Not Just a Man's World

I had to go to a different office yesterday morning, which increased my usual drive to work from 20 to 90 minutes.  My usual radio listening in the morning is BBC Radio 5 live, both in the kitchen while cooking my breakfast eggs and in the car.  It gets me up to speed on current affairs, so it’s a regular habit.

Yesterday morning, though, I was subjected to 90 minutes about Thierry Henry’s (by now infamous) handball in the previous night’s World Cup football match between France and Ireland.  I don’t follow football and haven’t got a clue about the rules, so you can imagine my frustration. 

The furore about this gave me cause to stop and think about cheating.  We are led to believe that cheating is endemic across all sports (witness the noise about drugs that fires up every time a cyclist does well at the Tour de France, the recent match fixing allegations in rugby or the condemnation for race fixing through a purposeful crash in Formula One).

But it goes deeper than this. Yes, you can cheat the rules, but you can cheat yourself as well.

Can you cheat at lifting?

Well, yes.  But it depends what you mean by cheating.  Here are a few things I can think of as a start:

• Taking steroids and other performance enhancing drugs.  This is obviously cheating the rules if you are competing in a drug-free contest, such as the Olympics, and it’s on a par with the examples of cheating that I gave before.  But other contests accept drug-use so this is only cheating in some circumstances.
• Doing half reps or poor form on your exercises.  This is the type of cheating that plenty of people are guilty of and they may not even be aware they are doing it.  It’s certainly a problem I suffered from early in my squatting career.  I powered up to 130% bodyweight when I started but didn’t realise my squats were getting shallower and shallower each week.  I now have a coach to keep an eye on me. 

This second form of cheating is only against you.  When you try for a one-rep max then you realise that your training has been ineffective.

I was so depressed when I realised I needed to knock 30kg off my squat to get to parallel again.  Cheating in the gym wasn’t worth it in the long-run for me. 

Legal cheating in the gym

There are sensible measures that you can take that don’t qualify as cheating but which can give you a better result.  For example, on my bench press I wriggle my bottom up the bench until I’ve got a big arch in my back.  It means I can use more muscles to get the bar in the air and it’s perfectly acceptable in a powerlifting competition, so it isn’t cheating.

A great introduction to legal cheating has been put together in a series of articles by Christopher Drummond.

Would I cheat?

I am a regular legal cheater.  I’ve already mentioned my benching back arch and despite having never considered it to be cheating I do benefit from doing my workouts barefoot when it comes to the deadlift.

At the moment I don’t compete so I have nothing to achieve from cheating the rules.  I lift for the physical health benefits that I get, and as such I also have no interest in cheating myself to get bigger numbers.  The improving numbers each week provide me with a sense of achievement at the end of a workout and are something personal to me.  If I were to cheat, who would benefit?  Would I still get that sense of achievement knowing I had cheated to succeed? 

If I used poor form to complete my reps on one arm presses then I would have to put the weight up for my next workout.  If I wasn’t actually ready to put the weight up then I would have to cheat on my reps next time (so as not to let myself down and reduce the weight).  I’m no longer doing the same exercise and I’m not getting the same benefits.  In fact, I may even be putting my body at risk by using poor form.

As for steroids – if I took those to increase my numbers then I think I would be cheating myself of my goal to lift for better lasting health.

A solitary sport

I have always sought out sports where I am competing against myself.  Where there is no peer pressure to create a result that isn’t real.  I have an incredibly strong sense of self-guilt which usually stops me from cheating myself.

Is it the peer pressure or the all-consuming desire to win and become famous that makes other people cheat in sports?  Would you and can you resort to cheating to improve your lift numbers?  Would you actually try to cheat the rules or just cheat yourself?

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