powerlifting | Tien Chiu's Blog

January 27, 2023 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Spring is coming

The last few months have felt like the rising sap of spring.

Janet and I launched the Handweaving Academy in December, to great success – over 500 people have signed up already! After an intense year of preparation, that feels just amazing.

Now, of course, we need to deliver on our promises – but fortunately, there are two of us to write all that content. And we are already working on adding other teachers. While we’re working hard, I’m down to working six days a week, and only about 7-8 hours a day. That is way less than I’ve worked any time in the last six years. Having a business partner I trust is fantastic – I know Janet has my back, and I have hers.

Jamie is also (finally!) most of the way through her transition. It’s been a really tough 4-5 years, as the physical and emotional changes associated with hormonal transition, coupled with the need to retool her entire identity, have been really tough on both of us. (It’s called “second puberty” for a reason!) Nonetheless, she’s figured most of it out, and the mood swings have mostly calmed down. Life has a LOT less stress now, for both of us.

Which is why I actually picked up a novel AND read it all the way through! earlier this month. Not only did I read the first book, but I actually devoured the entire rest of the trilogy and am halfway through with another series by the same author. This is the brilliant N.K. Jemisin, and the trilogy is The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky. Every book in the trilogy won the Hugo Award, one of science fiction’s greatest accolades. No one else has ever done that, or won the Hugo for three years in a row. (The Stone Sky won the Hugo AND the Nebula award – the other big prize in SF.)

Anyway. More important than the awards (which are just someone else’s opinion, after all) is the fact that Jemisin managed to suck me so deeply into the book that I read practically the entire thing in one sitting. This, from someone who hasn’t read fiction in about twenty years. And then I read the next one. And the last one. And now I’m diving into a new series.

What I love about Jemisin’s work is that the plot is NOT the typical science fiction plot (sometimes it feels like there’s only one of them), nor does she write books that reflect white middle class American values and assumptions. Her books explore a lot of deep themes, like slavery, racism, and hatred – not in a bash-you-over-the-head moralistic way, either, but with questions unfolding along with the plot and characters. Like Octavia Butler, my other favorite science fiction writer, Jemisin is a Black woman and brings those questions and experience to her writing.

I think she is one of the best writers I’ve ever read. (Now binge-reading her work, of course.)

Anyway. There are two great joys here. One is that I’ve discovered an amazing writer and am reading fiction again. The other is that I have time and emotional energy to be reading again. The last five years have been so stressful and hard-working that there was no space for that kind of luxury. Everything was focused either on Jamie’s transition or on building the teaching business. So to have the mental space and time to be reading again feels like a seismic shift.

I’m also weaving again for the first time in a long time. I took a piece off the Workshop Dobby Loom a few weeks ago. It’s simple but also beautiful, and I just love it:

Neither of these photos really captures the beauty of it, though. It’s a continuous gradient that goes from blue-green through blue to purple and back again twice over the course of the shawl. Design-wise, it’s simple but beautiful. I’m really enjoying it.

It has really been hard not having the energy to weave. When I went to start the Handweaving Academy, I chatted briefly with Linda Ligon, the founder of Interweave (and Handwoven magazine). She thought it was a wonderful idea but warned me that when she founded Interweave Press, she rapidly found that she herself had no time to weave. And that if I followed that path, I’d likely have much less energy to create my own work.

And that’s largely been true, not just this past year but the last six years. Do I miss weaving? Yes. I opened the latest Complex Weavers Journal yesterday and found it full of fascinating, in-depth explorations of the many things that are possible with a loom. I used to have the concentration and the leisure to do work like that, and I miss it.

But teaching weaving is incredibly rewarding as well. I LOVE what I do – both the teaching and figuring out the logistics of running a teaching business. I’m not sorry I went in this direction, but I’m grateful to finally have time and space – even if it’s only a tiny bit – to explore my own weaving again.

So like I said: it feels like spring!

And if you’re wondering about the weasels? I’m recovering from a minor injury (strained adductor muscle in my right thigh) so I’m off squats and deadlifts and anything else leg-related for the next few weeks, alas. (First session with the physical therapist on Tuesday.) However, no rest for the wicked – my trainer has me working on upper body stuff for the next few weeks!

Which is good, because I’m rather enjoying the She-Hulk look.

October 28, 2022 by Tien Chiu

Celebrating the power of community

I’ve been thinking lately about the importance of community, and particularly about how you define and choose your personal communities. Because the people you surround yourself with – their values, achievements, and interests – are the people who will define, inspire, and constrain your own expectations and behavior. Choosing the right community will free you to fly. Choosing the wrong community will be stifling at best, and potentially toxic.

For example, by virtually any standard, I’m pretty darn strong right now. (Last week I deadlifted 1,260 weasels (315 pounds). That’s a lot of weight.

However, Boss Barbell, where I lift, isn’t just any gym – it’s a powerlifting gym. In fact, it’s the biggest and best powerlifting gym in the Bay Area, and run by a renowned powerlifter. So if you’re a serious powerlifter, it’s where you go to work out.

As a result, “normal strength” in this gym is….a little skewed, shall we say? My heaviest lifts are more like warmup weights for many of the people in this gym. When I was doing my 315-pound lift, the guy next to me was doing nearly 500!

This creates a context in which 315 pounds looks, well, completely wimpy.

“But,” you say, “This is completely ludicrous! These people are elite powerlifters; they’ve been training much longer than you have; 90% of them are men who are two or three decades younger than you – of COURSE they’re going to be stronger! Don’t compare yourself to them!”

And that’s exactly what I mean by choosing your community wisely. Were I to take these elite, younger male lifters as my community – especially since some of them don’t consider me a good enough lifter to be taken seriously – it would be easy to get neurotic about my comparative lack of achievement. But I’m smart enough not to consider them my community, or to try joining their community. Doing that would park me as a permanent outsider and also at the bottom of the ladder. I made that mistake once, as a young woman in mathematics, and I’m not about to do that again.

This sense of dislocation and inadequacy is exactly what some of my students experience when they come into my classes and see beautiful work being posted by others who have been weaving intensively for a long time or who have art training (etc.). I regularly tell my students two things:

First, everyone is on their own creative journey, with their own creative goals. It really doesn’t matter where someone else is in their creative journey; what matters is your goals and how you are going to achieve them.

“What do you like in your work? What can you make better? How will you make it better? And how can I enjoy it more?” Those are the only questions that should concern you as an artist. “Am I a good artist?” is noticeably absent from the list.

Second, you have your own unique artistic voice, which is born out of your experience, skills, interests, and preferences. Which means that comparing your work to X’s to see whether X is a better artist than you are is just silly. You are different people and you speak with different voices. You can take inspirational elements from X’s work and incorporate them into your artistic vocabulary (though, please don’t imitate or copy!), but fundamentally wondering whether X’s work is better than yours is comparing apples to bicycles. It’s a great way to become neurotic without gaining much.

Having said that, of course it’s difficult to do your work entirely in a vacuum, and if you are the only person in the gym pulling 315 pounds when the ten other people there are pulling 400-500, it’s hard not to feel wimpy and out of place. (And a little frustrated at not being stronger…yet.)

There are two keys to persevering in these circumstances. The first is simply my first piece of advice to students, to remember that you are on your own journey, and that where they are in their journeys is irrelevant to your goals. The guy next to me may be looking to crack an 800-pound deadlift, but that’s his goal. Mine is to break the world record for 50-54 year old women in the 185-pound weight class, and that only requires a 370-pound squat, 415-pound deadlift, and something-or-other in bench press that I probably won’t achieve (bench press is my weakest lift right now).

Staying focused on your own goals lets you ignore the distracting shadows and focus on the target.

The second key, which I think is just as important, is to choose the right community, one that shares your values, where people welcome, appreciate, and encourage you, and you don’t feel out of place. It doesn’t have to be the dominant group in the community at large – but having even a few people who share your interests and values can easily make the difference between success and failure.

That’s true in anything – not just weightlifting or weaving – and is why, when attempting something difficult, I always start by reaching out to others for help. It’s not just about getting the help – though that’s important as well – but also about building a small community I can belong to.

As an entrepreneur, I always formed a small “mastermind” of a couple people who would meet regularly to talk about our businesses – a mini community where we could all support each other. As a weaver, I joined mailing lists and guilds and participated actively in both. And as a powerlifter, I’ve found a few people who lift like me and share my values as well. Not many, but enough. My community – at least for the moment – is more serious recreational lifters, women who lift, and elite lifters who encourage rather than exclude recreational lifters.

They say “It takes a village,” and I think that’s very true.

Ending with two videos that celebrate the power of community: my 315-pound deadlift from last week, and another video of me doing “pause deadlifts” – stopping and pausing halfway up. I was doing those with a 200-pound bar, and managed (at the end of the set) to pause for 10 seconds and still get it the rest of the way up!

(And not to worry – I’m careful about my form, and I have a top-notch coach who knows when to push me and when not to. I also wear a weightlifting belt, which helps protect my back.)

Happy lifting – in whatever you do! May you find happiness in a community of your own.

September 3, 2022 by Tien Chiu

A headfirst plunge down the weasel den

Long time readers of this blog may recall that a bit over four years ago, I decided to get back into shape (helped liberally along by a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes). In this blog post, I wrote about my decision to take up powerlifting, a form of weightlifting, as my vehicle for doing so, and my decision to measure my progress in units of weasels, which (lacking a NIST-approved Standard Weasel measurement), I declared to be four ounces. I figured getting into shape would be more fun if I didn’t take it too seriously, and measuring my progress in units of weasels would (a) seem a lot faster (bigger numbers!) and (b) more hilarious (just imagine all those weasels scampering around over the barbell!) than measuring in pounds.

Powerlifting consists of three lifts:

the bench press, where you lie down on a bench, lift a barbell out of a rack, lower it to your chest, and push it back up again,
the back squat (usually just called the squat), where you put a barbell over your shoulders, squat down, and stand back up again,
the deadlift, where you squat down, pick up a barbell that’s sitting on the floor, stand up straight, and put it back down again.

At the time I started, I could squat 380 weasels (=95 pounds), deadlift 380 weasels (=95 pounds), and I’m not sure about bench press, but I think it was about 260 weasels (=65 pounds). Not too bad for a couch potato, actually.

I spent about three and a half years working with Toussaint, an excellent fitness trainer at Silicon Valley Athletics. Three years or so into training, I finally blasted through the 1000-weasel mark in both squat and deadlift – 250 pounds in each! – and shortly after that, the 1200-weasel mark at 300 pounds in squat. In an idle moment, I looked up the stats and realized that this was a heavier squat weight than anyone in my age class had lifted at the California State Championships in 2019. Whoa. I had no idea I was that strong.

At that point, I decided to enter my first powerlifting competition, the “I Powerlift Like a Girl” meet with NorCal Powerlifting. Needless to say, I had to dress in theme, so I made myself a T-shirt for the occasion:

Tien in an "I Powerlift Like a Girl" T-shirt

I did…okay…in the meet. Depending on how you calculated, I placed either 3rd or 5th out of the 15 women who entered, but I felt I could have lifted significantly heavier if I hadn’t been so nervous. That’s okay – I got the first-competition jitters out of the way and now I know what to expect!

Afterwards, I did some serious thinking and decided that I wanted to get much more serious about powerlifting. Which meant making some changes. While I loved my trainer, Toussaint, he was a more general fitness trainer, and couldn’t teach me the more specialized points of powerlifting. I switched to a more specialized strength trainer at the same gym, Joey, who bumped me up significantly in a few more months. But I realized I was going to have to go to a coach who specialized in powerlifting if I wanted to get really good at it.

So I looked around on Yelp, found someone with great reviews, and reluctantly told my (wonderful) trainer I was going to leave and go train with someone more specialized.

“You can’t do that!” he said. My heart sank. I had been hoping to avoid a scene.

“You can’t possibly train with this guy,” he said. “You have to train with Dan Green. Dan’s the best guy in the Bay Area, and possibly in all of California. You’ve got to go with Dan.”

And Joey would not take “no” for an answer. He was absolutely adamant that Dan was the best of the best.

So I looked Dan up. It was…intimidating, to say the least. Dan has his own Wikipedia page. He holds world records in squat (783 pounds without special equipment) and total lifts (2099 lbs). AnimalPak.com has posters of him for sale on their website, for heaven’s sake.

Here’s a fun video of Dan in action (skip to the last two minutes if you’re the impatient type and just want to see the big weights):

More to the point, though, he’s also a great trainer and a really sweet guy. Definitely the “gentle giant” sort.

Anyway, I went over to his gym, Boss Barbell, and despite my sheer terror at the idea of training with a legendary powerlifter (because there was and is soooooooo much I don’t know about powerlifting outside of how to do the basic lifts) talked to him about training with him.

The net of it is, I’m now training with Dan. I can’t afford to train regularly with him (Dan’s rates are high, as you’d imagine for someone of his stature), so I’m doing video coaching with him as well as one personal training session every other week. Dan puts together a training schedule for me in a spreadsheet, I video my workouts and provide subjective commentary in the spreadsheet, and he gives me feedback on each exercise in the spreadsheet. Then I decide which of the lifts I want to work on most, and we do that in our every-other-week session.

That’s actually turning out to work just as well, or maybe even better than, working out more regularly with Dan. Because working out on my own with written feedback makes me think about what I’m doing, rather than listening to a trainer, where it seems to go in one ear and out the other. As a result, I feel like I actually learn faster in some ways. I wouldn’t want to give up working directly with a trainer, because more detailed feedback is very helpful too, but I’m finding it easier to take in one or two comments at a time, and really think about those comments, than it is to get a lot of information that I can’t remember later. (This is really making me think about what people say about “learning styles” and how every student is different!)

I will say that the first week of training was SUPER HARD. Coming into a gym where everyone else was an experienced powerlifter and I had no idea what I was doing half the time (I mean, I was looking up some of the exercises on YouTube to see how they were done!) – plus having to face a bunch of super buff, muscled-to-the-max men working out when I am emphatically neither – was both demoralizing and terrifying. I basically made it through only because I had decided I was going to do it and when I have put the death-lock on I simply do not back down. But geez, it was hard.

One thing that made it a lot easier, though, was that I went in one day mid-morning rather than in the late afternoon and found Dan there training someone who (like me) was decidedly NOT a super buff guy. Her name was Deborah and she was 72 years old (I know because she proudly told me 🙂 ). She couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. And she was deadlifting something like 160 pounds! and could do more push-ups than I can. I want to be Deborah when I grow up!!

Anyway, it was a HUGE relief to see that (a) Dan isn’t just training big buff guys, and (b) there were other women going to the gym. Representation matters!

Since then I’ve discovered that the gym has very different vibes depending on what times you get there. 5pm is when all the big buff guys arrive in force, and the gym tends to be packed then. Mornings tend to be very laid back, but I can’t work out in the mornings and still have enough brain left to work on the Academy. So I work out in the late afternoon, when my work day is over (I start at 5am) but it’s still fairly mellow.

The training schedule is tough. The actual workouts last anywhere from an hour and a half for the shortest ones to two hours (more usual), but by the time you throw in stretches, warmups and cooldowns, plus travel time to/from the gym, it’s more like 3 hours/workout, 5 days a week. It’s like a part-time job!

Here’s a video of me in one of my usual workouts. Here I’m doing one set of deadlifts – 275 pounds for 5 reps. Not as impressive as Dan’s 914 pounds, but not bad either!

I’m really enjoying this trip down the weasel den. My goal right now is to see if I can beat the highest world record for my age/weight class (there are different federations – this is the max I’ve found). That is 370 pounds in squat (1480 weasels), 435 pounds in deadlift (1740 weasels), and 231 lbs in bench press (924 weasels).

I have no idea if I can do that, but it’s worth a try. My best crack at it is going to be in squat, where I can currently do 300 pounds, but I can also do 315 in deadlift so I might be in with a chance. Bench press I can only do 135, so that’s probably out of reach.

Looping aaaaaaaall the way back to my original fitness goals – while my weight hasn’t changed one whit from when I started four years ago, I’m clearly a lot leaner than I was, I can see muscles flexing in the mirror, and shirts that used to fit just fine are now tight across the shoulders and arms (and looser in the belly)! I’m seriously considering starting a “before and after” series of photos – I just wish I’d started them sooner.

So – who knows where weasels can lead you?