Adventures in Squatting

So there I was…
I unracked the bar, and immediately thought ‘holy shit this feels heavy!’. Now It Doesn’t Matter How Heavy it Feels (copyright Ken Gack), but that thought chased other thoughts out of my head as I walked the bar out, including…breathing, but we’ll get to that. I suppose I should have gotten a hint from the suspicious way the room was fading into darkness that something wasn’t quite right, but I missed that subtle, crucial clue.
As I set up, I noticed the tightness I was able to attain in my legs. It was the tightest I had been able to get in the history of squats. At least that is how it felt. That thought pushed the heavy thought out of my head, and distracted me from other thoughts, some of them fairly important. Like…breathing.
Anyway I started my squat, and it was a beautiful squat. Good speed, good position, everything just right. But it quickly slowed, and I started to force it to hit depth. Although it had slowed, I was still in a pretty good position as I neared parallel. One more little push I thought, and I’ll be there. Just as that thought passed through my head alarms started blaring in my head: YOU’RE ABOUT TO PASS OUT, PULL UP, PULL UP, PULL UP!!!
There was a bit of a wobble as my consciousness started to go, but I was able to pull out of the dive and finish the squat without my spotters loving embrace, remembered to breath again, an systems returned to normal.
Moral of the story: treat every rep from the first warmup to the last working set as a max effort lift to make the little things automatic. Even then, sometimes you fuck it up.