Iron Warriors or Kevlar Clowns?

Iron Warriors or Kevlar Clowns?

Lights.

The blistering hot platform spotlights blind him with the radiance of a thousand suns.

Camera.

If successful, all the known world will bear witness to his epic victory.

Action!

The colossal weight threatens to grind him to dust. With Herculean might, he defies gravity. Vlad Alhazov has just squatted 1,250 lbs, shattering the world record. In doing so, he exceeds his limits. Our limits. Power lifting has ascended to the next level of strength athletics. Or has it? Having done so in a 6 ply Kevlar suit of armor providing up to 400 lbs of assisted resistance, can Alhazov's lift truly be considered a noble triumph over human limitations? Or does it reveal a baser aspect of the human nature, one that distorts our originally lofty aspirations into shadows of their former selves? Indeed, humanity's greatest failure is the achievement of success via synthetic means because it leaves us farthest away from our original, noble intentions. Nowhere is this truth more evident than in the strength sport of power lifting.

Since the dawn of time, humanity has been fascinated by the extent of its physical strength. Curious meatheads that we are, testing the extent of that strength was the next logical step. Eons (and innumerable hernias) later, the modern sport of power lifting was born. The beauty of power lifting can be found in its simplicity: A lone lifter stands on a platform, or lays on a bench, and moves a bar loaded with iron plates from point A to point B in three distinct lifts: the squat, bench press, and deadlift.

The squat consists of supporting a bar full of weights on the back of the neck, mimicking a sitting motion until the crease of the hips is below one's knee line and returning to the upright, standing position. A deadlift involves picking up a loaded bar from the floor until standing erect, with locked knees and hips. The bench press, every teenage male's ego's best friend, involves laying on a flat bench, supporting a bar full of iron with arms locked straight, pulling the weight to the chest and pressing upward until the arms return to the lockout position.

A power lifting competition, then, is simply performing these three events for three attempts each. The highest successful weight lifted in each lift is added to create a total, with the winner being the person with the highest total in each weight class. If the lifter fails to lift the weight in three attempts in any one lift, he is disqualified from the rest of the competition. In power lifting terms, they've "bombed out". The purpose of competition is to achieve the status of strongest in the world. That's all there is to it; the simplicity is obvious (If you still don't understand, turn in your driver's license and refrain from operating any heavy machinery). How, then, could so plain a path to success become distorted beyond recognition? Again, simple. It isn't about improving one's strength. It's all about the total.

In the pursuit of ever higher totals, power lifters expose themselves to weights that could crush mere mortals effortlessly. For even the mightiest of these behemoths, a slight misstep could lead to career ending injury. Thus the emphasis for safety gave rise to bench shirts and squat/deadlift suits, equipment designed to provide strain in the direction a lifter is trying to move the weight in to complete a lift. These pieces of assistance clothing were originally designed to provide a small amount of additional resistance to reduce the strain on the muscles, joints and tendons, thus decreasing a lifter's chance of injury. A second effect of this helpful resistance was that it allowed for faster recovery from injuries. Ted Arcidi, the first man to officially bench press 705 lbs raw, mentions in his article on criticalbench.com: "Originally, when the supportive bench press shirts came on the market, their intended purpose was not to enhance performance but to aid lifters who were working out with an ailing rotator cuff or other shoulder problems". At some point, however, lifters discovered that wearing this safety equipment also increased the amount of and the ease with which weight could be lifted without actually growing strong enough to lift it, resulting in widespread equipped competition. What once was safety equipment made of 50% cotton and 50% polyester and one layer thick has now evolved into a 5 layer Kevlar suit of armor. Leave it to humanity to warp equipment meant to provide safety while lifting into something more closely resembling fork lifts.

Some argue that the bench shirts and squat/deadlift suits don't just magically increase one's lifting ability, but require tremendous effort and training just like unequipped, or raw, lifting does. Yet, the disparity between raw world records and equipped world records is too great to avoid. As chronicled on powerliftingwatch.com, the super heavyweight class, the one most likely to produce the greatest totals, the differences between the men's SHW raw total, 2,298 set by Don Reinhoudt, and the equipped total, 2,905, set by Donnie Thompson, is astronomical. A 600 pound difference in totals averages roughly 200 pounds more in each lift, yet both men are in the same weight class with very similar strength levels. Where has the "power" in power lifting gone? Rather than focusing on achieving greater totals based on one's personal merits, success in the sport has been reduced to who can afford the most layers in their bench shirt or squat/deadlift suit. The hunger for outrageous totals leads lifters astray, far away from the noble pursuit of testing the limit's of human, not material, strength.

The irony of it all is that suited lifters "bomb out", or are disqualified, far more than raw lifters. Then again, the "Faustian bargain" always yields cursed rewards. The invincible suits of armor are woven in so many layers and from such powerful material that they restrict the ROM, or range of motion, of a given lift to a fraction of an unequipped lift. This results in equipped lifters failing to meet the ROM requirements that constitute a successful lift, and they end up bombing out and being disqualified from the rest of the competition. Greg Scott, a raw power lifter turned strongman quips:

I must say I am not a big fan of the crazy, rather over compensating, support equipment that is showing up at competitions. I mean when ten of the best bench specialists in the world show up at the Arnold Classic and seven of them can not make a single lift due to the fact the weight could not come down to their chest, we have a problem. Great Powerlifters like Ed Coan and Gary Frank have given similar views in articles regarding the equipment issue. The purity of the sport needs to be looked at in regards to the development of this kind of equipment.

The obsession with totals has obscured the original purpose of power lifting, lifting the heaviest weight with one's own power, to the point that people are losing competitions not due to a lack of power but due to the "advantage" of their hydraulic super suits doubling as their Achilles heel.

Why, then, is there no end to people's voracious appetite for success achieved by any means necessary in a sport that offers no prizes, no fame, and no fortune? Are power lifters today iron warriors, stalwart paragons of humanity's vaunted virtues in the battle against metal? Or are they Kevlar clowns, weak willed vagabonds looking for any underhanded means to come out on top? Can humanity's vanity be so prevalent that a simple title erases all sense of nobility within us as we chase after it? Or has humanity's fascination with "who is strongest among us" twisted the definition of "strongest" to more closely resemble "best equipped"? Indeed, so long as humanity continues to achieve success via synthetic means, it will remain our greatest failure because it will obscure our vision of the most sacred and noble of human truths: The success of any endeavor lies not within the success itself, but rather the transformation that occurs along the journey and the priceless lessons it teaches the individual about himself.

Until we come to that realization, it seems we'll forever be lost in one foolish mindset: "It's all about the total".