What does Plato have to offer a coach—and by extension an athlete—seeking a spot atop either of our previously described podiums? It is not too tough a task to think of coaches as Platonic craftsmen, and competitors as raw materials to be shaped and constructed. At the risk of shining a light of undue superordinance on coaches, it is their sense of what an athlete should be that guides the process leading to what that athlete becomes. Admittedly, very rarely do athletes knock on a coach’s door and offer themselves as blank slates. However, even more rarely do coaches accept an athlete into their tutelage and bend their methodology to whatever the athlete wishes to do on some given day. It seems fair, then, to consider the coach to be the cabinet-maker, and the athlete the fine-aged piece of cherry to be hand-sawn and chiseled into a competitive piece of furniture, or even a champion athlete.

In Plato’s Barbell we explore what ancient philosophers from Plato and Socrates to Aristotle, Epictetus, Zeno, and even Ovid may have to teach us about approaching the sport of weightlifting. Plato’s Barbell does not offer set or rep schemes. There is no detailed discussion of the value of not cutting the third pull short. And there is even less focus on how to turn a novice into an expert or an expert into an Olympian.

Plato’s Barbell offers more than that. It offers a way of thinking about the sport. The project is perhaps best described by the final paragraph of the book’s preface:

At the end of the day, the bar goes up and the bar goes down. The judge’s lights are either white or red, the medals gold, silver, or bronze. Are those not the sort of judgements and measurements Epictetus says we should use to get past mere opinion in order to more agreeably decide whether a thing is good or bad or right or wrong? Closer to or further from Plato’s forms? In Epictetus’s own words: “thus things are judged and weighed if we have standards ready to test them: and in fact the work of philosophy is to investigate and firmly establish such standards; and the duty of the good man is to proceed to apply the decisions arrived at.”¹

This is the beginning of philosophy.

This is Plato’s Barbell.

¹Epictetus Discourses Book II, Chapter XI