As an athlete the first time I made a 320kg back squat was on my 19th time attempting it.
I would try to squat this weight basically every day.
Missing it over and over again.
The 18th time I missed it was on my 2nd attempt at a competition.
I came back on my third lift and made it.
This was such a pivotal moment for me because the months of failures and grinding and fighting to make this lift was a herculean effort for me and I had exhausted all of my resources emotionally, mentally, and physically that I could to get there.
It was immediately after I made the lift that I realized, I cannot sustain this kind of training and it would’t work to get me to the next PR.
As a coach I was successful, I had coached multiple national champions, american record holders and international competitors.
I was using programming that “worked’ afterall it made people stronger and improved their lifts.
But the reality was it lacked so much.
I wasn’t tracking data and using that to really inform me of what to do.
I found I was making decisions that could reason away and jusfty because I “felt” that they were right, or they mimicked what other coaches were doing so clearly it must work.
This process ultimately led me to stall with my best athlete.
A lifter with tons of talent, work ethic, and grit.
Much like myself as an athlete I could see the other side of this and I came to a realization that I had been doing the same thing as a coach that I had as an athlete.
I went back to the literature, research, principles and started to change the programming, it was a complete 180 on what I had done up to this point.
Tracking tons of data points, reps, sets, avg intensities, exercise sequecncing, on and on.
This new approach when implemented had the most profound impact on performance that I had ever seen in one of my lifters.
It resulted in a 6 for 6 performance and Pan Am championship capped off with new Pan Am and American records.
It was the most perfect training it could have been, every lift, every session was on point, was meaningful, everything could be accounted for and it was put in the program for a specific reason.
There was no guessing and no need to rationalize anything.
I became convinced this was the way to the next level.
The only issue now was how to implement this system with everyone.
It required a massive amount of work and time dedicated to tracking data, managing programming, adjusting training on the fly etc.
I knew to make this work there needed to be something that could automate this kind of process, enter the idea of WL.ai
I created WL.ai as a way to bring expert level programming and technology to the weightlifitng world.
I wanted to create something that not only delivers great programming logic but also is a “living” product that improves and adapts over time.
A program that behaves like a coach where a lifter basically trains the app on how they should be programmed for.
There are so many cookie cutter templates and copy paste training programs out there and I wanted to make something that feels individual and truly grows with the athlete.
For over a year I worked with a developer to bring my vision to life, together we created the Weightlifting AI Interactive Training Algorithm that automatically adjusts your training for you and your goals.
