---
title: "Training to Lift More: Lessons From My Weightlifting Journey"
description: "For the goal that still looks insurmountable from where you stand."
author: "Rahim Rasul"
type: "Podcast episode"
series: "Halftime Talks"
episode: 154
published: "2018-02-06"
duration: "14 min"
theme: "Reps and effort"
tags: "weightlifting, goal setting, comfort zone, confidence, potential"
audio: "https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/rahimrasul/HTT154-TrainingToLiftMore.mp3?dest-id=175061"
url: "https://iloveprocess.com/halftime/training-to-lift-more/"
site: "I Love Process"
---

# Training to Lift More: Lessons From My Weightlifting Journey

_For the goal that still looks insurmountable from where you stand._

**The question:** How do we become familiar and comfortable with an increasing demand on our ability?

Listen: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/rahimrasul/HTT154-TrainingToLiftMore.mp3?dest-id=175061

## Before you listen

Initially the insurmountable paralyzes our engagement. The path toward an aspiration may be concealed or shrouded in mystery, but that does not negate its existence. My time weightlifting taught me lessons in goal acquisition, and one goal was the holy grail of lifting: a 405-pound bench press, four 45-pound plates on each side of the bar.

I was benching around 315 when a man benching 405 told me I should be there too. I was bigger than him, and it was a shot across the bows of my ego. What got me to 315 wasn't going to get me to 405. Belief in my ability, confidence, technique and a quiet mind carried me to 355 before an injury stopped the climb.

Listen for the secret I kept after the gym. With my max at 325, I'd load 345, let my spotter lower it, and press it back up, until working outside my comfort zone became regular.

## From the talk

> You have to get used to beyond what you think is possible, and the best way to do that is to foster a relationship with it.
>
> Once we're used to operating outside of our comfort zone, once we are used to it, it's no longer discomfort.
>
> Don't let other people's standards dictate your standards.

## Transcript

Welcome to another episode of Halftime Talks. My name is Rahim Rasul, and you're listening to the podcast that recognizes that in the middle of your game of life, whether you're up by 10 or down by 20, we all need halftime talks to uplift us, inspire us and challenge us to bring that level of performance it's gonna take to win the game.

I appreciate you guys tuning in for another episode. Make sure you go check out our catalog. These are evergreen episodes. The content doesn't get old. Check out our backlog of episodes, and I know you're going to enjoy it. So to begin this, let's begin with a little bit of appreciation. To start it off, today, I want to appreciate all the many reasons, all the many ways that invoke that spirit of playfulness out of us. There's no cooler feeling than being in that perpetual state of play as a child that that was 24/7 from the moment we woke up until the moment we went to sleep.

As we got older, we lost that playful feeling so for all the reasons to play, to make work lighter, to enjoy the company of those who surround us, or just for the hell of it, because we want to feel good and don't want to feel so serious about all the things that can be going on in our life and the world. So I appreciate those feelings, and I appreciate those moments that make me playful, really excited to bring you today's episode entitled training to lift more. In this episode, I recount a time when I was power lifting, and some of the principles that I learned in powerlifting are analogous and applicable to so many other areas of our life.

So how do we take on lifting, caring and completing things that look insurmountable, similar to some of the things we've spoken before, but in this week, we have a really cool twist. So strap in your seat belt, open your mind, and let's get prepared to, you know, say, take in another episode a story for this episode begins in the spring of 1996 it was the second semester of college. It happened in a class of all classes, philosophy, as we get our tests back or some assignment back. There's a note written in red, especially for me. It says, Rahim, I need you to meet me in my office at your earliest convenience.

And so I show up to the office, and the professor looks at me and he says, Rahim, you're participating in class. You're really engaged. I see what you're doing on these tests. And unfortunately, I don't think you're working up to your potential. Now, this whole episode is about efforts, techniques and tactics and conceptual understanding of how to push beyond that normalcy and realize your possibility. Little did I know that it would be about 10 years before somebody would once again tap me on my shoulder and confront me about unrealized possibility on my behalf, and this, this confrontation that happened at the gym, the gym, my personal dojo, my creative studio for painting the canvas that which is my body, because the body is responsive and you can mold it and shape it with effort, with resistance, with weight.

And the gym was a place where I went to develop my relationship with my possibility. And up until that point, I'd been in the gym five days a week or four days a week, and sometimes endlessly. And you know, with any pursuit, when you start, you're a little sloppy, it's a little all over the place, and you really have no technique. But from that beginning point to when I was confronted, I had. Developed a confidence in my abilities across I was probably one of the stronger people in the gym, and this here is a story of strength, a story of understanding the natural resources that we possess that go on earth because we haven't spent the time excavating our realized or unrealized possibilities.

So as it happens, there's these gentlemen who come in the gym and packs, and they were lifting heavy. This one gentleman was benching. I noticed he was benching about 405 pounds. And you know me, I was probably somewhere in the low three hundreds, like 315 and the irony is I was bigger than him, and he came up to me, and he was like, Yo man, you should be benching about about 405. I got a guy in a gym over the course of the last month and a half, and he's already at 385, and so that was a a shot across the bows of my ego.

And I was like, maybe I can do more, maybe I should be more. Maybe, maybe I could do more. Maybe there's some unrealized potential that I am not accessing. And so I made it my mission. I made it my mission therefore that I would bench 405 pounds. Let's do the math. I was at 315 I was shooting for 405, that's 90 pounds. And I realized what got me here? Won't get me there. I was going to have to dig deeper and access more possibility than I had up to that point. Even though that previous goal was amazing, based upon where I started, I knew that I was going to have to find a new resource within me to go even further.

One thing I suspect with you, that you and I share in common is that we want to live in a domain of exceptionality. We want to do things that represent the highest use of our mind, body and spirit, giving utility and function to the world, bringing value to the mass is by being exceptional. Now, that strength that's necessary to lift that mountain, to lift the weight, it requires a belief in your ability, no hesitation, no questioning if you can do it, because think about it, lifting that much weight and questioning if you can do it puts you at risk. There's something that says there's a cost and the safety and there's your physical well being is at stake.

So you have to have a belief in your ability to do it. Number two is confidence. Now there's something that I used to Summit. I used to summon, like the visualization that I was in that movie 300 and it was easy, and I was pushing that weight, and I was super strong, Spartan, this gladiator used to just flow through my being. I was like Hannibal incarnate when I was under the bench press. And so I had to summon the confidence. How many areas of our life are we attempting things that that other people may seem as so outside of the box, you have to summon that level of confidence.

Number three, technique is imperative. Technique is imperative because, like the bench press, you're there to train your chest. You have different parts of the muscles of your chest. You're not there to train your shoulders, your other muscle groups, except your chest. And so the technique should focus on what the output is that you want to get out number four, being underneath there, you have to access the best of yourself. It requires a clarity of your mind. It requires a focusing. It requires a silencing of that inner critic. The more you can do that, the more you can bring the best of you to that. Single point where you lower that weight and you raise it up.

And so with all of these, the next time I jumped underneath the bench, I performed 325 pounds. And over the next successive weeks, I had raised my bench up to 355 pounds. Now, Soon thereafter, I would suffer a small injury, and I would never be able to reach 405 pounds, but I learned a magical secret soon thereafter. It was a secret that I've utilized beyond the gym, and this is the secret that I want to share with you, the biggest lesson that I learned through my weightlifting journey, and that lesson is, you have to get used to beyond what you think is possible, and the best way to do that is to foster a relationship with it, and what I mean by that, and the way that it translated in the gym was, if my Max was 325, I had to put four, 345 pounds on I would let my spotter lower the weight down, and then I would use my muscles to raise it up.

I would get used to operating outside of my comfort zone. I would get used to the thoughts that were going on in my head, and I could turn those levers off. And the more that I got accustomed to just even doing half of the work, my muscles knew that it was capable of doing it, because now it had experience in doing part of the process. When I gave it the whole process to do it, had the confidence to know that it could even do that. And so I knew, I absolutely knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that if that injury did not occur, I would have exceeded 405 pounds, because once we're used to operating outside of our comfort zone, once we are used to it, it's no longer discomfort.

It is regular. It is something that we have built up and climatized to, and I've used this in so many areas of my life, and I offer that as a token, a token a momentum of my travels in the gym. So go out there and realize more of your possibility. You don't want to look back and wish you could have done more when you had the stage, you had the body, you had the mind that operated at the highest potential. Don't let other people's standards dictate your standards. If you enjoyed this episode, you might want to go in our catalog and check out episode number 77 release your Excalibur as well as number 91 experimentality.

Our entire library is available on our website. halftimetalks.net as well as the iTunes podcast library. While you're on there, do us a favor, SUBSCRIBE and leave a review. Not only would we love it, but it would also make our podcast more findable, discoverable for other people, like you, who can gain benefit from the podcast. So until next time, go out there in the second half of the game and play to win, be sure to tune in next week, when we're going to be talking about performing at the highest level. Really eager to share that with you. So I appreciate you guys listening. So until then, have a good day. Peace. You.