Introduction

Having been a powerlifter for eleven years and a powerlifting coach for approaching six years, I've had my fair share of times I didn't feel attached to what I was doing. Motivation wanes, desire to get into the gym just didn't quite feel where it normally did, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why or how that happened. I thought, "I love this sport, I love getting stronger". I know, too, that many athletes go through the same things. From my experience as a coach, I think the biggest reasons people stop powerlifting are (1) a career-ending injury that's either chronic or acute and you can't find a way back to pain-free lifting, (2) a life change where competitive powerlifting is de-emphasized over the normal course of life with events like having a child, changes in career, location, available free time, or lastly, (3) burnout.

As one of the three biggest reasons people stop powerlifting, I wanted to research more into what burnout is, how we characterize it, and most importantly, what we can do to prevent it. Especially in powerlifting, I think burnout is more common than most other sports because of the repetitive nature of training, the relatively low amount of session variation, and the individual nature of the sport reduces support and shared responsibility in processing challenge and loss. We'll get into this more ahead. It's in this pursuit that I'm creating this short e-book to help you identify burnout in yourself or athletes you work with to catch early signs and see if you can reverse course. I'll add some suggestions from my own personal experience as an athlete and coach and give some diagnostic tools. Together, we can keep you enjoying and succeeding in powerlifting for longer.

Overview

It turns out that people have been studying burnout for a long time, which began more in the study of human service workers in the mid 1970's. Athletes, however, haven't been studied until the 1990's and more research still needs to be done. While the mental experience of burnout can be related to the physical experience of overtraining (now called "underperformance syndrome"), given the nature of burnout across disciplines that are non-physical in nature, burnout seems to have more to do with the mind than the body. In this way, in keeping with the most accepted definitions, we'll treat burnout as its own phenomenon.

Burnout has seen a number of different and differing definitions based on the work of researchers from the mid-1970's until the early 2000's. Most of them can agree on burnout having dimensions of exhaustion (physical, mental, and emotional), cynicism (depersonalization), and low personal accomplishment. From there, various definitions of burnout include desire to withdraw from an activity that was previously enjoyable becoming a source of stress and disappointment either due to slumps or decreased performance, decreased outcome-oriented accomplishment, or event impaired immune function and chronic inflammation. In the formation of the presently accepted definition, depersonalization above was replaced with devaluation of sport in the sport-specific model. One important key to remember is that these symptoms are relatively sustained: athletes who experience temporary loss of motivation to train for any number of reasons aren't really experiencing burnout. What they experience isn't to be taken lightly, but in the same way that there's a difference between overtraining and overreaching, there's a difference between burnout and more mild detachment from sport.

Burnout is now considered to have three components:

physical and emotional exhaustion
a reduced sense of accomplishment