Live and learn… As in, I’ll barely live, and you learn from my mistakes (that’s a little over dramatic, but there was definitely an oh sh*t moment).

A couple days ago was squat day. I was crushing weight pretty well, and we decided to give 330lbs a shot for the first time. Chalked up, and feeling confident from the previous sets, I get under the bar and lift off. I came out of the rack tight, felt steady and strong on the way down, and stable in the hole. I even came out of the hole a good 6-10 inches, and then…. stuck. I tried to grind it out for a few seconds, and then… I just started to drop. Coach tried to spot me and get me back out, but for some reason I had nothing left to give, and I quickly found myself deeper in the hole than I’ve ever been: ass practically touching the floor with 330lbs trying to push me into the floor and threatening to tip me forward and crush the hell out of me…. Finally, I actually heard what coach was yelling at me, and taking his advice just dumped it down my back.

Evidently, it could've ended up a lot worse.

…So let’s review what went wrong: I didn’t set the pins before going for a max squat. Nor had I ever thought about what I would do in the case of “missing” a squat completely.

So that’s the moral of the story: set your pins and/or get more comfortable with dumping the bar, because it was a foreign concept to me, and I didn’t even know what to do for a good second or two and that’s a legitimately scary/dangerous moment.