Powerlifting with a desk job

2026-05-31

I stand up from my desk and my hips tell me what kind of training session today is going to be. Some days the glute med is angry. Some days it's the front of the hip. Some days both. I don't get to pick; I just get the report.

I started lifting at 18, when I got to the University of Colorado. I'd done general strength work in high school, but powerlifting was the thing that stuck. The math of it, the obsessive linear-progression spreadsheets, the meets. I competed for the four years I was there. Then I graduated, started working, and figured out within a year or two that lifting alongside a job is a different sport from lifting alongside college.

My peak came in 2021. COVID had taken everything else away, but I still had access to a gym, a flexible enough job, and no social life. Training was what I did with the time. The lifts I hit that year are still the best of my life, always knowing I might pay for it later.

I was paying for them pretty soon, actually. On a PR squat attempt at the end of that block, I stood the lift up and somewhere near the top, the left glute med just hurt. No pop, no tear, nothing dramatic. Just sudden pain that hadn't been there on the way down. I racked the bar, sat down, and that injury(or some version of it) has been with me ever since.

The hip

What's been frustrating is how non-specific it is. It moves around. Glute med one month, hip flexor the next, both at the same time some months. I've been through more rounds of physical therapy than I can count. The PTs disagree on what's actually wrong, but the thing they keep circling back to is the same thing I already suspected: the problem isn't really the lifting. The problem is the eight hours a day I spend sitting at a desk to pay for the therapy.

Knowing that hasn't fixed it. I work in infrastructure — the kind of job where it's rare for me to get up from my desk. I do mobility work. I have a standing desk I use less than I'd prefer. I take walks. The pain comes back anyway. After four years of trying to fix it from every angle I can think of, I've started to make peace with the fact that "sitting too much" might just be a chronic input I keep applying, and no amount of PT homework is going to outpace it.

The harder thing to make peace with

What I haven't made peace with is the second-order effect: I'm probably not ever going to be stronger than I was in 2021.

I keep writing programs that pretend otherwise. I'll open a spreadsheet, sketch out a block that looks like the kind of thing I ran four years ago, get three weeks in, and have to start cutting volume because something in my hip or my back is telling me the body running this program is not the body that ran it last time, even if the weights are lower. My accessory muscles get weaker every time I have to take a break, and the breaks get longer. The math doesn't work in the direction I want it to.

It's a weird thing to admit, because lifting has been a fixed part of who I am for a decade. The part of me that lifts has always assumed the next year would be a stronger year. Sitting with the alternative: that the strongest year already happened and I just didn't know it at the time. A kind of quiet grief I didn't expect to be dealing with this early. I still love lifting. I'll go train tonight. But the certainty that progress is the point has gotten harder to hold onto, and I'm tired in a way that PT can't reach.

Watching the bodybuilders

I train at a Gold's Gym in Tokyo now. There are plenty of racks for the squat, the bench, the deadlift. Plenty of people are using them, but they're doing bodybuilding work. For a long time I've walked past it without much thought. Lately I've started to look harder, because I'm starting to suspect that some version of it might be the path I have to walk if I want to keep lifting at all. The goal of "look better" doesn't care whether you peaked in 2021. It scales with your body in a way that the goal of "lift more than last cycle" doesn't.

Maybe I just need to change the goal. Switch to accessory work and let the strength be whatever it happens to be. Or maybe the answer is somewhere else entirely — maybe transferring this energy into coaching, into helping someone earlier in their lifting life avoid the things I didn't, would scratch the part of me that lifting used to scratch. Maybe it wouldn't.

I don't know yet. That's part of why I'm writing this — not because I've figured it out, but because I haven't. The hip will probably still hurt tomorrow. I'll still train. We'll see where it goes from there.