SONNY WEBSTER | From Zero To Rio: A Life's Journey To The Olympic Games

Sonny Webster is an Olympic Weightlifter who represented Great Britain at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Sonny is one of the best known names in the world of strength and fitness in the UK. But before the hundreds of thousands of followers and seminar tours all over the world, he had to learn his craft. Today we get to hear his story. From overcoming massive injuries as a child to leaving home at 16, having qualifying day catastrophes and no money to eat to walking out at the Olympic Opening Ceremony next to Andy Murray, we get to learn about his entire journey. Discover his pre-lift routine, his thoughts on CrossFit in the lifting community and why he's endangering his life with a barbell almost daily in videos on Instagram. This will be the first of many podcasts as there is a lot to go into about Sonny's career and mindset, but for now, enjoy Chapter #1. Follow Sonny Online: https://www.instagram.com/sonnywebstergb http://www.sonnywebster.com/ - Video editing & production by Dean Hindmarch https://www.deanhindmarch.com/ https://www.instagram.com/deanhindmarch - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Chris Williamson?

  He's learning already. He's learning to not put the can down too hard on the table. This is a man who's watched some podcasts. Anyway, everyone who's listening, welcome back. Sonny Webster's joined me today. How are you?

• 0:21Sonny Webster?

  Very well, thank you.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  What's happening? Long drive today?

• 0:24Sonny Webster?

  Long drive, five hours in the car, decent training session considering.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  Very decent training session and worth it obviously to see me.

• 0:32Sonny Webster?

  Of course, looking forward to the later part of tonight's antics.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  Yes, of course. Those of you who know what I, how I perceive drinking, I'm going to suspend my drinking habits or my lack of drinking habits for one evening. I can talk about it.

• 0:48Sonny Webster?

  Bearing in mind when I met you, you were on a six month sober.

• 0:51Chris Williamson?

  Six month sobriety stint, yeah, exactly.

• 0:53Sonny Webster?

  And we still went out and you were there like itching.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  It was difficult, but that was at the end of it. That was like, I'd like two weeks to go. It was not easy, but yeah, that was, that was still a really fun night of body power in Birmingham.

• 1:06Sonny Webster?

  So good because we literally met like a few hours before that as well and we just like click.

• 1:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's cool, man. It's awesome. So anyone who's watching on the brand new Modern Wisdom YouTube channel, subscribe, subscribe, subscribe. If you don't know what Sonny does, Video Mandine will make it appear here.

• 1:28Chris Williamson?

  And here. And also here.

• 1:33Chris Williamson?

  So Sonny is an Olympic weightlifter, represented Great Britain at Rio.

• 1:39Sonny Webster?

  Yep, 2016.

• 1:41Chris Williamson?

  And now you are travelling the world doing weightlifting seminars and coaching people, doing a lot of PT work.

• 1:47Sonny Webster?

  Having a lot of fun.

• 1:48Chris Williamson?

  Having an awful lot of fun and being a big dick Instagram swinger and all the rest of this stuff, man. So for the people who don't know who you are and for the people who do, can you give us a background? How did you start in weightlifting? Where does it go? Where do you begin?

• 2:02Sonny Webster?

  Well, I guess I have to take you right back to me even as a kid and go back and talk about. I guess um what got me into sport, I mean, I've always been a sporty kid, you know, you get those kids uh. The sporty kids and then you get kids that are more artistic, et cetera. I was always a sporty kid. Um my dad was always into golf, so naturally before I could pretty much walk, my dad would golf. Uh club my hands and even remember like, he's still got videos like on, you know, the old. Video recorders, like the tapes of him trying to teach me and he's so brutal with me. My golf swing's pure and he's like, that's wrong, it's bad. I'm there.

• 2:45Chris Williamson?

  Three years old.

• 2:45Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so um my dad was like, was pushing me for my sport um and going back to sort of like year. When do you start like primary school, year?

• 2:56Chris Williamson?

  Five, are you five years old?

• 2:58Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so from primary school really, up so that goes up to what, year six, doesn't it? So during that time of school, um I was all in like all the sort of school clubs, like gymnast gymnastics, um. You know, athletics, the cricket ball throw was my event, um eighty meter sprint until you get to year six and it became a hundred. And I'd like.

• 3:21Chris Williamson?

  Last twenty meters just kill you.

• 3:23Sonny Webster?

  Killed me. I was always like little like stocky like, obviously my mum's from New Zealand, so I've got a bit of marrow in me. So like got that stocky sort of build and I'd be like off for like the first like forty. Then I'd hang on for the eighty meters. As soon as it became like hundred meters, I was finished. It was always about being the fastest kid at school as well, wasn't it? So, um yeah, that finished me there. I tried high jump. Obviously, these little stumps are no good at that. Uh long jump was okay, but again, not great. And slowly realised that I was a kid that was. Good at lots of things, but great at nothing.

• 3:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 3:58Sonny Webster?

  Um and I always tell the story because it's, there's one like key point for me in. I guess my Olympic journey, if you like, that stands out for me. I don't know what it is about this moment, but it still like sticks in my head, but. I remember being sat in maths class in school, year, I would have been, year five probably. Um and it's, I'm gonna say two thousand and.

• 4:25Sonny Webster?

  Maybe it's two thousand two and I'm sat in maths class doing maths. And um in the way my school was, it was like three classrooms and they were divided by like sliding doors. And the P E teacher from running in burst open one of these sliding doors was like, stop, we've got to turn the T V on. And there was only one T V. In um in the school and so we were like, right, fine, like bet bet the maths, we'll watch a bit of T V. And Miss Cousins, I think the P E teacher's name was, and she flipped the T V on. And it was right at the moment when David Beckham and Kelly Holmes were jumping up and down, hugging each other. Do you know that one more about?

• 5:05Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 5:05Sonny Webster?

  Okay, so it's right when we won the bid for London twenty twelve Olympics, because obviously them two were like. Key figures, yeah, of like the um of the.

• 5:16Chris Williamson?

  Campaign.

• 5:17Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, the campaign. So um that moment just sticks out for me as something that's like my first. Real recollection of the Olympics and what it was. And I don't know it is about that moment, but it still like makes me feel happy now, but it was just how much it meant to them made me feel from like. Right from that moment, I I wanna be part of that. I want that feeling, whatever that is. And um after then, for the next sort of couple of weeks, I guess, in school. They did a lot of like classes around the Olympics, what it was to obviously educate us as to what the Olympic Games was. And um at that time, I could could have told you every golfer in the top ten of, but knew nothing about what, you know, any Olympic sports.

• 6:02Sonny Webster?

  So we learnt all that and um I guess then we got into year six and again I continued with the sports I was doing and, you know. Pundles sort of along and then um we ended up moving down from year six to year seven. Down to a school in Ivy Bridge, so this is back in Reading. And down to Ivy Bridge, which is a little town in um Devon, near Plymouth.

• 6:24Chris Williamson?

  And you're on the arse end of the country there.

• 6:27Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 6:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, true, true.

• 6:30Sonny Webster?

  But yeah.

• 6:32Chris Williamson?

  Pretty south.

• 6:33Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so it started for year six, um year seven then at this new school and. Naturally, when you start a new school and you don't know anyone, you're kind of like that loner and. At the time, I was living with my dad when we moved down there, when we first went down there. And I remember like my first day at this school and like, you know how like. Your mum makes you packed lunches and she can, cause it's your mum and they know how to make packed lunch. And then it was like, my dad was making me this packed lunch and like, bless me, tried too hard, but same to me, no fuck he was doing. So he'd just roll you into school with a single baguette and like. Yeah, pretty much like, uh, yeah, go in the shop and get what you want. You're like, no, you're going to slice my sandwiches and triangles, dad.

• 7:20Sonny Webster?

  So I just remember that first day being like absolutely horrendous, wanting to cry like. Yeah, shit packed lunch, starting this new school and just being like, oh god, this is horrendous. Yeah, fuck. New school and it's a big school as well. Okay. And it was, it was Ibridge Community College and it's really well known for its sport. Mm hmm. Which is half the reason why we went there. Mm hmm. Um, and it's like, um, a community college. It was like a normal public school, not private. Yeah. And, um, yeah, so starting this, in this school, no mates, like shit packed lunch. And I decided at lunchtimes, um, that I'd go and sit in the weightlifting gym and, um.

• 8:04Sonny Webster?

  So your school had a weightlifting gym? Yes. That must be very rare. I'd think you'd probably be able to count the number of schools on one hand. Two at the time. When I started, there was only two schools in the country that offered weightlifting as part of the GCSE curriculum. So you could do it as like a, um, as part of your PE, GCSE. That's amazing. Yeah, um, yeah, only two. The other one was in Birmingham, I think, Baverstock. So, yeah, really rare to come across this. Uh, but we did have also a golf academy even at, in that, that school as well. So. Uh, in the summer, I eventually joined the golf academy as well. But anyway, so I went and sat in this weightlifting gym.

• 8:45Sonny Webster?

  And I guess each year, maybe sixty or seventy students sign up to weightlifting club at lunchtime. Mm hmm. Um, from year seven. Um, but I wasn't really interested. I was just like killing my lunchtimes, basically. Yeah. Watching people do it because they're not mates.

• 9:04Sonny Webster?

  So I guess I've been there for nearly two weeks um before the coach come up to me and said, look, you've been in our two weeks.

• 9:12Chris Williamson?

  You're weirding everyone out.

• 9:13Sonny Webster?

  You're weirding everyone out. You're also taking.

• 9:15Chris Williamson?

  That pack lunch is fucking shit.

• 9:17Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, you're taking the piss out of like some of the kids giving it a go. And the coach was just kind of like, come have a go yourself.

• 9:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:24Sonny Webster?

  Like, or fuck off, basically.

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, take your shit pack lunch.

• 9:28Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so um.

• 9:32Sonny Webster?

  I was like, at the time, like, I didn't know that it was an Olympic sport and I wasn't really like, for me, sort of thing. I was like, I'm a golfer, whatever. Um, and the coach said, look, now, come on, you've got to come tomorrow lunchtime, like, and. Um, I thought, like, so after I had my arm twisted, I was like, fuck it, I'll go along, have a go. Uh, so the next lunchtime, I went along and purely because I'd sat there watching people do it, like anything, if you watch someone do it enough, you have a pretty good idea of what you need to do.

• 10:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Sonny Webster?

  Um, and I'd done that. And after the first session, the coach came over to me and said, like. Did, did the, the other coach teacher had to do that? And I was like, no, no, I've just been watching, like, I knew what I needed to do. And they were like, she was like, fuck, sort of thing. And she was like. Um, you got detention every lunchtime until you wanna be here, essentially. So that's how I spent the rest of my time. Um, in school was practicing the Olympic weightlifting. And it started off, so fell into it by chance, but then it started off just being like a lunchtime thing. I'd go in for an hour of lunch and. Do my weightlifting and I made some friends through that.

• 10:38Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:38Sonny Webster?

  Um, so then it became something that we do, get up and go and do an hour before school. And then it became like before school. Lunchtime and after school. And, um. Yeah, I mean, within the first, I remember my first competition, which was about. Six months after I started and it was actually at my school and I remember crying because I didn't, uh. Didn't get all my lifts. I think I got five out of my six lifts and started crying.

• 11:05Chris Williamson?

  A perfectionist at an early age, then?

• 11:06Sonny Webster?

  Yes, always. So, um, yeah, that's, I guess, from me, childhood to initially finding weightlifting.

• 11:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting. What I think's really interesting is that you've said about, um. Your capacity to be able to look and then.

• 11:22Chris Williamson?

  Turn the movement just from visually seeing someone else do it. I think that's definitely the mark of a good athlete.

• 11:28Sonny Webster?

  But everyone learns differently and I find this even as a coach now, where sometimes I can say something to one of the guys I'm coaching, they go, yeah, bang and do it.

• 11:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Sonny Webster?

  Someone needs you to show them a visual cue of them, like, you know, you're actually doing a demonstration for them to understand. Some people need to see themselves in order to be able to interpret what they need to do wrong.

• 11:49Chris Williamson?

  Some people just don't get it at all.

• 11:51Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, but that's the thing and everyone learns differently and I think I've always been very visual in the way that that I learned that.

• 11:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the ability for you, the proprioception, to understand where your body is from having just seen something, I think is definitely the mark of someone that has a natural athletic talent. And I think the fact that you've started so young, doing the golf swing, golf's very fine tuned movement, yeah, exactly, very precise. And I can say the same for myself to a degree. I did cricket for 10 years and that's exactly the same. It's very technique based. And when I started with Jordan at Reebok CrossFit Tyneside, I was able to pick up, like, the first time that he taught me to do a muscle up, I got a muscle up. The first time he taught me to do toes.

• 12:33Sonny Webster?

  Do you have an awareness of your body and what what is being asked to do?

• 12:37Chris Williamson?

  A hundred percent. I think that people don't like to hear that there's a lot of natural, a big natural component in success within sport, because it takes away someone's hard work capacity to get to the top.

• 12:50Sonny Webster?

  Hmm.

• 12:51Chris Williamson?

  But the bottom line is that some children and adults that start sports will naturally be able to learn faster. They'll be able to pick it up more quickly. So you've started your weightlifting, you're doing it up to, what, three hours a day now?

• 13:05Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so, um, yeah, I was doing up to.

• 13:08Chris Williamson?

  What what do you lift as an eleven or twelve year old? What's what you lift? Can you remember what your openers were?

• 13:13Sonny Webster?

  I can go, I can tell you sort of what I was lifting at twelve. I would have been snatching around seventy kilos, twelve, thirteen, about seventy kilos, clean jockey around ninety.

• 13:23Chris Williamson?

  At twelve and thirteen years old?

• 13:24Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, fifty.

• 13:25Chris Williamson?

  There's CrossFitters up and down the country that are listening to this that are burying their head in their hands right now.

• 13:29Sonny Webster?

  Fifty five kilo body weight or something like that. I used to compete in the fifty six kilo class.

• 13:34Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, you were fifty five kilos at twelve years old?

• 13:38Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, no, no, I would have been, I started, when I first started, I was forty six. And then went up to forty five, but the lightest men's category is uh fifty six kilo. So that was like my category that I competed in. So yeah, I suppose then we're nearly two years in. Um, and it's about, yeah, two years in, so I'm maybe would have been thirteen when I did those works. And um I'd won everything, like the British under thirteens, British under sixteens, under seventeens, I broke the records. Thought I was the dog's bollocks. I was now gone from like Billy Nomates in school to really obviously popular kid in school. Yeah, like, and I got selected for my first um international.

• 14:22Sonny Webster?

  Then I would have been, like I said, thirteen, fourteen, it was a European under seventeens in Pavia.

• 14:27Chris Williamson?

  So you're competing against seventeen year olds at the age of thirteen or fourteen.

• 14:31Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, but that didn't bother me. I was like, I'm gonna smash this as well. I've never lost. So I was like, let's be having this, gonna win this as well. Cocky, definitely. Uh, I went to the competition and ended up getting six out of six. Broke the British rec- my own British records by kilo in each lift, yes. Finished twenty second out of twenty three. That was only because twenty three bombed out. Bollock last and I, again, I remember that feeling of getting like working, watching the scoreboard going, what's going on there? Like, am I in the right category? Like, surely, there was women outlifting me, the whole shebang. And I was like, shit.

• 15:12Sonny Webster?

  So, uh, yeah, one of the best things that happened to me though, so early on as a kid in sport, because I've very quickly realised that it wasn't about being the best kid in your country or the best at your age. You had to look so much further past being the best in your pond if you wanted to compete at the highest level. And yeah, like I said, one of the best, uh, one of the best lessons I learned really early on.

• 15:38Chris Williamson?

  Humbling, I suppose, when you said you you were kind of big dick in it for a little while. And, yeah, bringing yourself back down to earth was probably what what you needed.

• 15:46Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, but at the time, obviously, you don't notice it, but. I look back and reflect now on my career because, I mean, I've been doing it twelve, thirteen years. I've had a lot of years lifting in me and there's set definitely certain points of. My career that I pinpoint and go that was a turning point, or that was when things went to the next level.

• 16:02Chris Williamson?

  So how did you react once that had happened? What happened to your training and what happened to your approach to the sport overall?

• 16:07Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so over the the next couple of years of coming back from that, I decided that I needed to work much harder in my training and, you know, the. I just started working a lot harder than the other guys, but. At the same time, straight after that, so two thousand and. Coming to two thousand eight, just shortly after that first international, um I actually ended up um having my back injury.

• 16:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 16:31Sonny Webster?

  So, um, it started off just being like a nervy pain in my back when I was lifting and I was like. It just didn't feel comfortable, but it progressed to the point where I couldn't walk. I was in that much pain.

• 16:45Chris Williamson?

  How old are you?

• 16:46Sonny Webster?

  So, two thousand and eight, so that's ten years ago now, so it would have been, yeah, fourteen years old.

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 16:54Sonny Webster?

  And, yeah.

• 16:54Chris Williamson?

  That's a young age to be having a what feels like a severe problem.

• 16:57Sonny Webster?

  A severe problem to the point where I ended up having crutches for eight weeks because to help me walk around school because that. Couldn't do anything.

• 17:06Chris Williamson?

  You weren't able to train, you weren't able to walk with the crutches.

• 17:08Sonny Webster?

  Nothing, and obviously that made me extremely upset even at that age because I was training every day and that was.

• 17:14Chris Williamson?

  Huge part of your life.

• 17:15Sonny Webster?

  Already at that age. So, um, we went to see a physio, um. And it was actually Tom Daley's physio at the time, Amanda Booth, because my coach when I first started, Michaela Breeze, was a. Come off, uh, gold medalist, she's been to the Olympic Games, she was my first coach. Um, so she took me to see this Amanda Booth and. Um, she was like, God, this bad, I've not seen anything like this before, go see a doctor. Um, so then we went up to Bath University from Devon to see a back specialist there and have the scan. And obviously the scan came back and it was like. At the time, I only had two dehydrated discs. I've had one extra once. It's sad that two dehydrated discs. Dehydrated?

• 17:59Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so basically, obviously, you've got fluid in your disc. Okay. And so I know if you're in it's like compressed, so. Okay. Dehydrated discs, so instead of them being like that thick, it was like that. So I already had that, like compression my discs. Um, and then basically, um, sacrum, first vertebrae were fused together. So, um, that put pressure then on the disc above, because obviously you'd have an extra disc there normally. That if you imagine when your back goes into flexion, gives you a nice. Curve. Curve. But because mine was like this to begin with, and you'll still see my back when I set my back. The first bit of it stays flat and then I get my curve. But obviously. That someone shoved a rod in it.

• 18:41Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, but obviously that disc then above where the two are fused. Has to take more. Force. Yeah. And it caused it to, um, come out, basically. Slip. But true, yeah. Um, slightly. And then, because I was so young, the bone, because my bones are growing. The osteophytes have grown over the top of the disc, like out over the disc to like. Protect it, I guess. Okay. And that's what was actually pushing on my sciatica nerve, causing the. The pain. The pain. So you've you've walked in and you're just like a glossary book of back injuries, right? Yeah, and the doctors, I remember going back up to bathroom consultation, he's like.

• 19:23Sonny Webster?

  I've never seen anything like this from someone your age. He was like, can we take this to the world, um. You know, medical conference to discuss it. I was like, yeah, no problem. And they did. You need to call in an expert. Yeah, and he sort of came back and was like. You have two choices, really. If you're carrying lifting, you're going to be in a wheelchair, um, or you give it a go. Rehabbing it and see what happens. Uh, but he was basically saying you need to stop weightlifting. So that was obviously really upset me down and I guess I had like sort of two weeks of not really knowing what to do. And then Amanda Booth came back to me and said, let's let's give it a go and just try and rehab it and we'll just see what happens. So.

• 20:07Sonny Webster?

  We went back to working um on low level core stuff and. I'd go see her three times a week for rehab, et cetera. And um at the time, after a little while, I started. Just when I could walk, et cetera, again, and was in very little pain, started snatching just for the five kilo bar. And again, this is one of the things that I think, and I mean, Ben Vergeron did a really good talk about injury like a while back and. You know, about when I in his talk, he's talking about how it when his daughter broke her. A tore ACL in a lacrosse thing and it's like that really like made me realise back at the same point when this back injury happened to me.

• 20:52Sonny Webster?

  It gave me a point to actually correct things that were wrong in my lifting because although yeah, I was a really good lifter. There was, I was making like little technical mistakes. My knees used to come in when I used to clean. I wasn't really strong enough for how. Good I was technically.

• 21:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:09Sonny Webster?

  And the bar used to crash on me, et cetera. My arms like little spindles.

• 21:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:13Sonny Webster?

  And it gave me time to sort of as I was rehabbing and coming back, I spent a year snatching just fifteen kilos.

• 21:20Chris Williamson?

  Just working on fundamentals and technique.

• 21:22Sonny Webster?

  Technique ingraining it, which is like why I think now, nearly ten years on, my technique's. Really good and really consistent because I had that time to correct those issues earlier on that a lot of people don't because they keep going, keep going, keep going.

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  And then you get.

• 21:37Sonny Webster?

  They get a back injury and that's it. Or you just never be able to progress because those technical. Patterns that.

• 21:45Chris Williamson?

  So there's a.

• 21:45Sonny Webster?

  Thing where.

• 21:46Chris Williamson?

  An, an, an interesting segue there. So I started boxing uh about three, four years ago.

• 21:52Sonny Webster?

  Hmm.

• 21:52Chris Williamson?

  And it was originally to do a white collar boxing fight against another promoter who's a good mate. And um I, I loved it. I actually, I really, really enjoyed it and decided, I'm fucking, I'm gonna continue. And went out to Thailand and went to Thailand to do kickboxing and Muay Thai and stuff like that. And I absolutely loved it. What I found was that because I'd spent so long doing bodybuilding, that, I mean, you can hear that little click there. That's my wrist.

• 22:16Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Chris Williamson?

  I, I swear that I didn't mean for it to happen at the right time, but uh.

• 22:22Sonny Webster?

  All people are cool.

• 22:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Um. Just gonna pop it away from the mic whilst it makes that. And I get annoyances off the audience. So. I'm boxing and what I found was that because of the years of doing like chest press and stuff like that, my power of being able to throw punches was super, super high, but because my technique wasn't there, I actually ended up injuring my wrists.

• 22:49Sonny Webster?

  Fair enough.

• 22:49Chris Williamson?

  So badly. And I'm like, no, this can't be the way. Like, it can't be that I'm too powerful for my own body. I don't even know how to throw a punch properly yet. But that was the case and it sounds like the same for you. You were almost too strong for your own biomechanics. Like you were able to lift weights that your body wasn't.

• 23:05Sonny Webster?

  Well, it's just, yeah, I think it was the other way around, but technically, like. I was enabled, it was enabling me to lift heavier than my body was actually.

• 23:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 23:13Sonny Webster?

  Ready for. But yeah, same principle, man.

• 23:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, sure. But coming at it from a different side. So you've spent your time snatching fifteen kilos.

• 23:21Sonny Webster?

  And yeah, came back two thousand and nine. So this is hard or. I can remember doing another Europeans and other juniors and I was successful in those years up to the point where I finished um. Coming up to year five or six and um I think through having done that, having, having that injury, I started to question. Um, I guess.

• 23:49Sonny Webster?

  Bits of what my coach was getting me to do, because I was going to competitions and nationals and seeing other guys that were far stronger than me lifting differently to me. And I was like to my coach, why won't we be doing so much deadlifts and pulls and squats as the other guys?

• 24:04Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 24:05Sonny Webster?

  And the coach was like, oh, you don't need that. It's all about, you know, speed and technique. And I was like, getting to the point where I was lifting as much as she was. And I guess I got to the point where I believed that I needed someone who was lifting more weight to understand what it takes to lift that weight.

• 24:26Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 24:26Sonny Webster?

  And now being in that position, or now, like, you know, ten years on, I I think it was the right choice that I made.

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 24:34Sonny Webster?

  So, uh, we did have a bit of a disagreement, a bit of a falling out, and it got to year six where we decided sixth form, college, et cetera.

• 24:41Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 24:41Sonny Webster?

  And I was still playing golf at this point, and I was playing to a good level. I was playing off like four, three or four handicap alongside my weight thing, like, so. Um, I was good. And my dad was obviously really wanting me to crack on with, um.

• 24:57Chris Williamson?

  Golf.

• 24:57Sonny Webster?

  My golf. And, um, I had to make a decision what I was gonna do, basically. So I ended up finding a weightlifting coach in Bristol called Andy Suter. It was a really well renowned weightlifting gym. It was the closest to, um, Plymouth as we could find home. And one of my friends was going to university there. So I was like, well, I'll move to Bristol and go join this weightlifting gym and off we go.

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  Were you gonna go to college as well, like sixth form or whatever? Or were you just gonna go to weightlift full time?

• 25:27Sonny Webster?

  To weightlift, that, that was it. I was doing that.

• 25:29Chris Williamson?

  Single minded.

• 25:30Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, and, um, I had good GCSEs. I had like six A stars, six As and four Bs, four Cs, that did all like the triple awards and all the extra ones. So I had good GCSEs, um, and.

• 25:44Sonny Webster?

  So I said to my dad, I wanna move to Bristol to uh.

• 25:47Chris Williamson?

  Waitlift.

• 25:47Sonny Webster?

  Come weightlifter.

• 25:48Chris Williamson?

  Sixteen.

• 25:48Sonny Webster?

  And he just looked at me like, you're dumb, you're not doing that. Um, so anyway, I went away for a couple of weeks and I went on the computer, did a bit of research and stuff. And um, I ended up finding a golf academy in Bristol.

• 26:00Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 26:00Sonny Webster?

  So I'm back to my dad, I said, dad, you know what, scrap weightlifting, like, I wanna join this golf academy. And he was like, I'm not stupid.

• 26:06Chris Williamson?

  But. Oh.

• 26:08Sonny Webster?

  He was like, but I'll let you go, but on one condition. So, okay, go on. He said, I'll give you two hundred pounds a month for six months. And if you don't find your own way, in six months, you have to come back home.

• 26:21Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 26:22Sonny Webster?

  So I was like, fuck, okay, well, let's give it a go.

• 26:25Chris Williamson?

  That's flying the nest, big style, right?

• 26:27Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so at sixteen, off I went, like, I hardly knew how to white moon bum, went to Bristol and um, my mate was obviously just started uni there. And um, slept on his uni hall floors for the first two months of being in Bristol. And as you can imagine, flashes, we went out, got hammered, had my mate's I D, like. Made every mistake you could make as a sixteen year old, moving out from home and having no responsibilities, just do what you want. Um, but at the same time, like, great, I had so much fun, I got to the, I managed to get to stay there to the point when. Um, someone actually dobbed me in for being sixteen to the security guard. For reasons that we won't mention.

• 27:09Sonny Webster?

  Um, and I ended up having to find a room there to rent, but obviously, living off two hundred pounds a month was very difficult, fifty pound a week, like. Through everything, like, and it was tough. And um, I used to get the bus down from North Bristol down to um, the centre of town to um. Walk to the gym and the gym was in St Paul's, which is a notoriously like. Bad area, rough area, it's got a bad stigma behind it.

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 27:38Sonny Webster?

  And not now, but at the time it did. Um, but the Empire Sports Club were there and like I said, this was a proper gym, like this is an old church. And anyone who went to the Empire, it was known everywhere, you'd train properly. There's a weightlifting in there, there's boxing, we had like world champion boxers coming out of there. Mister Universes.

• 27:59Chris Williamson?

  Ev- everything was done to a high, a high degree.

• 28:01Sonny Webster?

  Precious Mackenzie training there, like the lot.

• 28:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Sonny Webster?

  Um, so if you went there, you were serious and I get off first and I used to walk down to this, um, to the gym. And, um, I guess you got to my month five of being in Bristol. And, uh, having the way all the time, like I kind of, you take for granted all those things that your parents do for you. Washing up, washing your clothes.

• 28:27Chris Williamson?

  Cut, cut the corners.

• 28:28Sonny Webster?

  Cut, cut sandwiches, et cetera. And, uh, yeah, had to grow up really quickly, I guess. And it was coming up to, I guess now we're looking about a year out from London twenty twelve.

• 28:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, was that in the back of your mind? Were you thinking, when you first started, we, was that the goal? Was it London twenty twelve, I want to compete in my home nation?

• 28:47Sonny Webster?

  Of course, that's what I mean, my dream was always to go to the Olympic Games and that was definitely in the back of my mind and. Um, even in my coaches, that there was a good chance because when you're at Olympics in your home country, you get quota spots. So the qualification isn't like how it is now where it's, you have to be like top ten the world, it's really difficult. This is like you have, um, you have to, um. Yes, you get quota spots, this is like you ha- you don't have to be top ten the world, so you had three spots basically, so it's much easier to qualify. Um, so yeah, it was definitely in my, on my compass for sure, so, um. Like I said, I used to get the walk down through St Paul's to the gym and I'm in month five of being there and I'm working out how I can try and stay.

• 29:32Sonny Webster?

  In Bristol, cause I'm two months out from the world championships, which was the first. Uh, one of the last qualifiers for the Olympic Games and I was, I need to stay in Bristol to do this. And I walked into the car park one day and like I said, I've already described what the Empire was, like old church and a shit hole area. But this is brand new white Porsche nine eleven Turbo S parked in the car park. I'm just like, fuck, like, that is.

• 29:55Chris Williamson?

  You're brave.

• 29:56Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, that is nice car. What the fuck is it doing here?

• 29:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Sonny Webster?

  And um, I walked into reception and I said, um, so my coach, Andy was behind the bar. I said, uh, Andy, who's that? Who's car's that? But in the car park, his name's Jeff. He's in the main gym, in the bodybuilding gym. So, all right, fine. And walked off into the main gym, kicked the door open. I just shouted, who's Jeff? And I root the rooms that I probably say like six times the size of this room. It's quite a big long hall and there's everyone in there like a serious bone in that. And they've all sort of stopped because I've come in and said it was Jeff. And just on the other end of the room, um. Sat there doing bench press and he sat up and he goes, what do you want? I'm Jeff. And I just said, fancy sponsoring me? First thing I said to him, like.

• 30:45Sonny Webster?

  And he goes, well, um, how much is it gonna cost? And like I said, at the time I was living off two hundred pounds a month and um. I was like, he's obviously got a few quid. I need to be here two more months. An extra hundred quid, get some trainers, five hundred quid. So five hundred quid? And he went, what a month? And my jaw sort of like hit the floor at that point, bearing in mind I was living off two hundred pounds a month.

• 31:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Sonny Webster?

  Everyone in the gym probably only just about earned five hundred pound a month. And this guy is gonna give it to me, the little kid. So everyone stopped what they're doing. They scrapped their sessions and they're just watching this conversation just go back and forth now. And I went, um, yeah, okay then. And he just went sound and just let back down and carried the bench press.

• 31:30Chris Williamson?

  What a story.

• 31:31Sonny Webster?

  I'm just kind of like, has that really just happened? But okay, walked out and got on with my session. And then about an hour later, Jeff's come out and he gone, uh, yeah, what's your bank details? So I give my bank details. And sure enough, the next month, five hundred quid in my account. And I rang my dad up and I said, dad, I'm staying in Bristol, fuck golf.

• 31:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:54Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, try and go to the.

• 31:54Chris Williamson?

  Throw you the get down the bit, down the drain.

• 31:57Sonny Webster?

  And um I guess after that, me and my dad didn't really speak so much for a while. Uh our relationship definitely like sort of went went apart.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  You think he was predicting that you were going to end up going back home?

• 32:10Sonny Webster?

  Um, I don't think so. I think he knew that I was very determined to do what I wanted to do. Um but because we sort of drifted, I'll go back and tell you a little bit more about Jeff. Because he's kind of a really big part to my success and my story. Because from that moment on, um.

• 32:31Sonny Webster?

  So I'll give back and tell you about Jeff anyway. So Jeff used to race BMX as a kid. And he was a really good BMX racer. And um he was European number two and good enough to go to America to turn pro. Um but unfortunately, his um. His parents didn't have much money to send him out to America, so he subsequently ended up quitting. And stopping his sport. But off the back of that, he ended up setting up a telecoms company and that was extremely successful. Telecoms.

• 32:59Chris Williamson?

  It is all right.

• 33:00Sonny Webster?

  In his own right, multimillionaire. Um but at the same time, one of the most down to earth, nicest, funniest guys you'll ever meet. And he saw me in a similar situation. I had a dream of, you know, going to the Olympics. He was very aware of me and my circumstances and, you know, because at the club, I was obviously well known. Um of what I had dreams of doing. And he saw me in a similar position to him as a young kid. But he was in a position where he could help and so he did.

• 33:29Chris Williamson?

  A lot of uh sort of poetic irony, poetic justice in that situation, right? That you happened to come across a guy who was in such a similar situation to you. And then not only was in a similar situation, but had the resources to be able to assist you.

• 33:44Sonny Webster?

  I think, yeah, definitely. It's a stroke of stroke of luck for sure. But the thing that I take away from that and the thing that I try and. Because people go, well, sunny, like you managed to get sponsors, no one else did, et cetera. And it's it's as simple as if you don't ask, you don't get. And that wasn't the first time I'd asked someone for sponsorship. That was probably about the hundred and fiftieth time after countless letters I'd sent out and just no replies, et cetera. It although, yeah, it's great, but it doesn't necessarily happen the first time. But if you don't have the balls to ask someone. Then how are you ever gonna know?

• 34:19Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that that little situation that you've said there and the the framework that's around it is a microcosm to a degree for weightlifting, that people see you walk on to the platform, they see you snatch a hundred and sixty, a hundred and eighty kilos, they see you put these lifts up, and they go, well, like, of course you can do that, look at how strong he is, and you go, well, hang on, you haven't seen all of the fails that I've done in the gym, you haven't seen all of the hours that I've had to go into it.

• 34:46Sonny Webster?

  Of course, and that's that's the thing about any sport when you're put in the the limelight and you have to perform for that one moment and no one sees the the backstory and everything, the sacrifices and stuff that you go through along that journey.

• 34:59Chris Williamson?

  The walking on crutches for eight weeks at the age of fourteen.

• 35:02Sonny Webster?

  And the the all of that stuff, and I mean, like, from that moment on, you know, we went on and I actually ended up missing out on the um London twenty twelve Olympics by one kilo. It's heartbreaking for me at the time.

• 35:14Chris Williamson?

  One kilo?

• 35:14Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, by one, two kilos I missed out on it by, and, you know, it was heartbreaking for me. And again, like, you you learn from that experience and, you know, Jeff went to me, well, you know what? Like, why don't we just carry on with the sponsorship deal and you try and qualify from um try and qualify for Glasgow twenty fourteen?

• 35:35Chris Williamson?

  What's what was that?

• 35:36Sonny Webster?

  That's the Commonwealth Games.

• 35:37Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 35:37Sonny Webster?

  So that's like your next biggest thing really in weightlifting to the Olympics and I guess for me, that moment, that heartbreak, that failure and the disappointment, I still remember how it felt, that was like my catapult to make sure that for the Commonwealth Games, that wasn't gonna be the same thing, I wasn't gonna miss out on being there. Um but it kind of worked both ways for me because I made sure that, you know, I stepped up my training, et cetera, and made sure I hit the qualification total, and I did, and it was great. And I went to that competition to take part. This is exactly what I did, and I had no aspiration for anything more than just to be there.

• 36:16Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 36:16Sonny Webster?

  And that was, again, another big learning curve for me because it made me actually think of the psychological side of how you approach um competition, performance and events. And like for me, like, like I said, I all I had was the aspiration to be there, I end up lifting. Weights that I was capable of um and finishing in fifth place. And I think what if I had fucking tried and actually gone into that competition believing that I could win. And if I'd lifted out of my skin, reached P V heights, there probably would have been a good chance that I could have maybe snatched a bronze medal.

• 36:57Sonny Webster?

  But because I didn't believe that I was gonna do any better than just be there, that's all that happened.

• 37:02Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that that was an artifact of not making it to twenty twelve?

• 37:07Sonny Webster?

  Um I that thought process, I don't, I don't, because I'd never been in a position where I was competing in a major championships like that. Um so.

• 37:16Chris Williamson?

  Did you, did you feel like you'd already accomplished what you wanted to accomplish simply by being there?

• 37:22Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, exactly. And you know, I think whether I lifted five kilo more, five kilo less, it wouldn't have made any difference to me because I just wanted to be there.

• 37:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Sonny Webster?

  Because becoming at the time, getting to the Commonwealth Games is a massive thing.

• 37:33Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:34Sonny Webster?

  And um I'll sidetrack a little bit here because I think this is another like valuable thing that I learnt from reflection on that. Was that like at points of my career, the things that I thought were of most importance. Now I've got older, I've actually realised that they weren't and like if I could go back and. Change or change my thinking, it it would be that.

• 38:00Chris Williamson?

  What sort of stuff?

• 38:01Sonny Webster?

  So for example, like I used to hold my body weight down at like fifty six kilos or seventy seven kilos or certain weight categories. Far longer than I ever should, starve myself, used to live off jelly babies and make myself sick. So that my body weight wouldn't go up because I had no knowledge of any nutrition in order to break a British under seventeen record.

• 38:22Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:22Sonny Webster?

  Which in the grand scheme of things means absolutely fuck all. No one remembers who won the. Youth Olympic Games hundred metre sprint, do they?

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 38:33Sonny Webster?

  Ever remember seeing a thing, but the time as a kid and growing up, you think it's the most valuable thing on earth. And you do anything to achieve it. And just like I did, get just getting to the Commonwealth Games.

• 38:44Chris Williamson?

  I think what's interesting there is that perspective is something you naturally get as your frame of reference is wider. And this is for everything, right? Like your first breakup feels like your world's collapsing. We're making up for you. Like your first breakup feels like your world's collapsing, but ten years hence, you're like, part of the course, like easy come, easy go, so to speak. And you you're totally right. I can remember playing cricket and I got accepted to play for Durham Academy. And for me, like I got to warm up the Australian team when they were playing at Durham against England. So I got to bowl against Ricky Pontin and like some of the best players on the planet. And I remember thinking like, this is like the pinnacle of like what I can achieve. I'm like, you're not even on the strip.

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  You're like in the nets, you're in the nets and the arse end of the stadium. And but at the time, you've got that, do you know what I mean? You're so you're so overwhelmed by the experience. And you know, I think for young athletes, any young athletes that are listening, I I like what you said at the beginning, which was that. You you expanded that dome, what your perceived domain of competence to be global. That it was like, okay, I don't just need to be as good as the people in my town or in my region or in my country or even in like my continent. I need to be, if I want to be the best in my sport, I need to be the best.

• 40:07Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 40:07Chris Williamson?

  Period. And I think what's interesting is that there's still little artifacts of that that are percolating through. And obviously, for someone who has made it to the top of the sport, it's interesting to hear. That they are still subject to the same kinds of.

• 40:27Chris Williamson?

  Cognitive biases and uh uh and thought processes that a lot of people will.

• 40:32Sonny Webster?

  Hmm.

• 40:32Chris Williamson?

  They sell themselves short off their own.

• 40:35Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Chris Williamson?

  Of their own talent.

• 40:36Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, and of your own expectation. And I mean, going on from that, like I said, that being a like quite a big point, I guess, in my sport or realisation of myself and actually having like maybe even a thought about the psychological process. Cause prior to that, I did, I think there's no way that sitting with a psychologist and talking about um scenarios, et cetera, could ever make me lift any more weight.

• 41:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, when when your nutrition, the zenith of your nutrition is jelly babies. Like psychological training is probably not top of your list.

• 41:07Sonny Webster?

  But as a kid, there was no support. I mean, there's very little in weightlifting. And I mean, up to that point, um, the men's team had had very slim amount of funding up to the Commonwealth Games. And afterwards, it stopped. And after Commonwealth Games, half the team retired. They stopped because there was like, there's no way that I can continue training this hard, et cetera. And like I said, I was training um six days a week and it would be, three of them would be two, three sessions a day and the other ones would be one, two sessions a day. So, you know, racking up at least like nine to twelve sessions um a week, you commit your whole life to it. And the the guys were a little bit older than me and they were like, twenty four now, I need to go and get.

• 41:52Chris Williamson?

  A job.

• 41:53Sonny Webster?

  A job and earn money because this isn't paying me anything. And they end up quitting. But for me at that point, it was like, I'm not gonna let the fact that I'm not getting any money stop me from wanting to achieve my dream of going to the Olympic Games. And that's again, like my second, like I say, most valuable thing I'd say is that if there's any obstacles, regardless of whether it's in sport, in life, there's always a way around them or a solution. You've just got to be that, I guess, pig minded to wanna be able to go and solve it. And a lot of people give up that really quickly. I think this is like we're going back saying about traits of a good sportsman, a good athlete. They don't give up that easy. They go and find a solution to the.

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it strange that stubbornness is a virtue sometimes?

• 42:40Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. But like, yeah, great in the sporting, sporting situation, in a relationship.

• 42:46Chris Williamson?

  Probably bad in a relationship.

• 42:47Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so it swings around that. Um, so yeah, Commonwealth Games has gone, um.

• 42:54Sonny Webster?

  And now two years out from the Olympic Games and obviously um. That was well and truly then my next biggest focus and don't the whole way through this, like I said, Jeff's still. They're supporting me with various bits and bobs. And it got to the point where. I was about fifteen kilos off after the Commonwealth Games, what I would need to do in order to qualify for the Olympic Games. And the last two years prior to that, I'd probably put like. Maybe four or five kilos on my total each year. It's a very small amount, yeah, tiny amount. Um. So it was gonna be difficult to sort of reach that and I had to look at things and like I said, my training was bang on, I was working super hard in the gym, all of that was good.

• 43:39Sonny Webster?

  But I had to look at things outside of. Just what I did in the gym that could potentially help me with my performance. And that's when I started to look at nutrition, start to look at um. Psychology, start looking my lifestyle. Lifestyle, recovery, all of these other aspects and what I like to see as like a spider's web. Um. Of my life and could potentially contribute to uh my performance. And um I looked at um, I guess we'll talk firstly about psychology because we're kind of on that. And um like I said, as a kid, I had no belief at the at all that some guy could help me actually put improve.

• 44:23Sonny Webster?

  But I started working with this psychologist, one, my friend's dad, Martin Fricker. And two, David Riedel, um and they're both of the same school as sort of the. Steven, Steve Peters, is it, Chimp Paradox, et cetera. And um. I guess the key things that I'm gonna extract that they that helped me with my lifting, one was developing a process. Um. For when I'm lifting, so a routine that I go through every single time. Before I lift in order to develop consistency and also to be able to carry over any performance that I did in training. Into an environment like a major championships. Cause commonly you see athletes that can do bang bang in the gym, put them on a platform and go.

• 45:07Sonny Webster?

  Do something different or lose their rhythm and don't actually deliver on the day. So they taught me to help into the process. Um. And the second thing was only like worrying about the things that I could control like so. Again, like outcomes weren't, they're just byproducts of whatever the process was so. Um. I guess those two things without going into too much depth really helped me.

• 45:30Chris Williamson?

  Can you, can you explain what your process is?

• 45:33Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Chris Williamson?

  Before you do a lift?

• 45:34Sonny Webster?

  Okay, yeah, and this is something that's really independent to everyone. And I think the sooner you become aware of your individual process, the better chance you've got then of. Obviously being consistent. So for me, I pace up and down the bar, backwards and forth. I stand back behind the bar and I, what I like to call my think box. So this is where I'm thinking about the two. The technical side of things that my coach has taught me, whether it's to stay over, keep the bar closed, et cetera. My technical cues there and I visualize myself. Um. This is always a good question because people was asked this, do you visualize watching myself or? In my own body, yeah, so I visualize watching myself do it.

• 46:17Sonny Webster?

  And um executing the lift and it being a great lift and um. Yeah, so after that, then um I approach the bar and that's when my like, that's my trigger then to just go through my routine. So my routine is always right hand first, then left hand. And then I set my feet, I shake my arms, I get my breathing controlled. And then I set my, I start counting then, three, five, four, three, two, one, matter it very quietly under my breath. When I hit one, I lock in and go. And for me, like, so I always used to have that issue, which a load of probably the listeners will as well and anyone does weightlifting. Um. Right before you come off the floor, you think, fuck, this is gonna be heavy.

• 47:01Sonny Webster?

  Or, yeah, well, you laugh because you know exactly what I'm going on about. And that doesn't change whether you're in limbic athlete or it's your first day. You go, fuck, this is gonna be heavy or I might hurt myself here. But again, the negative outcomes like of whatever your process is. And for me, just by counting down before I lift and going like one, like a gunshot at a race. It distracts your mind from thinking about those negative thoughts. So that worked really well for me. Um, so yeah, that's, that's.

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  And that's the same for both snatch and clean and jerk?

• 47:34Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 47:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay. And what about, cause I've always, I've always wondered this. Once you count to one and once the movement has begun.

• 47:44Chris Williamson?

  Do you just let the training kick in in the same way as a boxer doesn't think too much? But there must be a point in snatch, I can see that it's one more fluid movement.

• 47:52Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Chris Williamson?

  There must be a moment, once you've cleaned the bar and then you stand up.

• 47:56Sonny Webster?

  The exact same thing, but a shorter version of it. So I get out the top of my feet. My foot comes in, feel the weight at my heels. Three, two, one, bang, go, yeah. So exactly the same thing for instance.

• 48:10Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome.

• 48:11Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 48:11Chris Williamson?

  That's a lovely little framework for people to use and it sounds so stupid that I've stepped up to the bar. Like in workouts or even like going for max lifts. And I've just like a- approached the bar, like gripped it, hoped for the best, but I don't have a, I don't have a process.

• 48:26Sonny Webster?

  And that's why you won't get consistency.

• 48:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Again, to draw this back, I feel like I'm talking about a sport I haven't played for nearly 10 years now. Cricket an awful lot today, but it's the best analogies that I can find. And for that, you can imagine as a bowler runs in. So you've got a bowler who's running in from the back of his runner, especially if it's a fast bowler. You've got five seconds from when this guy sets off until like when he hits the crease and releases the ball. And during that time. A lot, you've got a lawful lot of time to think and you're like, you end up getting trapped within your own thoughts. And that's the last thing that you want, especially when you're talking about someone who's pitching a ball eighty, eighty-five miles an hour. If you think, you you don't have time to react, you need to allow whatever your movement is to just carry through.

• 49:12Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 49:12Chris Williamson?

  And just have the the essences of where the fielders are positioned, how you know he typically bowls, what the what the pitch is going to be like. All of the little things that come through, you need to still have those in your mind, but not consciously.

• 49:25Sonny Webster?

  But it's it's interesting that you you you draw the comparison because you have to remember in weightlifting. Like, sorry, in cricket, in football, your action is a reaction of something else. Whereas obviously in weightlifting, you it's not the same.

• 49:42Chris Williamson?

  Total controllable.

• 49:42Sonny Webster?

  You're, yeah, a total control. So you initiate the movement when you want to. And it's, there's definitely a difference there in terms of you having that split second to make a decision.

• 49:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:54Sonny Webster?

  Whereas like for weightlifting, you're just executing that process. The same as in a in a golf swing. And that's what I love about um individual sport. And like being like, I guess, the only one there and spotlight on you. Because at the end of the day, it's down to you then as to whether it's a good lift, a bad lift or the execution. And you know, you can have a great performance one day and you know, okay, there's other people involved, that support teams, et cetera. But it's down to you. And if you have a shit there, you know, it's.

• 50:30Chris Williamson?

  It's uh it's strange. It's both it's both liberating and terrifying to think that if you've lifted. If you've snatched a hundred and eighty kilos before in the gym, you can snatch a hundred and eighty kilos on the platform. There's no reason why you can't, which puts the power firmly in your hands, but it also means that the failure is in your hands as well.

• 50:51Sonny Webster?

  Hmm.

• 50:51Chris Williamson?

  And I think that it must be for the guys that are at the top level of the sport and the same for CrossFit. Like, especially with when you look at stuff like regionals.

• 51:00Sonny Webster?

  Hmm.

• 51:00Chris Williamson?

  Um they release the regionals events in advance, the athletes will have tested the events at home. They know exactly how fast they can go. They may have even done a practice weekend where they've gone, okay, we're going to go back to back to back. This is the timings, this is the.

• 51:13Sonny Webster?

  But this is quite easy for me to to answer that that thing because this is the thing that people don't. Really take notice of when you talk about someone's performance in competition versus their performance in training. When you're in training, you've slept in your own bed the night before. You've woken up and eaten out your same cereal bowl you're used to eating from with your same cereal. You're lifting with your favourite bar, with your favourite plates on your favourite platform. And you've got your favourite coach there with you, watching you train. And that is your ideal environment to perform. And I, that's why I don't think, I think everyone's different in terms of like, you know, what competition can bring out of you.

• 51:53Sonny Webster?

  You know, some people do their best in competition, some, but this, I don't think it's necessarily um. A surprise that people sometimes perform best in their own environment. Cause when you travel to say Berlin, sleep in a hotel, maybe get woken up by the cars that you're not used to. Go down to breakfast and there's shit food there, et cetera. Um regardless of whether you've done the workout or not before, you're not in your best environment to perform. And it's only the real top athletes that can re- replicate as much of what happens at home in the com- when they travel for competition. That really perform.

• 52:29Chris Williamson?

  So you go back to controllables and uncontrollables to a degree that you said is the second part of your mental strategy. And you're totally right that I've said it must feel terrifying and liberating in the same degree. But as you say, if you take everything back to the process and you grease the groove and you have a plan and you stick to the plan and the plan is. I, I know that I perform best when I eat these kinds of foods. Pack me your bag. Like, I know that I need to have silence when I go to a hotel room. Pack some earplugs.

• 53:01Sonny Webster?

  Definitely, well.

• 53:02Chris Williamson?

  Don't be controllables.

• 53:03Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, and this is the, the follow on from this story is gonna be quite funny for you now, so. Um I've identified all these things, what I need for competition, et cetera, my best stuff, et cetera. Um down to my nutrition, started working with a nutrition company and had my food prepped, et cetera, and there's. Good bits and bad bits of that, but carrying on from what we're actually discussing. So I know what I need to perform, my weight of things to, et cetera, my boots, prep everything. So whenever I go to a competition.

• 53:37Sonny Webster?

  It's all there, exactly how I had it, practised it in training.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:40Sonny Webster?

  And six months before the qualifiers now for Rio twenty sixteen, I've gone away and done all it, sorted out my nutrition, sorted out my sleep recovery. I lived like a Mormon for six months, did, went to bed at the same time, every single day for six months, ate the same thing every single day for six months. Didn't have a drop of alcohol, didn't socialise, like.

• 54:03Chris Williamson?

  It's a very monastic lifestyle.

• 54:04Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, turned, turned myself into a robot, turned myself to a robot for the six months.

• 54:08Chris Williamson?

  Are, are these the sort of sacrifices and beyond that that you need to make?

• 54:12Sonny Webster?

  Of, of course, I, and you, I mean, even going back into childhood, I can count on one hand how many times I spent kicking a football round in the playground. I can count on like all our hands how many holidays I missed out on parties I didn't go to because like for me, there was much more bigger things at like the age of sixteen, okay, maybe I hadn't like tried a drug and like done all the things that, you know, as a sixteen year old, but I travelled to like maybe like majority of the continents of the world and seen like fifteen places which at like sixteen years old, not many people get the opportunity to do. And that was for me more important than those things. So it swings and roundabouts. I wouldn't say like you're hard done by, but there's other things, you know.

• 54:53Chris Williamson?

  I think what you're doing is you are, you've chosen your values at an early age, which not a lot of young people can do. You've decided what is of value to you and what virtue and integrity with that value percolating through looks like. And you've gone, okay, I'm gonna get after it.

• 55:07Sonny Webster?

  Hmm.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  Like, I'm not gonna allow um social norms or what I should be doing at this particular age to dictate how I, how I, how I need to behave.

• 55:18Sonny Webster?

  Exactly.

• 55:19Chris Williamson?

  And again, we come back to the stubbornness and the pigheadedness and kind of the, the um desire to chase what you feel is your own, your own path. And it, in this sense, yeah, it's absolutely a virtue.

• 55:33Sonny Webster?

  Hmm.

• 55:34Chris Williamson?

  You know, it can be a nightmare for a parent trying to bring a child up who's got this sense of uh like direction and idea because they're not gonna compromise. And it can be, you know, a nightmare in a relationship. It can be, uh, there's a whole host. It swings and roundabouts again. But you know, if you wanna be a good athlete and you don't compromise on things, like it's probably a pretty fucking good foundation to start.

• 55:54Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so going back to what I was saying, like, so the six, uh, the six months are gone. It's now competition day of.

• 56:04Sonny Webster?

  The qualifiers for the Rio twenty sixteen Olympics, so my, my day of reckoning, D day, whatever you wanna call it now. I'd had special weightlifting shoes done that were black and gold, but made, I'd had special Nike weightlifting suit that was black and gold. I had like a Nike tracksuit, had like my special logo stitched into it. Brand new pants, brand new socks, everything, snapback, black and gold, like. You sound like a bowler. Yeah, I was like, but this is exactly how I'd been envisaging it for. Yeah. Months, this is my day and this is how it's gonna go, so I've all of this prepped and ready to rumble. Mm hmm. And um, anyway, Jeff's can pick me up in his car, just like we planned, and we're driving up to the competition and um.

• 56:49Sonny Webster?

  Where's the competition? It's in Coventry and um, we're about an hour away, I guess, from the venue now. And um, I'm watching the competition on the live stream, like just seeing how my friends and people are getting on and um. The guy, the guy's walked out and thought, he's got a similar weightlifting suit to me. And it was just as I had that thought, I went, no. And I was like, Jeff, pull the car over, mate, I need to check my kit bag. Went in the back of the car, bearing in mind I've done sixty, seventy competitions plus, big major competitions at this point. I left my weightlifting shoes and my weightlifting suit at home. To the biggest day of my life, to something I'd thought about every single day for six months.

• 57:34Sonny Webster?

  And I was like, fuck, like, we were too far away because I would have missed way in to go back. Had to end up getting Jeff's wife to bring up one of his old weightlifting suits. And my coach just so happened to have one of my old pairs of weightlifting shoes in his car. So going from like the most prepped I'd ever been to exactly how this day was gonna go. To all of a sudden, like, span of thrown in the works, like, my suit's not there, but do you know what? And this is why, like, when people ask me, do you, are you stereotypical about anything now or in competition, I'm not. Because for me, I learnt from that. Day that regardless of what happens, if you prepared well enough for something, like you could have stuck me in a pink tutu that day and I would have still lifted the same.

• 58:20Sonny Webster?

  Cause I was that prepared for the competition. So I rocked up, dusted these boots off, got my suit on, weighed in and the competition began. Now, it was a, there's a really good clip on YouTube, um, of the. Dean will make sure that the link is here or here. Of the actual, um, of the actual fight for the qualification between me and, um, another weightlifter called Owen Boxall, really good lifter. So you must have known going in that it was going to be between you two for this. Well, for my weight category, definitely. And then my best friend who was in a lightweight category, Gareth Evans was also in the mix, but it's done, it was done on like points. And, um, but I knew I had to be Owen, like minimum requirement.

• 59:06Sonny Webster?

  And, um, notoriously when me and Owen have competed, it's been very like back and forth as to like, I win, he win, etc. He always used to snatch more than me. Um, but I used to always clean and jerk more than him, so. The snatch comes first, right? Yeah. Um, so anyway, we've gone on to, um, gone on through the snatch and I've ended up, um, beating Owen by like, I think it was like two kilos in the snatch, which is like unheard of. And I was like, boy, this great start, perfect snatch at one fifty-three, I think. And, um, I was like, let's see, I've done this pretty much.

• 59:46Sonny Webster?

  And Owen's opener was like one seven five, my opener was like one eight five. And I was thinking like one, like, I easily open on one eight five. So I thought I'm like ten K on the opener and his opener's gone up. Fair play. And then he's come out on that one eighty two, which is like his P B. I thought, pooh.

• 1:00:05Chris Williamson?

  What, for his second lift?

• 1:00:06Sonny Webster?

  No, for his first lift. I thought, fair play. He's going for it. And he came out and he did it. Fair play, mate. I come out, did my one eighty five and put like four kilos ahead now. And then he's gone like one eight nine. I'm I was going one ninety anyway, so I thought, yeah, no problem, whatever.

• 1:00:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Sonny Webster?

  And um he's come out and done one eight nine. So he's like ahead now again on body weight. I think bastard.

• 1:00:28Chris Williamson?

  Shit, the best.

• 1:00:29Sonny Webster?

  So now my second lift, then I've hit one ninety. And I thought, pooh, that's it now. There's no way now he's got another lift in him. And sure enough, he comes out one nine three and makes it. He's made a twelve kilo P B on his final lift. And he's like, for some reason, the way the numbers were, I thought that didn't matter that he got one nine three. I thought I was still in the lead.

• 1:00:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:54Sonny Webster?

  And I'm in the back like chilling like this. I don't even need to do my last lift of one. My coach comes out and he goes, so you need to make this lift. You need one nine three. And I was like, nah, nah, I put one nine four on, it's fine. And he's like, you only need one nine three, put one nine four on, no problem. And I put my hat on and I've spun my hat back round. So I take my hat off because I always lift my snapback. Put back on and off I went out. Like, nothing had phased me. And like, everyone is like on the edge of their seats, like. And it was like a British record. And I've come out and I've cleaned the weight one nine four. As I'm standing out of it, I threw off my mouth.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:01:32Sonny Webster?

  Swallowed, I don't know, just swallowed it down and then just nailed the jerk. And it was like. That was the only way that day was gonna go, like. Regardless of the scenario, and this is why I say that, when you prepare for something that well, it it didn't matter. That was the outcome for me for that day.

• 1:01:48Chris Williamson?

  Wrong kit, wrong shoes.

• 1:01:50Sonny Webster?

  Didn't matter.

• 1:01:51Chris Williamson?

  All of the worry before, all the anxiety before, thrown up in your mouth. Some guy's lifted his twelve kilo P B.

• 1:01:58Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Chris Williamson?

  But because you've greased the groove that hard and because you've done the work. You're able to trust the process.

• 1:02:04Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Chris Williamson?

  The outcome's almost inevitable.

• 1:02:07Sonny Webster?

  And yeah, and then that was me on my, on my way to Rio.

• 1:02:12Chris Williamson?

  Get on your fucking way to Rio.

• 1:02:13Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Chris Williamson?

  That's amazing. Are you allowed to lift in a snapback?

• 1:02:17Sonny Webster?

  I was the first person to start doing it and.

• 1:02:20Chris Williamson?

  Cause I saw you.

• 1:02:21Sonny Webster?

  I'll explain my reasoning for doing it because initially when I started doing it, a lot of the weightlifting community were like, that's really bad, you shouldn't do that, it's disrespectful. But for me, you watch weightlifting, a guy walks out, he lifts his weight. Makes some sort of celebration sometimes, they walk back out the back. You get no understanding or connection to that person as an athlete, as a performer. It's going back to like we say, you don't see all that stuff that goes back. Whereas like, I love what I do and I wanna show a little bit of my personality, a little bit of my charisma. When I'm lifting, so yeah.

• 1:02:58Chris Williamson?

  Like a signature.

• 1:02:59Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so this is me, this is me, snapback, a bit of me. And instantly when you see that, you get like a little inkling, maybe.

• 1:03:05Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's the guy that, that's the guy that wears the snapback.

• 1:03:06Sonny Webster?

  About that person, just for seeing the red snapback.

• 1:03:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:11Sonny Webster?

  And that was my reasoning for doing it. And yeah, it made me feel comfortable when I did it. And I didn't care that people didn't like the fact that I wore it.

• 1:03:18Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:19Sonny Webster?

  It was me and, you know.

• 1:03:21Chris Williamson?

  It's cool that, um, it's cool that it, it's allowed in the.

• 1:03:25Sonny Webster?

  It's counted as part of your body. So if the bar was to touch it, or if it's to fall off, it'd be a no lift.

• 1:03:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:03:30Sonny Webster?

  But yeah, it is what it is. And like nowadays, you'll see, there used to only ever be like, when I started, one type of weightlifting shoe, they'd be the same colour. There'd be one weightlifting suit. So everyone's in the same suit, the same shoes, coming out lifting, the bar the same. Boring as shit, yeah? It's different now because of CrossFit. Yeah, there is like multiple different weightlifting suits, multiple different shoes. So if you do have any sort of inkling of fashion sense, you could put together something that almost looks like a planned outfit.

• 1:04:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05Sonny Webster?

  So it's different and maybe, but like, yeah, that was, that was my reasoning for doing it.

• 1:04:10Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. I think it's really, uh, it's really interesting. I've got to the listeners at home, Johnny, who is a nationals level powerlifter, was making me laugh the other day as he said that he couldn't believe in powerlifting that when you deadlift, your socks aren't allowed to touch your knee sleeves. If your socks touch your knee sleeves.

• 1:04:30Sonny Webster?

  That used to be a rule in weightlifting.

• 1:04:31Chris Williamson?

  Three red, three red lights.

• 1:04:33Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, it changed that.

• 1:04:33Chris Williamson?

  Yusuf once got three red lights on a lift for putting his one foot on the platform, like on the corner of the platform, basically off camera. Before his clock had started, like just had his foot, you know, like resting your foot.

• 1:04:47Sonny Webster?

  But there's all those sorts of rules in weightlifting as well, that you wouldn't know that.

• 1:04:50Chris Williamson?

  For some, like somehow, having a hat has like.

• 1:04:56Sonny Webster?

  The reason, yeah, how it does is because they changed the rules only a few years back so that Muslims could. Female Muslims could compete in weightlifting.

• 1:05:05Chris Williamson?

  Ah, so they can wear the, is it the hijab?

• 1:05:08Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so that they could wear that, so that they had to class then any headwear as part of the body. Which is then how wearing a snapback.

• 1:05:18Chris Williamson?

  Give me the snapback.

• 1:05:19Sonny Webster?

  I'm saying piss a little bit, but that's how wearing a snapback is, is yeah, you're allowed to.

• 1:05:24Chris Williamson?

  That's funny. So roll it forward to Rio.

• 1:05:27Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, wow, so I guess going there, like going back and talking about kicking out, I guess. Cause for me as a kid, like as an athlete representing your country, getting your kit is like one of the proudest moments ever. And it is one hell of an experience. I'd all, I'd heard stories about people that had been to the Olympics. Um, about what kicking out is like and um, I was like. Like kidney canisters or basically, I've been to the Commonwealth one, but it's never the same as like what the Olympics like, cause they absolutely go nuts for the Olympics. So you go into this big hall, it's the NEC, and you have a personal shopper. And you go through like different sections, you start off with like formal wear.

• 1:06:11Sonny Webster?

  And you've had like this suit made for you with like, you know, um, the Olympic crest on etcetera. And every detail of it has got like really individual to you. And we wore that when we met like, um, Princess Anne and any royalty, you wore your suit. You get these cool shoes and then you go into like village wear. And then this is stuff that you wear around the village. I mean, it's stacks and stacks of stuff. And you get like we- weather gear for like Rio and it, we did actually need it in the end, but like, um.

• 1:06:43Chris Williamson?

  Just senseless.

• 1:06:44Sonny Webster?

  For any possible scenario and then you go into like, um, training wear and then footwear.

• 1:06:51Chris Williamson?

  What were you most excited about?

• 1:06:53Sonny Webster?

  Um.

• 1:06:55Sonny Webster?

  Wow. Probably the trainers of the footwear, like it was all about the the weird sort of thing. There's a few jumpers and stuff that I'd seen. Um. I can't remember what I'd say my, the certain top was my favourite piece that we got. But um you you get so much stuff and yeah, you get your accessories. But then the final bit is quite personal because. You imagine that I was the only male weightlifter going and there was one other female going. So when it comes to making what they what you perform in. They're essentially making you an outfit for your biggest day of your life and it's just you that's gonna have that.

• 1:07:30Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:30Sonny Webster?

  So obviously for a weightlifter, your weightlifting suit and you go into this waiting room for a minute. And they um have like a um. Uh mannequin.

• 1:07:41Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:41Sonny Webster?

  Of. You know, just.

• 1:07:43Chris Williamson?

  Is it your, is it your dimensions? Because you are not. You are not the traditional dimensions of a person.

• 1:07:48Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so they have a mannequin of a human and it's like a big reveal where you walk through and there's your lifting suit on a mannequin.

• 1:07:54Chris Williamson?

  Like when you get a new car and they pull the.

• 1:07:56Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, and they've made it just for you and they're so proud of it because obviously they've. Done it from scratch to be like for you and it.

• 1:08:03Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:03Sonny Webster?

  That was really cool. You do like some photos and stuff and then you go through because Audi sponsored it.

• 1:08:08Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:08Sonny Webster?

  So then you take all of your stuff onto the the bags, the suitcases, they've got like six bags, like different suitcases and bags and.

• 1:08:17Sonny Webster?

  All of this stuff and um that was very special. And um that's when I guess it starts to feel real that you're going.

• 1:08:24Chris Williamson?

  Kick in big style then.

• 1:08:25Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, and then um the next thing was the holding camp in um Better Horizonte. And bearing in mind, like I said, as a weightlifter, you have like no, no one really cares about weightlifting. It's not a very popular, famous sport. Um there's very little funding for it, et cetera. And all of a sudden, you're flown out to this purpose. Built place or like fitted out place for Team GB's preparation for the Olympics. And we get to the airport and it's like. Get on this bus, just three of us, three of us, two waitresses and a coach on this bus. And it's like an eight police motorcycle escort through Bella Horizonte, shutting roads for us as we're going through like we're.

• 1:09:09Sonny Webster?

  Celebrities are really important. Yeah, like that. And that was like weird, cause like I said, all of a sudden we're now just as important as the sprinters or the boxers and stuff like that. And you get to this hotel, nice hotel, again, normally we'd get put in the shittest hotel you can find. And you've basically got these people there that are there for you for what, anything you could possibly think of want. There's a physio full time, there's a doctor, there's recovery people, nutritionists, sleep helpers and all sorts of stuff. They'll get you whatever you could possibly want. And it's really weird, cause like I said that, and I was always told that don't do anything that you don't do at home.

• 1:09:51Sonny Webster?

  So obviously I'd never had any of that at home, so like you kind of just don't make them, don't use it, you do what you used to and eat what you used to and stuff, but.

• 1:09:58Chris Williamson?

  Cocoa pops please.

• 1:09:59Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, exactly, like they're coming over with like caviar, yeah.

• 1:10:03Chris Williamson?

  Alright, yeah. Just to interject there, do you think that there is a, it definitely sounds like there's a disparity. Between the level of support that's given to you at anywhere which isn't the Olympics. And then at the Olympics, there's like this perito distribution of like, nothing, nothing, nothing.

• 1:10:21Sonny Webster?

  Bang.

• 1:10:21Chris Williamson?

  Everything.

• 1:10:22Sonny Webster?

  And it's overwhelming and it's like going back to like you said about it being like. In competition scenarios, it's all of these things, it's all of a sudden overwhelming, like you go to training while we were there. And they've got fifteen cameras pointing at you, it's flashing while you're training. I was like, this is like.

• 1:10:41Chris Williamson?

  Did you wanna be back in the church?

• 1:10:43Sonny Webster?

  No, I was kind of loving it a bit, like, you know what I mean, it's like this is sick.

• 1:10:47Chris Williamson?

  So you could embrace it and take it as your power, right?

• 1:10:49Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, well, it was nice to feel like important that people wanted to come and have photos of you and like interview you and stuff like that and it's.

• 1:10:56Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that says a lot about your personality that you almost took energy from that?

• 1:11:01Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, definitely, I wouldn't said that necessarily energy that would have caused me to compete or perform any better, but. I'd say it made me feel special and, you know, proud of what I'd achieved.

• 1:11:16Sonny Webster?

  Uh but at the same time, very draining, like, and the point from the qualifiers to that, to the actual Olympic Games was very small in weight, it was a six week window. And this is the thing with our sport, I went balls to the wall to qualify. That there's no way, no matter who you are, can you hold that level of performance for six weeks without your body falling apart. You have to taper and I tried to hold that standard of lifting there up to like what I did at the qualifiers, but it's no chance. I was, I was on more sleeping tablets, painkillers, everything you could imagine, just to be able to lift and.

• 1:11:55Sonny Webster?

  We've flown down to the village now, about two weeks out from uh lifting and I just said to myself, we weren't in the village, I said. I don't, regardless of what happens on the day, you've got to remember this experience and that day.

• 1:12:11Sonny Webster?

  Like, as the best day of your life, because you're never gonna get that opportunity again in that, regardless of whether you go to the Olympics again, that one day. You've got to live with that for the rest of your life. So I wanted to make sure I enjoyed it. So. I just said that to myself and I kind of like took a little bit of pressure off myself in terms of what my training and stuff was going like, um. And then we went um into the village and it's like, you hear the stories about the Olympic. Yeah, damn right. This is what everyone's tuned in for. Yeah, but it's like, it's not like that. Well, either, either that or it wasn't, I missed out. Were you in the wrong, you were in the wrong area, right? No, I, I don't think I was, but it's just like, it didn't seem like that about what everyone sort of in imagined.

• 1:12:53Sonny Webster?

  So we went on to um, got into the village and obviously that I was just the only weightlifter, male weightlifter. Mm hmm. But everyone else is like a team of hockey players, a team of sevens, a team of like athletics. And it's just the weightlifter and like standard, like the weightlifters are just like. Put in the corner. Yeah, because we're not winning any medals, so. And um they were like, right, do you wanna go and share a room in with the ping pool, uh uh ping pong, I shouldn't say that. Table tennis guys, or you can share with the gymnast lads. And I was like, oh, I know a couple of the gymnast lads from the combo, I'll stay with them. They go, that's fine, you'll have your own room, but you're in the cleaners that cupboard.

• 1:13:38Sonny Webster?

  Fine, my room is probably about this big, it's absolutely fine. I walk in and Max Whitlock is in there doing his stretches on the floor like. Um, he comes straight up, he's like, how you doing? Took a bags in my room and um, we all just like clicked just like that. So it was me, Max Whitlock, Niall Wilson, Bryn Bevan, Christian Thomas, Lewis Smith, um, and Nathan Hall. Mm hmm. And um. Niall's just rang you there, right? Yeah, yeah. So we're all like, um, seven lads in an apartment. Hmm. Young lads, there's pranks going on, there's supergluing toothbrushes down to tops and

• 1:14:18Sonny Webster?

  all sorts of render stuff like, cause just seven lads in an apartment. And they really made me feel like one of their team, like straight away. I'd have team meetings with them, like I would go for breakfast with them, dinner with them. That was really nice, like to kind of like gain some routine. Mm hmm. But definitely for the first week, I was round the village like a fangirl, like you'd so many celebrities everywhere you looked and you're like, fuck, photo selfie, like just these people that you're like, you've only ever seen them on TV and then all of a sudden they're there in Cocoa Pops, like. Yeah. Um, so I was like, wow, basically for the first couple of weeks, took a lot of selfies, met lots of famous people. And then. Who was your, who was your favourite person you got a selfie with?

• 1:15:02Sonny Webster?

  Um, I got, I got lots, but I'd say for the reason, I wasn't the most famous, but for me as a kid, obviously growing up playing golf, um, Justin Rose was like a bit of a hero. And um, we're sat in the queue waiting to get on the bus to go to the opening ceremony. And that's like the big thing, the opening ceremony, like, cause I'd sat as a kid since even way before then and watched the opening ceremony on TV and then all of a sudden I was in my opening ceremony gear on my way to go to it myself. And I was just about to get on the bus and I've seen Justin Rose stood there and I've kind of gone. I've got to go out and ask him for a photo and I've gone over and asked him for a photo. He said, yeah, no problem. We had a photo and then.

• 1:15:48Sonny Webster?

  He just started chatting to me. He's like, so what sport do you do? Blah, blah, blah. We end up getting on the bus together then and sat together for like forty five minutes on the bus.

• 1:15:56Chris Williamson?

  You just bitching yourself the whole time.

• 1:15:57Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, and but like at the same time having the most normal conversation like we are. And then he his his missus FaceTimes and he's like, oh, yeah, I'm just like, he was sunny. He's a weightlifter. Like, I'm like. Hey, that's Rose's missus. This is weird. Um, and then we get off the bus, then we're starting to walk in. You get like walked around like the houses basically before you parade in because it's all done in country order.

• 1:16:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:20Sonny Webster?

  And um, he started like telling stories then about like um, being on the tour and Tiger Woods and like. How they've got houses next to each other, Barbados and all these various stories, like golf related stuff. It was like, wow, wow.

• 1:16:34Chris Williamson?

  Just lapping it up.

• 1:16:36Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, and like Andy Murray's there as well, like and a couple of the other tennis guys. And um, all of a sudden we're there and we're just about to walk in. And I had my phone out like that to like try and video or take a photo and I was just like, no, there's no way that you could. Capture what that experience felt like in in any sort of picture. And they like, you know, that is one of the most bestest moments ever for me, like in my life, walking out to that. Stadium, the size of it, everyone's looking at you and I managed to get like right on the front row, right next to Andy Murray.

• 1:17:14Sonny Webster?

  So all the photos, Andy Murray's there with his massive flag and then I'm there with my little paper.

• 1:17:24Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that that's symbolic, the size of your flag and the size of Andy Murray's flag?

• 1:17:30Sonny Webster?

  Definitely. Um, but anyway, so, yeah, amazing experience. Like and you afterwards, you're like almost like set up like.

• 1:17:38Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, how long did it take to get to sleep after you've been to these days?

• 1:17:41Sonny Webster?

  I don't think I did, but after that, like, um, incredible experience that, um.

• 1:17:49Sonny Webster?

  And then you're kind of like getting towards um opening ceremony, uh. Competition day, like I did various acquaintances, like meetings with other athletes then and. I will come back on to Andy Murray because obviously he got asked to be the flag bearer. And um I guess in the media, Andy Murray comes across like. You know, very emotionless, quite a lot, some some would say.

• 1:18:14Chris Williamson?

  Stoic, right?

• 1:18:15Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, and um he's not like that at all, like and I was very fortunate to spend like. Sit down, have lunch with him one day when we were at the school. And meet him there because we had like a school outside the to go and train. And I got to spend a bit more time, listen to him talk and chat. And once he started to talk and you know, you got to listen to him more. Actually, in my opinion, he's just like a little bit socially awkward. And he's by no means like arrogant or, you know, he's just a little bit shy and like I think with all of like the. You know, fame and everything he's had, he doesn't find it is easiest to express his emotions. And that was really like, I guess, humbling to see that someone that's that successful.

• 1:18:59Sonny Webster?

  And has achieved that much is still like almost a little bit shy.

• 1:19:03Chris Williamson?

  Is it, do you feel quite endeared to him now?

• 1:19:05Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, definitely, definitely from that experience and the same with, you know, Justin Rose, like and him giving me that. The time of his day, like knowing like how much, you know. I looked up to him as a kid.

• 1:19:17Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:17Sonny Webster?

  To spend time with him and on a level and the same with Greg Rutherford.

• 1:19:21Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:22Sonny Webster?

  And like.

• 1:19:23Chris Williamson?

  Triple jumper, right?

• 1:19:23Sonny Webster?

  Triple jumper, Olympic gold medalist, won everything.

• 1:19:25Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:26Sonny Webster?

  And like, I'd be sat down having food and two days later Greg would come up and be like, hey, I was training Sunday, you good? And it's like, and still now, like Greg like watches my Instagram story like every day and we chat regularly and it's like. These guys are like superstars, but it makes you realise that they're no different from anyone else. They're like exactly the same as me and you, they've just had a ridiculously huge dedication to whatever they've wanted to achieve and.

• 1:19:51Chris Williamson?

  I think it's an interesting point there that you talk about to do with. The way that the me that athletes are portrayed in the media, like. You can, through hard work and dedication and natural talent and all the rest of it. Become really, really good within a particular discipline.

• 1:20:11Chris Williamson?

  That has no bearing on your capacity to talk to a camera.

• 1:20:14Sonny Webster?

  No.

• 1:20:15Chris Williamson?

  At all. And I think that in this day and age where social media is a transparent window into people's lives and there's such an interest in athletes' private lives, you know,

• 1:20:29Chris Williamson?

  some footballer signs for a different football club, the story gets 10,000 retweets, some footballer cheats on his wife with another wife, it gets 50,000 retweets, do you know what I mean? Like, it's almost like

• 1:20:39Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Chris Williamson?

  Everything's become reality TV showized now and people want a narrative that's constantly going on. And you're totally right with the Andy Murray thing, although I've heard that, you know, that rhetoric like Andy Murray, like miserable Scottish guy. And you think, oh,

• 1:20:56Chris Williamson?

  hang on a second, like, is he? Or what happens if you are not someone who's super comfortable on camera?

• 1:21:04Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Chris Williamson?

  How does that make you come across? Actually, it makes you come across exactly the way that he's coming across.

• 1:21:10Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:10Chris Williamson?

  This person has decided, chosen to be good at their craft and now has had all of these other demands put on them. And you're like, well,

• 1:21:21Chris Williamson?

  fuck, like, is that fair?

• 1:21:22Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23Chris Williamson?

  And now you're judging, you're judging him not based on his performance. Like, he's doing good at his performance thing, like, leave him alone.

• 1:21:29Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:30Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, I, I think

• 1:21:33Chris Williamson?

  people want the whole package now, right? Like, and especially, I guess, sponsorship money and all the rest of it. People buy into the character as much as they do the performance.

• 1:21:43Sonny Webster?

  Well, then this is when people go back to me and it's commonly asked questions to sports people. What's, who's your biggest inspiration? Who's like your idol? And for me, having been through that experience at the Olympics, it's not about now an individual or an individual person. It's traits of people that have been inspiring. And it's like I said, that the way in which, you know, some of the most successful people in the world are so like humble, that for me is an inspirational trait. And I find that through more now than a specific performance that anyone's done.

• 1:22:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:17Sonny Webster?

  Inspiring.

• 1:22:18Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting. We were walking into the gym earlier on and there's a guy who you won't know, but Nathan Moffat, he'll be listening. And Nathan was walking out and he's been in Newcastle, he's been in Newcastle for years, they've moved to Australia and his goal is to make it to regionals, I think, within the next couple of years. And he walked out, recognised me, he said hi to me, turned around, recognised you, shook your hand and he walked away and then turned back. And said, oh, you helped me with my clean over Instagram D M's like a few months ago. Thanks for that. And you're like, oh, yeah, man, like, cheers, no, no problem. You know, like one, just one guy. And I'm aware that, you know, it's not meeting Andy Murray in the Olympic Village. But to the same extent, it's the same core message, right?

• 1:22:56Sonny Webster?

  This is, it's exactly that. You've like hit the nail on the head. And this is where like through for me now, when people do send me direct messages. When people do ask for a photo and it's like, it's still weird for like someone in wait, like me getting like that sort of tension. But I do do my hardest to like, you know, even respond if it's the smallest little thing. Cause I remember what it felt like having, you know, Justin Rose be like that with me. And think that, you know, if I can do that small thing by, you know, offering someone a couple of words of motivation or advice or liking their video. And then be jumping up and down for the rest of the day. It cost me nothing. But you then are passing that same sort of message on in terms of what you aspire to be like.

• 1:23:38Sonny Webster?

  And that's not to say I've replied to every single message I've ever been sent, because this is not realistic. But as much as I can, I always do try to, to do that. And it's purely from, you know, having experienced that myself.

• 1:23:50Chris Williamson?

  Good role models to a degree of people who have made it to the top of the sport.

• 1:23:53Sonny Webster?

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:23:54Chris Williamson?

  So what was it like stepping onto the platform then in Rio?

• 1:23:57Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, well, again, it gives me goosebumps now just thinking about the actual.

• 1:24:03Chris Williamson?

  So tell me, tell me, tell me what it looks like. Um, so first off, actually, I want to find out, and I'm sure that some of the people will be interested at home. Um, anyone who follows A T G, um, or what's the other one?

• 1:24:15Sonny Webster?

  Jim Hugrip, yeah.

• 1:24:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So both of them, amazing Instagram accounts. You should follow them. They do a lot of backstage stuff, right? Big competitions and they'll track. If you go on the YouTube channel, they go like dick and balls. They'll go from like empty bar to final warm up lift and they'll track everything and they'll pop it up. Um, so talk me through your routine. You pack your bags. You've arrived at the lifting hall. What happens?

• 1:24:41Sonny Webster?

  Uh, yeah, so it does really seem like a little bit of a. A blur now thinking back like because that day for me right from start to finish, I've never felt that way on a competition day. I think because like, you know, like, and it's again, it sounds weird because we're talking about um just another competition, but you've dedicated, we've talked about my whole life today. So you're you're eleven years deep. Yeah, but all of that, all the things that we've talked about has funneled to that one moment and it's really hard to kind of capture how that feels and I never felt emotional in a competition experience before like that and it was kind of like

• 1:25:26Sonny Webster?

  really hard to kind of, you know, keep your focus like you would never any other competition in terms of like your routine, your warm up and stuff because it was like, I wanna remember this and enjoy it and soak everything in because it's it's such a special day to me and like I know in myself everything that I've sacrificed for that one moment. And I remember as you go in, you get weighed in and then you sit in like a room. What category were you in? Ninety four kilo class B group. Okay. Um and you, there's a room out the back that has like loads of drinks and food and stuff and I had my food and went to put my weightlifting suit and um again, which is like

• 1:26:08Sonny Webster?

  quite special, I'm peeling your suit, I pulled mine on, it just ripped in half, right, my fucking hands like. But luckily I bought a second one, second one's on fine, like, so I ripped my suit in half. Um and you go into the warm up room and like you get given your platform and we had a few photos and stuff. And I had this grin on my face that like I just couldn't get rid of, like I was just so fucking happy, I like my cheeks hurt by like the mo- from the moment I woke up till like that whole day, that's that smile and grin just did not leave my face. And um we've got to um now you're obviously in the warm up room and then you get called for presentation, which is kind of like

• 1:26:53Sonny Webster?

  right, this is it, like, competition's about to start and.

• 1:26:58Sonny Webster?

  I remember coming out, walking out and them saying sunny roads to Great Britain and like I. It was so hard not to cry like and I still remember it now like thinking like, don't cry.

• 1:27:13Sonny Webster?

  So many people are watching, don't cry, don't cry. And I kind of like held back and was like. You know, cause you know, like so many people are sat there watching who know you and it's like. And then like I looked up and Jeff's in the crowd, came flat to Rio to watch me. And another friend of mine, Susie, was there like who came out to watch, who was again has known me since I was young in my career. And you know, it was real special moment and to go back in then afterwards and you have to kind of like. Try and throw that away and just be like, right, you're here to perform and lift, but it's so difficult.

• 1:27:49Chris Williamson?

  That's a, that's a good point. Just before you go on, I'm going to interject. Do you think that. The um, the ability to think outside of yourself and soak the situation in is. Contrary to focusing on the greased groove of the movements. It seems to me like. Soaking the situation in by its very virtue is going to take you out of that routine, take you away from what you're used to doing.

• 1:28:15Sonny Webster?

  In every, every other situation, but in every other competition other than. The Olympics, yes, but I think that is the most difficult. One to do, especially in like, you know, as you, as your first Olympics, but even people say to me that have been to multiple like.

• 1:28:33Sonny Webster?

  That I know what to expect the next, if I was to ever go to the Olympics again, what that's going to be like and you can kind of, kind of prepare for that a little bit. But even people that have been multiple times said that everyone's different. Yeah, you're always that this Olympic Games, it's like the biggest.

• 1:28:46Chris Williamson?

  Biggest stage in the world, right?

• 1:28:47Sonny Webster?

  So, yeah, I think like it does to a degree, um, but I had to kind of put that to one side and remember that I was there to lift, but. You've got to remember as well, I'd had the worst couple of weeks training up to this event and like I kind of just warmed up and. You know, I tried my hardest and like the coaches said to me, they've said, do you want to bring your weights down and you know, just go through some easy lifts? And I was like, I haven't trained my whole life to come here and sandbag myself and look back on it and think. I could have lifted more. I would rather have tried my hardest and, you know.

• 1:29:24Sonny Webster?

  Got one lift and said, well, at least I went balls to the wall. I just didn't make it. And that's exactly what I did.

• 1:29:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:30Sonny Webster?

  I stuck to my plan. I went out and I made one snatch and then missed my net. No, I think I missed my opening snatch. Got my second and then mi- I missed my third. And then for the clean and jerk, um, I got. My first clean and jerk, my second clean and jerk, and then missed my last. They were like, they were better ways that I could have done, but like. Every lift, regardless of whether I missed it or made it. I still finished the lift and soaked it in and enjoyed the experience and like. A lot of people would have looked at it and looked it upon like, oh, he didn't try hard enough. Or he, he didn't look like he really cared. But like. For me, and for me, that was a bit annoying because like people don't know what goes into that, but.

• 1:30:13Sonny Webster?

  I didn't wanna walk off the platform kicking myself and think like, I knew I wasn't in the best shape and I knew I could have gone lighter and sandbagged it. But I now look back on that moment. Still with a smile on my face and with no regrets. And that's what I wanted to do. So regardless of what, you know, the pub perception was. Et cetera, cause they don't know all of that stuff that I just said about, you know, my sleep, my body and my body was et cetera.

• 1:30:36Chris Williamson?

  Six weeks to taper down and then go.

• 1:30:38Sonny Webster?

  You know what I mean? They don't appreciate that. They probably even need, never seen you lift before. They just go, and that's their perception, but fine. I like know myself, cause at the end of the day, I'm the one who has to live with that day. That I, well, I tried as hard as I possibly could and I enjoyed every moment of it, every second of it. And I look back on it now with a smile on my face. I retell the story. With a smile on my face and I will do again in twenty years' time probably. Um, so yeah, very special moment, but you kind of go on from that. Peak, the best day of our life. And then reality's here.

• 1:31:13Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:14Sonny Webster?

  And you're back at home and no one cares. No one's there with a big money pot for you. Like sponsorship deals checked. It's kind of like. You get back on with your normal life and all of a sudden you sacrificed your whole life for this one moment and now. You're back and. It was difficult, I think, initially because I did feel quite depressed coming back from it and you get those Olympic blues, et cetera, and it only wasn't really until um I started doing the seminars after the Olympics where I kind of found my passion back for the sport again, if you like.

• 1:31:56Chris Williamson?

  Broadly, it's it sounds like a a version of PTSD, almost.

• 1:32:01Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Chris Williamson?

  It's like you've gone through such a lation that there's a there's like a come down on the other side of it.

• 1:32:08Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, but people talk about it all the time. I think it's genuinely a thing. Olympic Blues is a is a thing.

• 1:32:12Chris Williamson?

  Like the Ibiza Blues.

• 1:32:13Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, yeah, I've had them twice this year.

• 1:32:17Chris Williamson?

  Um, so let's get on to the seminars now. So, you know, I I that's how I got to know you was through your lifting online, through the, you call it circus lifting?

• 1:32:29Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, it's kind of been branded that now. Um, I don't know if it's a substitute. Um, I guess for me, the circus lifting came about because I watched a lot of weightlifting online and followed a lot of weightlifting accounts and I don't know, like, it's gonna be a surprise, but I find it boring as shit watching people just posting a snatch weight and I can't imagine how even more boring it is for someone who has no understanding.

• 1:32:57Chris Williamson?

  They're not invested in the sport.

• 1:32:59Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, but no, like, understanding of the weight and how heavy it is. You watch some, you know, I get now that crazy dude come out and snatch one ninety and you're like, fuck.

• 1:33:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:09Sonny Webster?

  And that's it.

• 1:33:10Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, you uh as a another example to bring it back to A T G or uh hook grip, they'll have on their Instagram, they'll have one video at like a hundred frames a second. And obviously, the reason that they do that is so that the technical experts can see just how close the pull is to their legs, just how much they dip under the bar, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:33:28Sonny Webster?

  Regardless, even the normal speed videos, it's ten, fifteen hundred guys on there all snatching weights, the exact same lift.

• 1:33:38Sonny Webster?

  To me, that's a bit boring, whereas like for me, I'm like, oh, fuck it, let's jazz things up a bit, like, do something a bit crazy, add a bit of a complex together, and it just gives someone something different to watch, other than the same shit, the same two lifts. Mm hmm. Dean will make some of these appear as we are talking around the screen. Thank you, video guiding. Um, so yeah, that's how the surface lifting came about, um. So let's cut to people who haven't seen it or who are watching it. What's going on around the screen around our heads at the moment? It's me sticking various different movements, lifts together, um, until basically I run out of energy. But it kind of shows like a, I guess, a real control of the bar and understanding of

• 1:34:24Sonny Webster?

  the technique in order to be able to do that. It's extremely difficult to do, and if, please don't try it at home, you could probably hurt yourself. Um, as people have done, yeah, so that is, it is essentially that, but I think like as well, and I missed a massive chunk of my story out because um, I have actually done a degree in sports performance of Olympic weightlifting. Okay. Which I missed out studying at Bath University during, um, I guess that time when I was trying to qualify for the Olympics. Mm hmm. Which I completely missed out, but did four years at university purely at Bath on sports for Olympic weightlifting. And that's an incredibly specialised sports performance for Olympic weightlifting.

• 1:35:06Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so what you do at Bath is everyone in my class was either international at their sport, there were six Olympians in my class, and I had a class of only thirty six people, so everyone was national, international at their sport. And, um, very set group, you do the course based around your individual sport. So there was, for example, a rhythmic gymnast in my class, so who went to the Olympics in twenty twelve, she did her course around. Rhythmic gymnastics. So we do different sectors. So for example, nutrition, she'd do nutrition for gymnastics, I'd do nutrition for weight thing. There'd be a psychological um aspect and you relate everything back to the sport and do all your dissertation, et cetera, your um studies.

• 1:35:47Chris Williamson?

  What was your dissertation and what was your title?

• 1:35:49Sonny Webster?

  Um efficacy of caffeine in power based sports, so.

• 1:35:53Chris Williamson?

  And how how effective is it?

• 1:35:55Sonny Webster?

  Um yeah, but it is effective, obviously, um higher doses for um. Power based sports. So I was I was talking, I was looking at like real high doses, we were looking like six hundred um. Eight hundred milligrams of caffeine we were using.

• 1:36:09Chris Williamson?

  Which is what, like about twelve, fifteen cups of coffee, something like that?

• 1:36:13Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, a lot.

• 1:36:14Chris Williamson?

  Did you see this? Did you see the study that happened at Northumbria University where someone accidentally got given like ten grams of of uh, no, it's fifty grams instead of fifty milligrams?

• 1:36:23Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:23Chris Williamson?

  Someone got given fifty grams of caffeine, uh two of them, and they had to be shipped off to the R V R.

• 1:36:29Sonny Webster?

  So I was doing that and during that time I was training throughout the day. I'd go home, eat, get in my car at like. Nine o'clock at night, drive to university, which was an hour away from Bristol. Study ten till three, four in the morning, drive home, sleep for three hours and then do again, train.

• 1:36:49Chris Williamson?

  For how long?

• 1:36:50Sonny Webster?

  Uh well, I was there for four years, so I had during term time of that time. Yeah, that's why I didn't do a lot of sleeping during that time. I'm trying to juggle training with that, it was extremely difficult. So yeah, I kind of like sidetracked it there, but I missed that out. But um going back to what we're saying about um. The circus lifting, the coaching, like that was kind of like, I guess, adds a little bit to. You know, what I do now in terms of delivering the seminars, coaching people, helping people with their techniques, et cetera. I've done the theory side of it as well, as much as.

• 1:37:25Chris Williamson?

  You drilled yourself into the ground with that, right?

• 1:37:27Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:28Chris Williamson?

  So now you're, as you move forward, coaching people. I know that you're going and doing these seminars where you've got between groups of what, ten and fifty? What's the biggest seminar that you've done so far?

• 1:37:42Sonny Webster?

  I've probably had forty people once, but like for me, ideally twenty people is a really good number. Because any more than that, I don't feel like I'm giving each person any personal attention. And I like everyone, my seminars just much about having fun as they are about learning. So for me, like, I wanna try and make sure that everyone leaves that day with individual technical pointers, but also feeling like they've met and hung out and spent time with me and got to know me as a person. I've been seminised before where there's fifty, sixty people and you may even not get one direct person from, one direct word from the person that you paid to go and see.

• 1:38:22Sonny Webster?

  So, yeah, I think for me, um, yeah, I think that's the.

• 1:38:28Chris Williamson?

  So it's your goal, your goal at the moment, as you move forward, obviously you're having a, for anyone who doesn't know, we will make sure that Sonny's dates for his tour in.

• 1:38:38Sonny Webster?

  October.

• 1:38:39Chris Williamson?

  October, and you're beginning in October and finishing in January, going that way around, that way around the coun- the world, sorry?

• 1:38:46Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:47Chris Williamson?

  Um, through Doha and Australia and finishing in Miami.

• 1:38:51Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:51Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 1:38:54Chris Williamson?

  Broadly beyond that, beyond going and, I guess, accessing as many people as you can up to this twenty-ish limit. Where do you see your career going from that? Is that sufficiently fulfilling for you? Or are you eyeing up trying to take some young blood and get them to the highest level of a sport or?

• 1:39:15Sonny Webster?

  I think for me, like, like I said, I dedicated twelve, thirteen years of my life solely to being a competitive athlete. And you sacrifice so much, like I said already, in that process. I'm twenty-four years old now and there's a lot of things that I've missed out on and things that, you know, not that I would ever change and go back, I wouldn't. But there's certain things I wanna do and live like a bit more of like a normal life. I've been able to travel a lot more this last few years, go on holidays, go to more parties and, um. You know, I wanna spend a little bit more time for myself and focus on business side of things in terms of with my seminars and, you know, I'm really enjoying at the moment the, um.

• 1:39:58Sonny Webster?

  Getting to meet more people, um, building my, I guess, there's very few people out there that provide education for Olympic weightlifting and, you know, wanna sort of like become a expert in that field in terms of, you know, wanting to help people. Um, improve with their lifting. Um, obviously, um, I've made a bit of a, um, impact in the CrossFit community in terms of, um, giving it a go myself and obviously a lot of the gyms I go to coach at across the gyms. So, um, I'm enjoying learning something new, um, a new challenge. It's extremely humbling. Doing CrossFit workouts and sucking at them, um, cause like I said, most weightlifting stuff now, I've been doing it most of my life. I can do it with my eyes closed.

• 1:40:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:42Sonny Webster?

  But make me run a mile and I'm there. So, but that's really nice. And I'm enjoying that feeling of having to learn a new skill.

• 1:40:49Chris Williamson?

  Being a novice at something.

• 1:40:50Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, and, you know, applying the skills I learned through weightlifting to something else, um. So that's enjoyable and I'm not really thinking, I guess, too much further ahead. As long as I'm happy and I'm enjoying what I'm doing, then that's kind of like the, the key main focus for me at the moment. I do have, in terms of aspirations to compete again. Um, I don't know a hundred percent yet. I mean, I've got out, I wanted to go to the Olympic Games, I did that. One last thing that I haven't done that I wanted to do as a kid was win a Commonwealth gold medal. And there's potential to come back and do that in, um, in Birmingham in twenty twenty two.

• 1:41:31Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:41:31Sonny Webster?

  Um, which is, yeah, potentially something that I may look at nearer time.

• 1:41:36Chris Williamson?

  So would you be prepared to make the sacrifices to your lifestyle again?

• 1:41:39Sonny Webster?

  Again.

• 1:41:40Chris Williamson?

  To do that?

• 1:41:42Sonny Webster?

  This is the thing, like, and it's a, it's a really good question because I kno- I know what it would take to go back and do that. And I think that's kind of good in that respect to know exactly if I wanted to achieve that.

• 1:41:54Chris Williamson?

  Know what you're in for.

• 1:41:54Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, know what I'm in for, um, and I guess, um, I'd have to look at it close to the time. I couldn't definitively say right now that that's a diehard priority of mine.

• 1:42:07Chris Williamson?

  It must be in the back of your mind though.

• 1:42:09Sonny Webster?

  A hundred percent. It's in the back of my mind and it definitely like features as a, as a thought, as something that I've kind of a stone that I've, one of the stones I've left. Um, but at the same time, weirdly, over the last, I guess, six months, more, I guess, attention and aspirations has gone to maybe wanting to compete in the CrossFit Games or like, um, especially after coming back from regionals and watching the atmosphere of the competition and the sacrifice those guys put in to what they do is is out of a challenge. But again, like, I know what sort of training and dedication it will take

• 1:42:46Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:46Sonny Webster?

  to reach that sort of level of sport. And until I'm in a situation where with the best coach, with the best training partners, um, I'm a hundred percent focused to that goal. I'm not gonna do it half-heartedly. I would quite rather just enjoy what I'm doing.

• 1:43:03Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like a a common theme that's sort of come about through this has been a a a single-mindedness for your, you've understood where broadly where you're going to one degree. And it's funny that it almost sounds at twenty four years old, like you're taking kind of like a semi-retirement.

• 1:43:20Sonny Webster?

  Semi-retirement, yeah.

• 1:43:22Chris Williamson?

  Um, where you're just like, okay, like, or, you know, you've done, you did four tours in Afghanistan, like, I'm gonna just, give me a break and I'll go back out there, maybe I've still got the skill set like, and i- it's cool. It's it's interesting to think that. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if young athletes suffer with burnout. I'm sure that a lot of them do.

• 1:43:40Sonny Webster?

  Giving my body a rest as well, like, it's nice not being in as much pain that I was day in, day out before as I was training and I I do have other aspirations outside of sport in terms of business aspirations and other things I want to achieve. Um, you know, so, yeah, there's definitely o- other things outside of sport for me there.

• 1:44:00Chris Williamson?

  What would you need to, what would your total need to be, do you think, ish, at the Commonwealth Games to be able to pull a gold? I know it's heavily dependent on what the competitors.

• 1:44:09Sonny Webster?

  Thing like, I mean, anything can happen. I know that it'd need to be probably close to a one sixty snatch, which I've done training, obviously, um.

• 1:44:19Sonny Webster?

  Around that one sixteen mark and clean jerking around the two hundred, two ten mark, but I mean.

• 1:44:24Chris Williamson?

  So it's big numbers.

• 1:44:25Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, it's big numbers. It'd need an improvement, but there's guys out there that are doing more than that at the moment that, you know, may continue to go on. They may move up a weight category. All the weight categories have changed now.

• 1:44:35Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:36Sonny Webster?

  For me, weightlifting as a sport, it's, it's really struggling. Um, and I think although CrossFit's raised the awareness of it a lot more, I think that now like that is a more attractive um, proposition for me in terms of like where the sport is and where it's going and.

• 1:44:55Chris Williamson?

  Do you see, could you see yourself competing in CrossFit over the coming years?

• 1:44:58Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:59Chris Williamson?

  Like local, local comps and then building up.

• 1:45:01Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, I'm doing a charity one for Battle of Cancer with.

• 1:45:05Chris Williamson?

  The one in October in London?

• 1:45:06Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so I'm competing in that.

• 1:45:09Chris Williamson?

  I might be competing against you.

• 1:45:10Sonny Webster?

  Uh, yeah, well, I, I quite like my team.

• 1:45:13Chris Williamson?

  I hope I don't go head to head with you on a, a single rep.

• 1:45:16Sonny Webster?

  Got Zach George.

• 1:45:18Chris Williamson?

  Have you?

• 1:45:18Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, Zach George and the Lean Machines in that team. So it's a pretty solid team.

• 1:45:22Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, even if you don't win, you've probably got the most Instagram followers if you're part of it together, so.

• 1:45:27Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:27Chris Williamson?

  That's, that's number one. Um.

• 1:45:29Sonny Webster?

  Um, but no, yeah, definitely. Like, I'm not, I'm not putting too much pressure on myself because like I said, for at once in my life, I don't have to. Um, yeah.

• 1:45:38Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. It must feel very liberating to have something that's, um, that's kind of close to what you've done before, but also it must feel like a holiday, like a holiday doing the same thing that you've always done to a degree. Like it's kind of, there's a lot of crossover, but it's also new as well.

• 1:45:55Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, and there's a lot of things that I think actually having done CrossFit has assisted my weightlifting, like and made me learn about the way that I train and how hard I train in terms of, you know, there's maybe doing a little bit less, but training a little bit smarter and maintaining like still different levels of, uh, of my lifting, you know?

• 1:46:14Chris Williamson?

  So we, we talk about this a lot. We've mentioned it on the podcast with Jordan, Paul and Tim before about just how sophisticated the sport's becoming now. And it's interesting that you've got this massive lift off, you know? Weightlifting not so long ago included a, it was a clean and a press, right? And then it was a clean and jerk. So it was three components like powerlifting.

• 1:46:34Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:34Chris Williamson?

  And that changed, but because it's been around for so long, the adolescence of the sport was like fuck knows when, like early nineteen hundreds, maybe something like that.

• 1:46:44Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:45Chris Williamson?

  But with CrossFit, like the, the site's only existed since like two thousand and two.

• 1:46:50Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:50Chris Williamson?

  The, literally the site has existed since then and the event that they've done at this year's CrossFit Games, thirty must stops for time, was on the site in two thousand and two.

• 1:46:58Sonny Webster?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:58Chris Williamson?

  That's sixteen years ago.

• 1:46:59Sonny Webster?

  You say, you say this, that, but you look at, like a lot of people thought when I've, because obviously Matt Fraser was a weightlifter, et cetera. And when they started hearing that I was doing, um, weightlifting, uh, CrossFit's training, they go, wow, he's gonna be the next Matt Fraser. And it's like, hang on a minute. Like, I'm not being funny, how, no, there's very like, I reckon my value of actually competing as an elite athlete is more valuable than my skills as a weightlifter. Because, but even then, like you look at what these guys are lifting, they're lifting near enough like top level weightlifting weights anywhere.

• 1:47:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:35Sonny Webster?

  But it's a completely different energy system like than it is when you're doing a one rep max lift. There's very little carryover. I said like my ability to know how to train hard is more valuable than my weightlifting abilities. But I picked up a lot of the movements quickly, more going back to like what we were saying about having an understanding of the body and how it moves. Um, but there's still so much to learn. It's a very.

• 1:48:00Chris Williamson?

  Principles instead of specialities to a degree, isn't it? That you understand how to eat and how to train and that athletic ability.

• 1:48:06Sonny Webster?

  Of course.

• 1:48:07Chris Williamson?

  Um, yeah, I, I mean, it's interesting that CrossFit is bringing to the forefront of people, the, uh, to the forefront of the general public's mind, weightlifting and, and strength sports in general. It's made it a lot more sexy. Me and you.

• 1:48:25Sonny Webster?

  Definitely.

• 1:48:25Chris Williamson?

  Me and you a lot of the time when we speak, we. We make jokes about like powerlifters, like, you know, you are really, really strong, but you are cursed with like not very interesting looking kit. It's it's but you know, like you look at CrossFit and it's like a fucking fashion show to a degree, like and you're like every everyone's able to dress cool and all the movements are.

• 1:48:47Sonny Webster?

  It is a it is a it's a bit like a community slash people will call it cult.

• 1:48:55Chris Williamson?

  But it's it's strength sports for the for the fucking Instagram era, right?

• 1:49:00Sonny Webster?

  Weirdly very attracted to a very wide diversity of people and I think it brings people together really well and that's why I think, yeah. People do class as a community because, you know, you can have your forty year old mum of two training with twenty year old lad. That's just been out in the piss the night before, shackled birds, you know what I mean, trained together and they can be completely different. Abilities and work work out together and bring two very different people together and it'd be like on a level.

• 1:49:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think um it's one of the only sports that you get like that, which has taken what is typically very individualistic, as you said. You know, I'm sure that you had a lot of friends that you weightlifted with and they would stand around the platform while you were training and support you and stuff like that, but there must be times that it feels very lonely.

• 1:49:45Sonny Webster?

  Oh, extremely lonely. And that's why I said that after training that long, like. Very independent for the last sort of four, five years of my career. Um, yeah, it's shit and it's boring and that's why I say to people that it's. Very boring sport, going into a room full of people training together, it's, you know, it's exciting.

• 1:50:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I agree. I think um it's.

• 1:50:10Chris Williamson?

  It's a strange uh a strange world to be in where you've got such a diverse number of people that are all doing the same sport. And uh it's really cool to uh. To hear that you're maybe gonna make that transition over. Um, I wish that we could go on, but I'm eyeing up time.

• 1:50:25Sonny Webster?

  Dying for a wee.

• 1:50:27Chris Williamson?

  You need a wee, you've had too much, you've had too much knuckle. You need a beer. I'm full of fit aid. And I know that Shark Club stopped serving wings in about forty five minutes. So I'm gonna get you back again. It's quarter to ten.

• 1:50:38Sonny Webster?

  Wow, come on.

• 1:50:40Chris Williamson?

  We've been going. So, man, thank you so much for coming down. I'll make sure. Uh, can you tell the listeners where they can find you online, please?

• 1:50:46Sonny Webster?

  Yeah, so mainly on Instagram, Sonny Webster G B. I do have a Facebook page as well, Sonny Webster. But any inquiries you've got about anything, whether it be seminars, programming, et cetera, as well, you can email me at info webs at info at webstar hyphen performance dot com.

• 1:51:05Chris Williamson?

  Webster, right?

• 1:51:07Sonny Webster?

  Star, not Webster, webstar.

• 1:51:09Chris Williamson?

  Ah, exactly. So, man, thank you for coming on. I'm gonna get you back. We've got

• 1:51:13Sonny Webster?

  We could talk.

• 1:51:13Chris Williamson?

  So much to go. I might just, I might just like video one of our, I won't video one of our FaceTime calls, that's a bad idea. But maybe one of the more PG ones.

• 1:51:21Sonny Webster?

  We could have gone into like, some of those various small aspects and spoken for.

• 1:51:26Chris Williamson?

  Granular detail. Man, well, you know, if people, if people want you back in the comments below in YouTube, I'll make sure, I'll give Sonny a kick every couple of weeks and I'll make him log on. I'll make him go in and have a little bit of a browse through the comments. So if you are watching on YouTube, make sure you do that. Subscribe, Modern Wisdom. Please share the episodes if you want. Follow Sonny online here, Video Guide Dean, thank you very much. And yeah, we'll see you next time. Bye bye.