Marilia’s Powerlifting Blog

As I always say, I am a newcomer to powerlifting and I tend to observe everything with unfamiliar eyes. Only recently have I come to actually appreciate this lack of familiarity. It is the same lack of familiarity that, years ago, allowed me to look at a biochemical system and “see” something the rest of the lab ignored. Of course: they were looking at those protein-cell surface interactions for 10 years and I had just been introduced to them. What stuck out like a sore thumb to me was unseen to them.
Back to powerlifting, just as the colored disks support looked to me more like a post-modern sculpture, the slapping, hitting, pulling ears and screaming act previous to lifting at meets was just too fascinating. I remember staring at one lifter who couldn’t find anyone to hit him and started slapping his own face, which was a pretty arduous task since he was wearing a very tight bench shirt. Looking at this apparently bizarre self-abuse behavior, I wondered what it was all about.
“Adrenaline” – they told me. “Testosterone”, others said.
When I started taking part on competitions, I wondered if that would help me. My first lift was always done under already so much anxiety and stress that I could not possibly imagine what an extra production of those hormones could do to my body or mind.
So one day my coach gave me one big slap on the back before my first deadlift. I missed a REAL light load. And concluded that hitting and slapping was not for me.
One month later I broke a regional, a national and a South American bench press record by doing exactly the opposite, with the help of my friend Fernando Canteli. Canteli is an experienced lifter and holder of several national records. He noticed I was under a lot of pressure and feeling uncomfortable and isolated me from the crowd, allowing me to close my eyes and focus.
So: focusing is for me. Not slapping. Focusing. Not screaming. Silence.
That is a nice starting point: some lifters quench anxiety to focus and succeed, others prefer to increase their stress level to achieve the same goal (channel all aggressiveness to lifting the weight – another form of focusing).
Researchers in the field of sports psychology, anxiety and performance have been struggling with the relationship between the various components of stress and performance for years. There is an obvious complex relation, but which is it? Some studies propose a model with multiple anxiety (or stress) components, each behaving differently but feeding back into each other (at least a physiological and cognitive component).
A single “optimum” relation seems unlikely, but situation-specific optimum levels of stress components seem to describe individual performance.
This is the closest academic research gets to it.
And I still wonder what sort of western explanation may account for the incredible results observed in the martial arts. They come under concepts such as “Qi (chi) energy”, “meridians” and the like. For some reason, I feel they could be helpful to us, or at least very insightful.
So: what do we do now?
Read more:
http://www.athleticinsight.com/Vol4Iss2/Competitive_State_Anxiety.htm
 

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 4:39 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.