What I’m Learning From Doing Deadlifts

I am relearning how to deadlift.

In addition to the deadlifts, I’ve been doing turf walks with a loaded hex bar.

This week, I walked while carrying 155 pounds. That’s more than I weigh.

This is not about the deadlift.

It’s not even about the hex bar walks.

It’s about how to move forward when you’re weighed down.

What weighs us down is often invisible: fear, past failures, shame, guilt, anger, resentment, beliefs that lead to these emotions.

We may think that we need a new belief to empower us to take the next step.

Sometimes a new belief can form only after you take the next step.

Taking the next step is hard when you’re immobilized by the albatross of your unexamined fears and shame.

It would be nice if you could just let it go, but that’s not always possible.

You need to learn how to lift the load. You must learn how to carry it. How to move with it.

When you learn how to lift the load and carry it, you can step forward in life even before you’ve solidified a new belief.

You can trust that as you take the next step, as you move to a new space, you’ll see life from a different perspective.

From that new perspective a new belief will form. It will be a belief you couldn’t have believed from where you previously stood because you lacked experience and insight and awareness to formulate it where you were.

Sometimes we need to carry the load for a while. This is part of our healing: building resilience in the nervous system to prove to it that it can function under the stress of the heavy load.

Stress itself isn’t bad. Distress is the harmful stress. There’s also eustress – a stressor that builds resilience.

With the right technique, when you know how to handle it, the stress that you once considered distress becomes eustress.

The load might feel heavy, but it’s no longer an anchor weighing you down and keeping you stuck.

With practice, it becomes a heavy load you can lift.

It becomes a heavy load you can carry.