How I got the strongest I've ever been at 36 years old

I've been going to the gym for the past 10 years, but I've seen more progress in the past 100 days than in my entire life. During this time, I increased my deadlift by 72%, I nearly doubled my squat, and I increased my bicep by a half an inch. So yeah, I've been pretty productive lately. I recently uploaded a 28-minute documentary following my first 100 days of powerlifting, culminating with my first ever competition. And in this video, I want to share nine of the biggest lessons I've had and what you can take away from it if you want to get stronger, build more muscle, or just pick up a consistent fitness practice. This video is sponsored by my friends over at Squarespace. Later, I'll show you one of the biggest projects that I've ever worked on on their platform. Okay, lesson number one, set a big f***ing goal. In the beginning, I was just going to do powerlifting for 100 days. That alone would have been just fine. But a few people mentioned to me that I should sign up for a comp. And my only thought was, What the hell is a comp? I didn't really know much about powerlifting in the beginning. I just thought it was a style of lifting at the gym. What I came to realize was that it's an actual sport in and of itself that combines your total one rep max for your squat, bench press, and deadlift. And when I look into what competitions actually look like, well, it scared the hell out of me. So naturally, I decided to sign up for one. It's really not that hard to find other similar fitness milestones or goals. Tough Mudders, Spartan races, triathlons and marathons all work to motivate people into action and for a couple reasons. First, they come built in with a deadline. As soon as you sign up and pay for your spot, the clock starts ticking. Every day you fail to train is one less day you have to prepare. I have just over a hundred days now to get myself in shape to prepare to compete. in a legitimately sanctioned powerlifting event. What the f*** did I just do? And I found that it's really hard not to talk about it. Whether it's with your partner or co-worker, it's eventually going to come up in conversation. And this really helped me stay accountable. I knew that I couldn't just quietly cancel the competition and ask for a refund. Also, it was non-refundable, so there's that. The closer the day of the competition got, the more intense my training became. There were gonna be over 100 people watching me lift the heaviest weight I possibly could, and the risk of failure was incredibly high. That was a huge kick in the ass that helped me stay committed to my goal. There were some downsides to this that I'll get to later in the video, but this definitely helps to explain why I saw such significant progress in only a few months. If you wanna get stronger, you should hire the world's best strength coach. Okay, that might not work for everyone unless you also live in Sydney, have a large budget, or a YouTube channel with 3.8 million subscribers that you can leverage. But honestly, hiring any expert in the field you're interested in, whether it's powerlifting or professional bed making, is one of the smartest ways to progress quickly. I was lucky enough to work with one of the best strength coaches in the world, Sebastian Bass-Oreb. He's held several national records during his time as a professional powerlifter, and he's also the strength coach for this guy, Thor Bjornsson. You may have heard of him before. He's one of the greatest strength athletes of all time and the current world record holder for the deadlift at 501 kilograms. No big deal. I have never hired a personal trainer or coach before. I've definitely always relied on the DIY approach, but in our very first session together, I saw the benefit. He gave me live feedback on my form, critiqued my lifts, and helped talk me through each set as I was doing them. Come under the barbell, place it on the rear delts, elbows back, and shoulder blades down. All those muscles are nice and engaged. Take a big breath to brace. Good. One step back to clear the rack. Side, side. Good. Let's try and stand very slightly wider. Yeah, I like that. Okay, that's going to allow for more strength potentially. Okay, now, looking straight ahead, tuck that chin, take a massive breath, hold on. Good. Push the knees out in the same direction as the toes and stand. Great. Tuck your chin, you're looking up a little bit too much. Good. The result? I was able to lift far more than what I was already doing at the gym. I wasn't worried about hurting myself or doing the lift wrong. I had much more confidence and as a result, I was able to lift much more than I thought I could. My mind's blown. It feels so much easier than the way that I was doing it before. That's offered to train me for the entire 100 days leading up to my competition. And that really meant that I could stop scrolling Reddit, looking for answers from strangers and just throw them at him during our sessions. Should I get a powerlifting belt? How do they work? It's giving me a bruise. Am I wearing it wrong? Are there any supplements I should be taking? Creatine? Cool, what kind? What happens if I fail a set? Do I lower my weight? What do I do next week? Where should I get my powerlifting singlet? Does it make my butt look big? Okay, yeah, you're right. That's not cool. Honestly, I'm surprised I didn't annoy him so much that he fired me as a client. Every week, I threw every question I had at him. And because he's a pro, he had already spent the past 20 years thinking about each one. So my advice is to find an expert that you trust and work with them as much as you can, whether that's one day per week or one day per month. Not only will you get a better answer than Google, you won't spend months or years going down the wrong path. Be imperfectly consistent. I have to admit, this one goes against my own basic instinct. When I looked at my program on day one, I thought to myself, I'm not going to miss a single day. I'm going to hit every single workout and check off every lift. But then, of course, life happens. I took a long trip out of town. I had to cram towards a work deadline. I stayed up all night with my newborn. Probably shouldn't keep a baby up that late. Now there might have been a time in the past when I was able to power through and live up to my regular perfectionist standards. But since I've become a dad, I just don't have the same flexibility that I once did. If I took my old all-or-nothing approach, I'd end up with a lot of nothing. As Bass told me when he walked me through my program for the first time, there's optimal and then there's practical. A lot of people, you know, look at a program and they say, I can't do that, so therefore I'm not going to do it. It's like, no, that's as optimal. Now let's think about what's practical for you. We need to always compromise and make sure, one, you can do it. And two, I've spoken to you about this, you're going to enjoy it. You need to enjoy your training. If you don't enjoy it, you're not going to stick to it. As life happened, I made adjustments to stick to the program the best I could. That meant sometimes I'd only train three days a week instead of the prescribed four. While on vacation, I had to use my hotel's shitty gym equipment. And sometimes I had to cut my workout short if I had an urgent work deadline to hit or if I was exhausted from being up with my son all night. As I moved from one imperfect workout to the next, I continued to make imperfect progress toward my goal. I didn't let small setbacks deter me, and I saw far more growth than I would have if I let perfectionism hold me back. On the technical side of things, one piece of the lifting puzzle that helped me build strength very quickly is something called progressive overload. Progressive overload is a strength training concept characterized by systematically increasing the load of an exercise over time to continually challenge the body and stimulate adaptation. Put a little bit more simply, if you want to get stronger, you need to lift more weight over time. So on week one, I started by squatting 80 kilograms. Then on week two, I increased by five kilograms to squat 85 kilograms. The next week, I lifted 90 kilograms. And finally, on week four, I increased to 95 kilograms. Since it would be physically impossible to continue at this rate forever, the next week would start the beginning of phase two, in which I would deload and lower the weight, starting the process all over again. Over the course of a few months, you should be able to see considerable strength gains with this method. If you're just getting started out, it's easier to see progress. They call them newbie gains. Once you're an elite athlete, you might have to train for an entire year to get an extra five kilos on your bench press. So compare this to my typical approach, showing up at the gym week after week and lifting what felt comfortable. Sometimes I'd push myself, other times I'd just have a casual workout. I never focused on progressive overload before. And once I did, the results followed. Okay, here's one that I think is highly underrated. Stay off social media. I rarely have Instagram on my phone these days, but early on into powerlifting, I did. And it didn't take long before the algorithm realized I was interested in seeing more gym content. And holy shit, did it show me more gym content. Overnight, I started to see hundreds of fitness influencers, professional powerlifters, and CrossFit trainers. I saw Natty or Not videos, Sam Solek takedown videos, and videos of a janitor doing a one-handed overhead press in front of the biggest dude in the gym. When I got started with powerlifting, I felt excited, proud, eager to learn. I felt unique and special. But after seeing these videos on repeat every day, I felt deflated, overwhelmed, confused. I felt far behind where I thought I should be. And then when you look at the comments, oh my God, the comments, they were just filled with so much negativity and jealousy and bitterness. It was enough to make me want to throw my phone out the window. It's great to have inspirations to look up to and there are a lot of people making great content online. But I don't think it's healthy to see hundreds of people every day who are outperforming you in every way imaginable. It's hard not to compare your day one to someone's 10-year journey. And if you're someone who is quick to compare, it deflates your confidence and smothers the excitement in the worst way. The only comparison that should ever matter is you today versus you tomorrow. And this isn't just limited to powerlifting, whether it's baking, woodworking, cooking, or home renovations. If you find yourself often getting in a negative spiral of comparing yourself to others, do yourself a favor and log off the apps completely. So as many of you know, I recently made the switch to become a solo creator again for the first time in five years. That change has meant that I've had to rethink everything about my YouTube channel and business, and one platform that's played a huge role in this transition has been Squarespace. They're my sponsor for this week's video. So my biggest project so far this year has been moving my YouTube course page over to Squarespace. It's a ridiculously long and beautifully designed landing page with overlapping elements, custom borders, graphics, icons, buttons, and a responsive design. Now normally I keep my websites incredibly simple. This was not that. And so I was a little bit nervous about how ambitious this project was. But once I jumped into Squarespace, I was amazed at what was possible. Look, I can literally drag this image. anywhere. I can overlap graphics, I can create custom dividers, and even add little flourishes. This is exactly why I love Squarespace as a platform. As a solo creator, I don't want to spend a lot of time and money on developers and copywriters and designers. I want to be able to just jump into my website and make a change. If you've been watching my videos for a while, you've heard me talk about Squarespace, about how they have great templates, how it's easy to use, and great for people building simple websites. And now you know it can also help you build a ridiculously long and beautifully designed course site with overlapping elements, custom borders, and responsive design. Visit squarespace.com to start your free trial. And then when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash mattdiavella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Getting back to my learnings from 100 days of powerlifting, one thing that really made an incremental difference was following a legit program. I went to the gym for 10 years, and for 10 years I didn't think, hey, maybe I should follow a legit program created by a professional. No, instead I pieced together information online, I got tips from friends at the gym, and I took Reddit comments from anonymous strangers as gospel. Don't get me wrong, personally I found a lot of progress with this DIY approach. I was able to build strength, muscle, and get really fit with this strategy. I felt good, had a few healthy habits on rotation, and actually enjoyed going to the gym. These were all huge wins. But there was one small problem, at least from a performance perspective. After my first few years at the gym, I hadn't really seen any significant progress. I was still lifting around the same weight that I had, and I still had pretty much the same build. Obviously some of this can be explained by slow periods and extended time away from the gym, but now I realize it's largely because I wasn't following a legit program. And by legit, I mean one that was developed by an expert with a track record to prove it. That set me up with a program on day one that was much more structured than anything I'd followed before. although i'm a powerlifter i don't train my powerlifters like typical powerlifters we place equal emphasis on the muscles of the front of the body to the muscles of the back of the body okay so we talk about a push pull ratio of one to one so when we do our upper body sessions you'll see the first exercise of the day is bench press and we superset that with a pull exercise which in this instance is a lat pull down Before you pick a program for yourself, it's important to know what goal you have in mind. Do you want to build muscle or strength? Since I wanted to build strength and specifically strength as a power lifter, that meant I was largely focusing on my squat bench press and deadlift. If I was trying to get as big as possible in 100 days, I'd follow a very different program. Track everything from your calories to your workouts. I used an app called My Fitness Pal to track everything I was eating. Until you actually measure out your meals, you'll never know if you're getting enough carbs to fuel your workouts or enough protein to build muscle. By the way, a good rule of thumb is to get one gram of protein per pound of body weight. I also tracked all my workouts. I pulled each phase of my program into an app called Strong. You can create supersets, see what you lifted the last time you did the exercise, keep a detailed history of all workouts, and the most useful feature for me, it has a rest timer built in. So once I check off a set in the app, the rest timer automatically starts. This is one of my new favorite apps that I've been using, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who goes to the gym or follows a structured program. It's not free, but definitely worth it in my opinion. I will say that I did stop tracking my calories after a couple months. I found that it got too high maintenance for me to continue. Scanning a barcode or measuring almond milk before each meal was really annoying. But a couple months of tracking did help me a lot and gave me a solid grasp of what I was eating and how many calories I was taking in. And it was enough to help me be more intuitive with... my eating going forward. You don't need to train to failure. One thing I've been told ever since I started going to the gym is the importance of going to failure. I was told that the last rep is the most important rep. And if you don't go to absolute failure, you might as well not even go to the gym at all. Of course, the perfectionist in me absolutely loved this idea. But in training with BAS, I learned that it's actually not as important as most people make it out to be. And most experts now agree that it's largely hype. I think that the research shows that there's not a huge difference in terms of hypertrophy or strength if you go all the way to failure or if you stop a couple reps shy. Agreed, and I would add that most of the people that are saying that failure is super important are coming from an egotistical perspective in which they need to emotionally drain themselves in the gym, and it's more cathartic and psychological and less to do with what gets optimal results. The principle that I learned over this time and started applying to my training is to always keep one in the tank, meaning you should stop when you feel like you have one more solid rep in the set. There was only one time I didn't take this advice. Since I was at the end of phase one, I was preparing to deload for my next session. So Bass and I decided that I should go for an AMRAP, which stands for as many reps as possible, or lifting until you fail. And this is what happened. That might not have looked like much, but I felt an immediate tear in my pack and after going to a physiotherapist the next day It was confirmed. So he said it's like it's probably a first or second degree tear It'll be okay. It's a bummer I'll talk to Sebastian tomorrow and just see kind of what he thinks about programming and stuff and he'll be able to kind of adjust the program This is not to say that going to failure often leads to injury. Lots of athletes incorporate failure into their regular programs. It does, however, increase the likelihood that your form will break down, you will get more fatigued, and you're making yourself more susceptible to injury. In the end, I got unlucky. But the question you need to ask yourself is, if this doesn't give you significantly better results, is it worth the risk? For me personally, I'm just not going to go to failure as much as I did in the past. Except, of course, when it comes to competition day. I've got one more takeaway, but real quick, I wanted to let you know that my YouTube course just opened up for enrollment and it won't be open again for another six months. In the course, I share a roadmap for creating a successful channel with integrity, including handing you my own systems for brainstorming ideas, editing videos, creating compelling thumbnails and titles, and so much more. Go to mattdiavella.com slash YouTube to get started and also to check out a pretty amazing website, if I do say so myself. Effort makes a difference, but at a cost. If 100 people with similar genetics go to the gym for one hour, they will probably all see very different results. And that's because not all time at the gym is equal. What you do and how you focus your energy makes a huge difference. Some people spend their time at the gym scrolling their phone, taking longer rest periods than needed, taking selfies in the mirror, or simply just not focusing on each set. I've been guilty of all of these things in the past. except for maybe the bathroom selfies. And there's definitely nothing wrong with being chill at the gym. But during my 100 days of powerlifting, I did notice a huge difference when I started to be more focused and give more of an effort into each lift I performed. Every week, I was pushing myself far beyond what I thought I could do. My intensity was dialed up to 11. And that came with a lot of huffing, puffing, and cursing under my breath. Make no mistake. This was intense training and it wasn't always enjoyable I was no longer showing up at the gym and leisurely jumping from one exercise to the next I was methodical about following my program and lifting the weight I set out to because if I didn't hit my lift this week How did I expect to add another five kilos onto the bar next week? Training like a world-class athlete taught me something else that was really important I don't want to train like a world-class athlete all the time I had so much fun doing this experiment and I learned so much that I will continue to apply to my time at the gym. It's actually amazing to think about the transformation I made and how much confidence I now have. Going forward, I'll still be using a legit program, annoying bass as much as he'll allow me, focusing on my technique first and going to failure much less often, implementing progressive overload, tracking my workouts, and avoiding gym content like my life depends on it. But for now, I'm intentionally pulling back on the intensity of my training. Instead of focusing... on getting radical transformation in a short time frame, I'm going to be enjoying the slow burn of continued progress. Only now with a few more tools in my back pocket.

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🗣️ Stuff I mention in this video:
My coach: https://instagram.com/australianstrengthcoach
Strong App (Workout tracker):  https://www.strong.app/
MyFitnessPal (Calorie tracker):  https://www.myfitnesspal.com/

Hi there 👋 If you're new to my videos my name is Matt D'Avella. I'm a documentary filmmaker, entrepreneur and YouTuber. I've made a couple documentaries for Netflix. I also teach courses on everything from filmmaking to habit change. If you like to nerd out about self-development as much as I do, you can subscribe for weekly videos.

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Directed by Matt D'Avella