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Let me tell you a fun story. I was squatting last year, and I happened to have two spotters that night – I normally train by myself, so there were witnesses. My work set was to be 325 for one triple, and the warmups felt like shit. You know the situation: 135 feels weird, like it's been 6 months since you did it, 225 feels slow, and 275 feels heavy, like it's the work set weight.
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This has been the case with my lifts so often that I no longer pay attention to how I feel about lifting before I work out or how the worksets themselves 'feel'. I video all my lifts, even warmups, and more times than not the lift looks easier and definitely moves faster on the video than it felt when I was doing it. To my mind, this is one of the first lessons a lifter--someone who is serious about getting stronger--should learn: how you feel about the lift does not matter. And a corollary: when you puss out, only you will know it, and you will (or at least you should) feel worse about that than you would have felt had you tried the weight that 'felt' hard and failed at rep 4 or 5. There are many ways to be a pussy in the weightroom, and this is, in my experience, the most common one.
