, you are essentially “training” 7 days per week with 0 rest at all.
To double down on this, I noticed anecdotally that anytime I would try to turn it up a bit for an off-work session, it would be hard to get into that zone because as you go on for months and months, your body becomes adapted to the stimulus you present it, known as the SAID principle, and you feel, for lack of a better term, “clunky”, on your off-days. Now, I speculate this comes from the fact that general movement is better than being dormant for an entire day leading into a session by virtue of better circulation, nutrition partioning, etc… but also think we are forced to be more dialed in on things like nutrition and hydration, when we know that lifting is not the only physical endeavor we have on that given day.
So, the proposal here would be to let rest days from work, be REST days and you will find you are rejuvenated for each successive session.
Lastly, and this is usually a last-case scenario, I would recommend being open to what may be deemed unorthodox in terms of a training split to accommodate your work schedule. For this, I have a personal example that I think is interesting.
Team Hogan lifter, Evan Wright, made progress very fast, early on and that progress slowed down considerably when he started working manual labor.
We tried everything you can think of including but not limited to: reduced training volume, reduced training intensity, shorter training cycles, longer training cycles, more variation, less variation, less training per week, etc…
After one too many lingering and chronic injuries, we had a talk on where to go and I want to give him credit here as although it was a collaboration, if I remember correctly, it was his idea to go this route.
We started with a 5 day split, trimmed it to 4 and that was okay, and then it dawned on us, why don’t we try 3 days per week? I think you can poll 10 coaches and ask, can someone make the best progress of their training career, only being in the gym, 3 total times per week, and maybe 5 will say no, 3 will say not for very long, and then the other 2 would say what is the context? That is where the answer lied, context matters.
So, for the last year and a half Evan has trained 3 days per week, usually on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and has brought his squat up 46lbs, his bench up around 20lbs, and his deadlift up around 50lbs since that point. Keep in mind he was training steadily for around 2 years before that. If we did not explore this option, there is a good chance he doesn’t see this swell in progress and that is a testament to being open to unique solutions as an athlete and not being too dogmatic as a coach.
Training for Powerlifting While Playing Another Sport
This is a unique one that I feel we will see more and more as powerlifting continues to grow and schools begin to offer it as either a club or sanctioned sport. A lot of the same principles apply here to manual labor, however there is certainly trade-offs here and extremes that are not present in that domain. For the sake of defining what this looks like, we will say training for powerlifting and another sport implies you are actively trying to progress and/or compete in both concurrently.
Now, I have limited experience myself with this as I did not compete until I was in college, however, I weight trained vigorously before, during, and post all seasons of team sports growing up and have some tidbits to share. I noticed through myself, and later confirmed after learning the science behind it, that lifting would fatigue me if overdone but keep me strong a resilient if kept at bay in-season. A unique thing I stumbled upon my junior year of high school was after basketball season, there would be a very long lay-off into track season. As such, I played less basketball and lifted more for strength and something really manifested during this experimental period. Each year, we’d have an alumni basketball game about a month after the season that we would play in, mostly for fun. I was a pretty good jumper, my best max vertical was 44.5 inches and at one point I could get half my palm over the rim at 5’4'‘. But what I noticed was I could not produce that force to jump that high 95% of the time because of chronic fatigue from playing too much, knee pain, and fatigue from strength training. So, what I decided to do was remove that stimulus (the lifting) and taper my intense basketball training and low and behold, I came as close as I physically could to dunking in those warm up lines and felt so springy and explosive it felt like I was in a video game. I did this same thing the next year, never dunked though, so can’t lay that in my hall of fame achievements.
Erik, what the hell did this tangent have to do with this? Well, it is to solidify that your performance in one avenue will suffer the more you push the other. I think we all kind of know this intuitively, but why is that the case?
As it turns out, our body performs and adapts via energy systems. I can break it down into the minute detail, but for sake of explanation, we have 3 primary energy substrates. One for ultra short duration exercise, one for short to medium length exercise, and one for longer duration exercise. Training for team sport, in some capacity, touches on all three but trends more towards medium and longer duration for most sports. Powerlifting, at it’s purest, is extremely short duration, even the longest grind is 5-6 seconds on the highest of high ends.
So, if we put two and two together here, trying to improve your shortest duration performance, with constant bouts of medium and long duration activity usually does not end well.
People like to say, “Well what about the guy who squatted 500lbs and ran under a 5 minute mile”? Well, what about him? In context of general fitness, that is very good! But assuming absolute performance is the goal, and assuming the person is a 190lbs male, a 500lb squat is very middle of the road and a 4:50 mile pales to the world record of 3:43.
This is where the trade-off is made, you are either going to sacrifice performance in top-end strength, or in performance for your sport, you have to choose which is more important.
Here are some considerations for training powerlifting during periods of team sport seasons.
Adjust expectations on strength. Bar-none, this is the biggest piece for the people I have worked with during sports seasons. If you can manage ego, dare I say, you can actually benefit from doing another sport while trianing for powerlifting! This can go one of two ways, in my experience, however.
1. They adjust accordingly and realize that holding on to 90-95% of peak strength is “good-enough” and that this is the best case scenario. These people are usually to get right back to peak levels shortly after their season tapers off.
2. People do NOT adjust and as such, mentally trap themselves into thinking they got weaker and they need to do either more, or train different. I’ve dealt with this and it is tough but what I find resonates with people is this proposition. Who is your favorite powerlifter? For sake of this exercise, let’s say it is Russel Orhii. Okay awesome. Does Russel Orhii play full seasons of contact sports WHILE training for a powerlifting meet? No, he does not. So why would it be appropriate to assume that you will be as strong as you have ever been, while engaging in activities 95% of all the best lifters do NOT engage in? To my knowledge, I can only think of one high level lifter who is, say, top 3 at nationals in an open raw division, or at least that caliber, that also plays another sport that requires running and jumping, etc…
Shift focus away from 1rm and more to variations or rep maxes.
Full disclosure, I do not think this is the best way to navigate things physiologically as I think regular exposure to singles and higher percentage lifts is the key to maintaining that groove but it equally damages people mentally and emotionally when 90% of their 1rm feels like 105%. If people did not have ego attached, this would be the move, that said, and I am not above this, here is the next best solution.
Pick a distant variation or a rep max you do not have much data on. If you are a low bar squatter with a PR of 405lbs, maybe run high bar squats as you won’t be so emotionally attached to your numbers in that variation. Maybe you have data on your low bar squats with reps from 1-5, but you do not have a 6rm or a 7rm, now is a perfect time to establish one. This can also work well for your performance as absolute weight for some people is fatiguing.
Shift training volume down, not up
Some people will think higher reps means higher volume, but that isn’t mutually correlated.
I would recommend that whatever your usual set count is, trim it down by at least 1 total set to start. Meaning, if at your peak in a training cycle you would do 4 sets, have that peak be 3 sets.
Be open to the fact that you might not have to change anything
Above all, our bodies can go a lot further than we think and I think a lot of people psyche themself out before they even get going with a protocol because on paper, it does not make sense.
If the sport is pretty low-key, say, a club sport or something where you meet only a couple days a week, you might have to just grow up and embrace it. There are people who are forced to walk miles and miles to their gym, do manual labor, and still make progress in powerlifting, the self-determination factor here is something that you really cannot teach, however.
It Might Not Matter As Much To You As You Think It Does
This is a statement that one of my college professors iterated that really resonated with me.
It might not matter as much to you as you think it does.
If you love training, you will find a way to make it out on the other side, regardless of anything I provide to you as advice here. I think it is important to be honest with yourself, which I feel more and more, is becoming an issue with today’s youth, and think, do I really care about this or am I just afraid my Instagram followers will think less of me?
Brutal!
But for some, this is the case. If you are coming up with every excuse known to man, I will be the voice of reason for you in that, you do not care about it as much as you lead on.
“I can’t find time to eat during work.”
I worked with a one hour lunch break and would eat as much as I could during that time period and would prepare shakes and bring bars to eat on the go.
“I want to stay out later to hangout with friends.”
Perfectly valid and you should enjoy your life, but realize the people who care about this the most, are sacrificing things in their personal life to be better, maybe you are not willing to do that. Be accepting that your recovery will never be as good as it can be.
“Everything feels heavy.”
It should, you were on your feet for 8hrs, why should it feel light?
“I’m losing motivation with the weights I lift going down each week.”
Well, the truth is even if you did not do manual labor or sports, you will have periods of time where the weight on the bar does not go up each week. If you get discouraged that easily, again, this might not be a huge importance to you, doubly so if I find out you are not doing all the extra things to be as locked in as possible.
“I don’t think I can keep up with training at all and should take time off.”
Maybe, but what good will that do, if it’s purely mental, more power to you.
Have you tried to keep it up? You might surprise yourself.
Lastly, if your first line of defense is to stop altogether, you definitely do not care THAT much about this, which is okay! You just need to be honest with yourself.
I have worked with a lot of individuals who have made progress to various degrees, while under other avenues of physical duress.
Andrew Graves played rugby concurrently with powerlifting training.
Joshua Dang played rugby concurrently with powerlifting training.
Evan Wright and Evan Larsen work manual labor jobs.
And to tie everything together, I want to make it known that there is a time and a place for training taking the backseat entirely, especially when the emotional toll becomes too much, in the future, I will talk about how to train when you are dealing with mental and emotional struggle.
Love all y’all and hope this helped!
To Utopia,
Erik