Lifting in Lipstick

So, hit a deadlift PR yesterday, which was really cool!

I'm a notoriously terrible deadlifter. Like, there was a point in time where my squat and deadlift were terribly close. I don't know if I just don't have the body type for it (I think this is part of it...I'm built for squats!), but I was stuck for a really long time and I was getting extremely frustrated. My boyfriend tried to help me with my technique, and he'd get furious because I just wasn't getting it down. It wasn't that I wasn't making an effort, it's just that my body didn't DO things the way his does. A lot of it, I think, I can attribute to my pretty different center of gravity, which is loads lower than his or even a lot of women. I tried sumo, which was eh, but I still wasn't making the progress I should have been.

One day I showed up at the gym and someone had left 135 sitting on the platform. I just went over, picked it up, and put it in the rack. All of a sudden I stopped...the week before, I struggled terribly with 135. Confused, I grabbed it out of the rack, put it down, and picked it up again. That day everything changed. I stopped overthinking. I stopped taking tons of time to set up. That just made it worse. Just walking up and picking up the weight...as ridiculous and simple as this sounds...was what worked. When I did that, it was like my body automatically shifted into the position I needed to be in to lift the weight as easily as possible, the position I had been trying so hard to find. I struggle with reps, because when I put the weight down, I lose that position, but things are looking up.

Yesterday I pulled 185, which isn't really a lot to most people, but for me (I'm 5'2, and even when I'm heavier like now that's definitely more than 1.5xBW) that was a goal that I had set for myself. And it wasn't too awful! I maybe could have even pulled a bit more! I'm pretty hard on myself a lot of the time, but this was the first time in a while I felt satisfied, and almost a bit proud. I still hear myself reminding my head that, hey, you're heavier than you usually are, of course your weights should go up a bit. But I'm trying to just concentrate on the fact that my first deadlift ever was 65lbs and I'm up to almost three times that.

Now onto the next goal...the elusive 2 plates!