Reaching a lifetime goal

I reached a goal I set 8 years ago when I started training the squat, bench press, and deadlift: a 200/140/200 kg SBD. I thought I would get there sooner but encountered various obstacles. This post traces the obstacles I encountered and the methods I used to work around them.

From the beginning to today

I read Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2018 and the book shaped how I saw optimization, slack, and fragility in my programming work. At the time, I was building tools on top of a full-featured discrete optimization system: software that helped businesses schedule staff, allocate work, and reduce costs. These systems are useful not only in periods of abundance, but also in periods of turmoil. (Even when I write without assistance, I notice LLM-ish habits in my sentences, like “not only this, but that.”)

It became clear to me that optimization can make the resulting system more fragile, especially if the plan does not include slack or redundancy.

Continuing with digression: a highly optimized schedule can fall apart as soon as unpredictable events occur, whether it is a delivery route, a battery-charging plan, or an airline-capacity schedule. The algorithmic work is interesting, but the approach often introduces fragility or assumes an unrealistically stable world. Many events after 2018 confirmed both the need for optimization software and the danger of hyperoptimized systems that can lose their gains in one unpredictable event (CrowdStrike). A system with no slack or redundancy recovers much more slowly. After the outage, airlines lacked the personnel to clear the backlog.

To return to lifting: Starting Strength is mentioned in the book and I found the whole approach to training appealing. I joined OrlandoFit (now The Fitness) and started the classic three-sets-of-five on the squat, bench press, deadlift, and overhead press.

The first issue I encountered was bar placement on my shoulders. My body had adapted almost perfectly to sitting. My spine had lost its natural S curve; it had flattened from the atlas to the tailbone. My shoulders were rounded forward and my hips were in a posterior tilt. A low-bar position was excruciating. Because squats came first in the workout, I could not overhead press more than 45 kg for a long time. The low-bar position fatigued my shoulders enough to hurt my pressing. This issue continued to plague me for years.

Another issue was gaining weight. Knowing the theory did not make the practical problem of eating enough any easier. In 3 months of training I gained 3-4kg. My hope was to gain 10-15kg, but it took me 8 months to find a diet that made steady weight gain possible. Today, I can easily go from 90kg to 105kg over 6-12 months by mostly eating soy products, potato-based carbs, protein bread and olive or rapeseed oil. I followed a vegan diet throughout, and it was not a problem. My default is to under-eat, so gaining weight required a deliberate food routine.

My linear progression stalled very quickly. I was failing my sets of 5 after 2 months of adding weight. I tried to compensate with strict resets, longer rest times, but none of it worked. Alongside the minimal bodyweight change, I was also unable to learn the movement pattern properly, even after reading the book and watching many tutorials about technique and trying many different cues (one at a time). I eventually started filming myself. Video feedback ended up being very useful. I noticed inefficient movement patterns and corrected them. Before filming, I was relying on proprioception; video made the result visible. It took 8 months before I was moving efficiently enough for the linear progression to continue. I assume that slowed my progress, because much of the opportunity for newbie gains went unused. I was at the stage where I had to unlearn the ingrained bad habits.

The way I sit had left my left side overstretched before I ever started lifting. I usually place my left foot beneath my right thigh, inadvertently stretching my ankle, knee and hip. I had already noticed issues while hiking long before I started strength training, but lifting made the issues impossible to ignore. My left knee, left hip, lower left back has small aches. In the end, my left leg ended up growing more than my right to compensate for the excessive stretching. Due to some of the aches, I had periods where I had to replace back squats with front squats, or stop squatting completely. Even after 8 years, I’d say all training-related aches are on the left side. Luckily, strength training made regular physical activity leave no impact, causing almost no fatigue.

As the weights got heavier, I used a lifting belt for stability. But, weight gain, combined with wearing the belt tighter, made impingement more likely. Nerve irritation would make it harder to stabilize my left hip and I would sometimes aggravate the area so much that I wouldn’t be able to squat. It took me quite a lot of time to realize it was not a lifting injury but extreme belt tightness.

After 5-6 years I lost motivation to continue. I stopped logging the workouts and kept a simple low-volume plan in my head. The goal of squatting 200kg looked out of reach. I figured out how to eat enough. My squat mechanics felt efficient and comfortable. Non-LP programming did not seem to solve any issues or there wasn’t any progress. Surrounding issues (shoulder pain/flexibility, lower left side aches) were reappearing the moment I started sets with heavy weights, in the 145-165kg range, where I had been stuck for years. At that time, I expected I’d probably need at least 5 more years, if not more, to approach a 200kg squat. The most demotivating part was the mismatch between effort and outcome. Effort at levels that I rarely reached during my academic studies. It produced mediocre results and at some point, produced no results at all. I liked the fact that I could train, but training was structured around eating too much food and repeating movements that often left me aching. Those aches made it harder to ingrain efficient technique. Bench press and overhead press were not improving at all. I started doing presses at the beginning of the workout and saw progress, but then I’d have a bad set of squats that would just completely fry my shoulders/arms to the point where I couldn’t even bench/overhead press my weights from the previous week and I would need weeks to recover.

I really desired to get as strong as I imagined. To be more specific, I wanted to get as strong as possible on my own. I read a lot of books and scientific papers on strength training. I stuck with stable programming for months/years, I tried out many cues, filmed my sets, added in accessories, did not skip workouts during my travels, disliked skipping workouts, gained weight, lost weight, and because I was seeing no results, desire faded.

I decided to get a powerlifting coach. That forced me to be accountable and execute someone else’s plan. I made an effort to log everything and just blindly follow what was planned. It was interesting how a few simple tweaks that went against the grain, eliminated my issues and allowed me to reach the goal stated at the beginning. I changed my low-bar grip to an unconventional one, which allowed for fast progress on bench press. Low RPE training style almost completely eliminated weird aches. When I started being coached I had aches in my left hip, weird clockwise rotation of barbell during squat, and in the last year I’d say not much remains from the issues (I can still aggravate my shoulders/arms but it’s an event that happens once every 6 months instead of once every 2 weeks). I still had motivation issues, as now training is extremely structured, I have to log everything, I have to film myself regularly, and now I also have to report all of that to the coach, but I made data collection and reporting semiautomatic.

What am I doing after accomplishment?

After my last max-out on April 20, 2026, I haven’t experienced a lot of pleasant emotional feedback. If I had to compare, positive feelings that arise after waking up from a nap or listening to a song are much stronger. I liked that I reached my goal. This goal was the first concrete goal I had. Most of my life is curious drifting where I’m lucky to see gradual or swift improvement and eventual completion. I never had any long-term goals before. When it comes to further progress, I am fine with maintaining this into old age. It will be interesting to see how long the body can handle it. I have lost interest in powerlifting as a sport way before I started being coached, and I’d much rather improve my wing-foiling and wind-surfing. We’ve added, coach and I, zone-2 cardio to develop work capacity that will allow me to continue practicing powerlifting and I will go through weight gain and loss cycles to improve my body composition. When it comes to a particular weight on the bar, I do not care anymore. I’m back to curious drifting.

P.S.

I asked ChatGPT to grade the initial stream-of-thoughts draft of this essay using the well established A1,A2,B1,B2,C1,C2 scale and most of the categories landed on B2, with some landing on C1. After 20+ years of English, I’m still not comfortably landing at C1 (mostly due to incorrect verb patterns, non-idiomatic verb-object pairings, abstract nouns where a verb is more fitting, incorrect past tense usage). After fixing sentences that were off, I cleared the context and reran the prompt. Response criticized the same sentences 😑.

I find it funny how job ads for onsite positions in Austria require C1 German & “good” English. I’m pretty sure I’d have to approach English the way I approached powerlifting; by practicing every day, at least half an hour, to comfortably land on C1 English with my initial drafts. I suspect I’m not too far off to compare this expectation of C1 German & English with an expectation that comparable share of people can hit a 200/140/200 SBD? If I needed 8 years of effort to reach it, how many years of concentrated effort would someone need to reach comfortable C1 German and English, on their own, while working a full-time job? The job ad must be seriously off and the authors must be completely unaware of effort required for such an accomplishment. How can this kind of hiring requirement be a competitive advantage?