That day I broke a barbell in half

If the bar ain’t bending, you’re just pretending, right?

It was my second year of lifting, and I was doing hang pulls — an excellent exercise for full body explosiveness. My gym wasn’t the most expensive, and a lot of the equipment was substandard, to put it nicely.

I was using a different barbell than usual, as the others were taken.

I put 20kg on each side, and did a set. I put it back down on the edge of the bench in front of me. I noticed that the barbell felt lighter than usual, but I had been progressing well recently and just figured…

”Hey, I’m having a good day!”

I put 15kg more on each side and did another set.

It still felt lighter than usual and the bar felt sort of strange. As I put the bar back down, I noticed something — the bar rolled slightly on the bench as I put it down. Normally a bar doesn’t roll; if it is perfectly straight, there is no reason for it to. But, young lifting me thought nothing of it, and naturally went up in weight, to 120kg.

I lifted it off the bench forcefully, and started repping it out, pulling it as high as I could with each rep, savagely exploding, using my entire body to launch it as high as possible.