You Can't Unburn Your Mouth: How to Pace Your First Set
One of my lifters asked me a question that stuck with me: what do you wish you knew before your first competition? I have a whole list. Don't sign up for all three lifts. Give yourself extra time to warm up. Set aside time to calm down and get your head right. Don't change anything on comp day. All of that matters. But if I could only hand a first-timer ONE thing, it would be this: don't come out too fast.
That's the one that gets people. And it's the one almost nobody respects until they've been burned by it.
Why fast feels right and ruins your set
Here's what nobody tells you about your first time on the platform. You think you're calm. You did the breathing, you did the visualization, you feel ready. Then you step up. People are watching. The music is pumping. A judge is staring at you waiting to count. My heart rate goes up just describing it to you right now. I get goosebumps.
So you start lifting, and you feel amazing, because adrenaline is a hell of a drug. You're flying. The first minute feels easy. You think, this is going to be a great set.
It is not going to be a great set. You just lit the fuse.
Joe Daniels said it better than I ever have. Coming out too hot is like biting into a hot pocket fresh out of the microwave. You can't unburn your tongue. You can't unburn the roof of your mouth. Once it's done, it's done. Same thing on the platform: if you sprint the first two minutes and spike your heart rate, you cannot get it back down mid-set. It does not happen. You can always step on the gas later. You can NEVER successfully slow your heart rate back down once it's redlined with eight minutes still on the clock.
That asymmetry is the whole point. Going too slow is a recoverable mistake; you just speed up. Going too fast is not. So you plan for the side you can't fix.
Plan your pace before you ever pick up the bell
The fix isn't "try to relax." The fix is to decide your pacing strategy ahead of time, on paper, before competition nerves get a vote.
Start with the number. What rep total are you actually trying to hit? Work backward from there into an average pace you need to hold. Then, and this is the part people skip, plan to come out BELOW that average for the first two minutes. Not at it. Below it.
I'd say ninety percent of the athletes I work with should come out slower than their target pace. There are exceptions; some people are metronomes, dead controlled, but those are almost always experienced lifters who've already learned this lesson the hard way. If it's your first comp, you are not the metronome yet. Assume you'll come out hot whether you mean to or not, and build your plan around that fact.
And notice what "come out below pace" does not mean. It does not mean we average eight reps per minute by starting at ten and hoping to hold on. We start under the target and climb INTO it. If the plan is to hold eight, an experienced athlete might just start at eight and sit there. We never start fast and try to survive it.
The check-in plan I use with my athletes
Here's the actual shape of it. Say the goal is eight reps per minute for a ten-minute set.
- Minute one: start at six. Yes, it feels too easy. That's correct.
- Minute two: move to seven. At the end of two minutes, check in. How does this feel?
- Minutes three to five: if everything's good, settle into eight and hold it. Check in again at the five-minute mark. Still good at eight?
- Minutes five to seven: hold the pace you committed to at halftime. From here you either accelerate (if accelerating was the plan and you've got it) or, if you're not feeling good, you back off. The check-in is the whole point.
- Minutes seven to eight: survival. Just get through that minute clean.
- Two minutes left: decide. Pick it up, hold, or back off based on what your body is actually telling you, not what you hoped at minute zero.
- Final minute: the flurry. We always try to finish fast and empty the tank.
The entire thing is built on the foundation of not coming out too fast. Every check-in only works because you left yourself somewhere to go. Come out hot and there are no decisions left to make; you're just hanging on and watching your reps fall apart.
The sacred cow nobody wants me to touch
One more, and this one's a little controversial. You do not have to finish the time.
People treat finishing the full ten minutes like a sacred cow. Don't get me wrong: finishing the time is usually the goal, because the people who finish the time usually get the most reps. But finishing is a MECHANISM, not the prize. The point of the sport is the most reps in the time, full stop.
So run the math honestly. If you can hold eight reps per minute for eight minutes and bank sixty-four reps, that beats grinding your pace down to six just to limp across the ten-minute line at sixty. You were under tension the same brutal amount of time, you went slower, and you got fewer reps. There are sprinters and there are marathoners. Some people genuinely perform better going harder for a shorter window. Know which one you are, and let the rep count, not the clock, settle the argument.
Plenty of coaches will disagree with me here, and that's fine. Come tell me why I'm wrong. The goal is the most reps you can lift in the time specified. The clock is just the container.
So before your first comp: pick your number, plan your pace, come out under it, and check in at the marks. Know you're going to be excited. Know you're going to be nervous. That means you're alive. Plan for it anyway.
Listen to the full episode here.
If you're staring down your first competition and you want a real pacing plan instead of a guess, that's exactly the kind of thing I love helping people build. Come work with me; I've never turned anyone away over finances, and there's no better feeling than watching someone nail their first set.
Vokse eller dø. — Coach Jordan