Twenty-five years ago, when I started lifting, you could be strong in private. Your failures belonged to you. Now, every workout gets filmed, every lift gets posted, every personal record gets compared to someone younger and stronger doing it for reps.
This effect is all the starker for the fact that we’re living through the golden age of human strength. The numbers powerlifters achieve today are staggering. John Haack totaled 2,254 pounds across the squat, bench, and deadlift at 198 pounds bodyweight. Colton Engelbrecht achieved a 2,645-pound total at 275. These represent leaps that my generation thought were impossible. Years ago, I spoke to many of the world’s leading practitioners of the bench, and these experts assured me that 800 pounds was a ceiling that would require the evolution of a perfect specimen. Now, heavyset Julius Maddox is targeting 800 and has apparently already done it in training.
And, to put it plainly, instant access to the greatest feats of strength in human history is a bit of a buzzkill. When Hafthor Bjornsson deadlifted 1,124 pounds, when Maddox bench-pressed 782 pounds, and when Ray Williams squatted 1,080 pounds raw, they broke the sport of powerlifting along with those world records. The gap between beginner and elite has never been wider, and thanks to social media, everyone can see exactly how far behind they are.
When I was 14, working with barbells for the first time, Eddie Hall’s 500-kilogram (1,102 pounds) deadlift was still decades away. Gen X lifters like me and my older brother thought 950 pounds was the stuff of Arthurian legend. Now, the Mountain is making 510 kilograms look routine. When he started his pull, the bar bent like a horseshoe. His face turned purple. Then, he stood up out of a modified conventional deadlifting stance, and everybody watching him on YouTube knew we knew absolutely nothing about what the outer limits of human potential looked like.
My brother and I grew up on Mike Mentzer’s Heavy Duty and Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, muscle magazines stolen from the supermarket and hidden under my bed, and tips from our old-school big father. That was the whole education. There were no Instagram form checks, no YouTube tutorials, and no Reddit programs. We learned by doing it wrong until something worked.
The Metroflex Gym in Arlington, Texas, became my finishing school when I turned 30. Elite lifters there fixed a decade of bad habits. Even with their help, my squat peaked at 650 pounds, my deadlift at 705, and my bench just a shade over 440 a few days before I tore my pec. Those were big numbers for a 242-pound man in 2012. But today, you can see a bevy of super-steroidal teenagers achieving them on Instagram and apologizing in the caption for having an off day.
The information explosion should make everyone stronger. You can read Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength between sets or follow him across a variety of media. Legendary Russian coach Boris Sheiko’s programs are free online. Ex-powerlifter Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 has spawned a thousand variations. Kelly Starrett will teach you mobility work that would have saved my hips and knees ten years of grinding. A kid starting today has access to more knowledge than I gathered in a decade.
But along the way, they’ve lost something: the privacy of trial and error. Every beginner now starts their journey knowing exactly how far they have to go. They watch Haack bench 600 at 198 pounds of bodyweight and think they’re failing if they can’t bench 365. Girls can see 165-pound German powerlifting legend Denise Herber deadlifting 640-plus pounds and wonder why they’re struggling with 315. The standards have shifted so far that even intermediate-level strength looks like weakness.
Indeed, women deserve their own discussion. Two decades ago, a woman deadlifting 405 pounds, four full 45-pound plates on each side, warranted national headlines. Now, it barely cracks Instagram’s algorithm. As the East German women’s Olympic teams showed us during the 1970s, women respond quickly and well to even mild performance-enhancing drug use, so as more female lifters chasing records and attention began to use drugs like testosterone in the 2010s, the whole concept of traditional female strength limits got thrown out (alas, the side effects were and still are worse for them, too). Yet as the ceiling keeps rising, the floor for newbies stays the same.
I watch young lifters spend more time researching programs than running them. They argue about squat depth on videos instead of actually squatting to depth themselves, and optimal frequency instead of showing up consistently. They know the science behind muscle protein synthesis, but can’t stick to a diet for three months. They’re paralyzed by information, afraid to start because they might not be doing it perfectly.
I got pretty strong on bad information and good effort — there “ain’t nothing to it but to do it,” as retired and badly debilitated bodybuilding king Ronnie Coleman used to say. My form was fairly mediocre, my programming was random, and my nutrition was whatever protein I could scrounge off the Golden Corral buffet during my four years spent working there. Even so, I showed up and did the work. This is still true: The iron doesn’t lie, even if the din of social media makes it much harder to hear what it’s saying.
When I trained alone in my father’s garage in my early twenties, a 495-pound squat seemed pretty special. It was, in my neighborhood, in my head, in my little world, there in Glacier National Park. Now, budding strength influencers squat 600 for reps and caption it “poverty numbers.” They can’t enjoy a personal record because someone just posted a bigger one. They can’t appreciate progress because the algorithm shows them someone who progressed faster.
THE STOLEN BASE IS BACK — AND SO IS BASEBALL
I’m glad I got to keep my strength work private for so long. For decades, it was just me and a few training partners, secret sharers exploring what we could move and trying to improve one rep at a time. The iron game was never meant to be played against anyone but yourself. But now that the weight room has merely become another stage in our ever-expanding society of the spectacle, lifters who once hungered to be the show are increasingly pressured just to stand idly and see it.
Today’s young lifters will never know what it felt like to be strong in isolation, to have your numbers mean something without needing strangers to confirm it. They’ll never experience the quiet satisfaction of adding ten pounds to the bar with nobody watching, nobody caring, nobody telling them it should have been twenty. Comparison is the thief of joy, and we live in an era of instant comparison to the whole rest of the world.
Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. His Substack is Oliver Bateman Does the Work.
