The Three Check-Ins That Save Your Set
Almost nobody fails a competition set because they ran out of strength. They fail because they ran out of plan.
I see it every meet. A lifter steps on the platform, the buzzer goes, the adrenaline hits, and they come flying out of the gate three reps a minute hotter than anything they ever held in training. It feels amazing for two minutes. Then the heart rate spikes, the bell starts winning, and somewhere around minute seven the thing gets set down. Not because the body couldn't do it. The body proved it could do it for months in practice. It got set down because nobody told that lifter what to do when the moment got loud.
So let me tell you what I tell my athletes. This is the framework, and it works for brand new lifters and seasoned ones alike.
Your nerves are not the enemy
First, the mindset, because it comes before the math.
If you step on the platform and you're a little nervous, good. That's your sympathetic nervous system getting you to the level of arousal you NEED to perform. If you walk up there feeling nothing, I'd actually worry; it means you don't care enough about the result. Nerves are just excitement wearing a different costume. Own the feeling, then relabel it in your head: "I'm excited to be here. I'm ready to go." Same physiology, completely different story.
What you DO have to guard against is over-excitement. Too much juice at the wrong moment is what drives the suicidal opening pace. And here's the part people miss: how much arousal you want depends on how long the set is. On a five minute set, coming out hot is fine; you only have five minutes to survive. On a ten minute set, coming out hot is a trap. You'll burn through your buffer early and take a massive adrenaline dump right in the middle, exactly where you can least afford it.
So we plan for the excitement instead of pretending it won't show up.
Three check-ins, not ten
Here's the core of it. I divide the set into three anchor points: the first two minutes, the halfway mark, and the last two minutes. Three. Not a self-audit every single minute. If you're checking your pace every sixty seconds you're living in your own head, and that's its own way to lose a set. Three fence posts is enough to steer by and few enough to stay calm between them.
Let's say the goal is to average 10 reps per minute across a ten minute set. Here's how I'd coach it.
Minutes 0 to 2: come out UNDER pace. Start at 8 rpm, a couple reps below target. I know the lifter is amped, I know the heart rate is going to sit higher than the pace alone would justify, so we deliberately bank some buffer. Keep the heart rate down, settle the breathing, let the storm pass.
Two minute check-in: Do we feel good? If 8 felt easy and there's room, we step up to our real pace, 10 rpm, and ride it to the halfway mark.
Halfway check-in (minute five): How's the heart rate at the new pace? If it's climbing too high, we have permission to back off; drop to 9, 8, even lower if that's what the day demands. If things feel solid, we hold. This is the honesty checkpoint.
Then we settle in for the hardest stretch of any ten minute set: minutes six, seven, and eight. Minute seven into eight is where most failures happen. That's the wall. We don't make a new decision there; we already decided at minute five. We just hold and grind through it.
Last-two-minutes check-in (minute eight): You've cleared the wall. Mentally you've turned the corner, there's only two minutes left, and now the only question is: do I have gas in the tank? If yes, we start stepping on it. 10 becomes 11. And we always try to finish with a flurry; maybe the last ninety seconds at max pace, maybe the last thirty, depending on what's left. You empty the tank on the way out, never on the way in.
Plan A, Plan B, Plan C
Nobody steps on my platform with one plan. They step on with three.
Plan A is the perfect set. It goes exactly the way we strategized; under, settle, hold, flurry.
Plan B is the good set that got hard. You hit a mental rough patch, you had to back off pace at a check-in, and now you're recapturing it at the end with the flurry. You made an adjustment at one of the three anchors. Still a win.
Plan C is the day it's just not there. Bad sleep, a no-count that rattled you, your head got loud, whatever. Some days you have to go under pace for most of the set or all of it. That's a real outcome and it's allowed to exist. What is NOT allowed is being completely unprepared for the set to go anything other than perfect. Plan C isn't failure. Plan C is the version of you that still finishes.
The whole point of the check-ins is that you're never panicking, because you already know what each fence post asks of you. The lifter who blows up is the one who came out too fast, never checked in, watched the heart rate climb with no plan to respond, and put the bell down at seven minutes out of pure surprise. We're not avoiding the hard part. We're refusing to be surprised by it.
Make it yours
This framework is a starting point, not a straitjacket. Some lifters are sprinters who save everything for a wild finish. Some are metronomes who hold one steady cadence the entire ten minutes and never flinch. Some like to start slow and build, and build, and build. All of that is fine. The structure underneath stays the same: know your real practice pace, give yourself a few anchors to check against, and have a plan for when it's perfect, when it's a fight, and when it's just not your day.
You can't control whether it's your day. You can control whether you walk up there with a plan. Do that, and you can handle anything the platform throws at you, including the stuff your own mind throws at you. As Yogi Berra put it, this game is ninety percent half mental.
I dropped this one as a quick bonus before a big meet, but the framework outlives any single competition. Listen to the full episode here.
If you've never been coached through pacing and you want a real plan for your next platform, that's exactly the kind of thing we build together. Come train with us; we'll figure out your numbers and your three check-ins, and we'll never turn you away over what's in your wallet.
Vokse eller dø. — Coach Jordan