Carl Raghavan SSC: Goals 103

[Mark Rippetoe]

Goals 103: Nobody Cares | Carl Raghavan

[Barry Charles]

Excellent coach! This is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot and you’ve captured these ideas very well.

Anecdotally (and with apologies for a first person comment to your thread ) I’ve been getting a lot of medical attention lately (shit) and I’m always asked “how are you doing?”. To which I always answer, “better than some, worse than others”. We laugh because it really is a stupid question.

But lifting goals capture that, right? And I think that it is paradoxical. On the one hand, the goals are ridiculously specific and measurable. On the other hand, my lifting is “better than some, and worse than others”. So is yours. Which is absolutely arbitrary.

I really can’t think of anything in recreation or life that is so obviously contradictory.

Is that why we love it? We discovered something others haven’t?

[Mark E. Hurling]

Goals now. I doubt Dearly Beloved really cares about them, although she has never given me grief about training and always enjoys coming to the powerlifting meets I compete in. It must be part of the marriage deal.

What really got my goal setting going was deciding to compete. Which I never would have done had not a Starting Strength seminar not gotten my form in the lifts squared away. First it was learning about Kilgore's charts and looking where advanced and elite were for men my age (60 then) and weight. After getting a 425 gym lift in the deadlift a few months after the seminar, I thought placing in a meet might be possible. A little research in guys my age and weight class showed that, yes indeed, it was in the cards. Using those parameters as goals to shoot for, I trained accordingly. As time went on, I discovered the powerlifting rankings where lifters are compared across all lifting federations internationally. Now I use those numbers as goals to shoot for.

[Tiff]

Thanks Carl- Your article resonates with everything I'm doing at present.