We slid into a world champion's DMs (Part 1: The Gains)
Tena koutou, team! Something a little different today!
We mentioned a few weeks ago the perils of following elite athletes on Instagram - comparing ourselves to them and then wondering why we’re not lifting as heavy. “Strength-flation,“ if you will.
We’ve been fangirling over Karlina Tongotea for a while. She is, frankly, a deadset legend. You can see her lifts here, but if you’re not a massive powerlifting nerd, here’s a quick primer.
Last month, she competed at her 4th World Powerlifting Champs, where she came second in her (brand new) weight class, lifting a combined total of 607.5kg. In competition, her best deadlift is 262 kilos. (For context, that’s 142kgs more than Megan managed in competition, and 82kg more than Carl.)
And she would probably say that wasn’t her best. She won in the 76kg class in 2023 and 2025.
She’s literally one of the best lifters in the world. (Actually, New Zealand produces quite a few of these. We'll rant about how they never get any coverage another day.)
So, like, we recognise that while we’re technically the same species as Karlina, we’re not anywhere near the same. And we wanted to find out what it takes to lift that heavy, compete at that level, and be that consistent. So we slid into her DMs.
She’s also a doctor, and having spoken to her for an hour, a genuinely lovely human.
We’re going to split this over a couple of weeks. This week the gains, next week, the brains.
We started by asking how often she trains. Which engendered a sigh, and a wry smile. She won't say three or four days a week anymore, even though that's technically true. These days she measures it in hours. "I'm training, like, 18 hours a week," she says, up from around 12 when she started eight years ago, and that figure doesn't include the physio, the prehab, or the cardio. It's less a hobby at this point than a part-time job stacked on top of her actual job as a GP.
At the beginning, her medical training gave her an advantage. (she ended up lifting because as a trainee doctor, team sports were too hard to wrangle.)
“It was much easier for my coach to explain things to me. He didn't have to sort of give me many cues because he could just use the muscle…he would say that word and then I would just do it. Whereas when you're explaining it to, like, you know, non-medical or non-anatomy, informed people it can be so much harder. How do you explain a scapular retraction or a pelvic tilt?”
But ask her to explain her periodisation and she'll tell you straight up: "I don't actually know that much about programming and, like, what is happening. I just do it." What she does understand is colour.
Her coach, Dom, builds her programs in six-week blocks and assigns each session a colour instead of a percentage: blue for light and easy, green for a bit more demanding, orange for something around a hard-but-manageable effort, and red for genuine max effort. Rather than a single fixed number, she's usually given a range for a lift and finds the right weight within it based on how it actually feels on the day.
And she’s pretty good at sticking to the plan. (We asked, because at least one of us would struggle a little with that)
If she's given an orange day and ends up training at red intensity instead, she doesn't treat that as a bonus. She treats it as debt. "If you're prescribed an orange day, but you perform it at a red intensity, you're in debt, and we don't know how many days it's going to take you to pay that debt back," she explains - a framing borrowed from a training concept she came across years ago, treating recovery capacity like a bank account.
Push harder than prescribed and you've overdrawn it, with no guarantee you'll be ready for the next real max-effort day when it counts. So instead of defaulting to more-is-better, she'll ask her coach directly: "do you want me to bring the number down so it does feel like an orange?"
It's a useful model for anyone who treats every session like a test: sometimes the discipline isn't pushing harder, it's sticking with the plan.
Her recent weight class change is arguably the biggest shift in her training in years, and almost none of it involved changing what she does in the gym. For four years she competed at 76 kilograms, keeping her weight down mostly through a sustained calorie deficit rather than aggressive last-minute cuts - no water loading, no sauna sessions.
"Recovery is better. Just not thinking about food all the time," she says - and for the first time in her competitive career, a lead-up to Worlds that didn't involve the usual month of constant soreness and depletion. She also competed fully fueled for the first time this year, and by her own account, "those squats have never moved like that before."
The other area her medical training pays off is in understanding pain, something we’ve talked about a lot here at Gains and Brains. “Understanding what is like expected pain, what you can work through, what you should probably not work through. I think it gave me a huge head start. Let me sort of accelerate through the sport.”
Her approach to niggles and pain follows a similar logic of looking backward rather than just treating the symptom. When something starts to feel off, her first move isn't to isolate the sore spot - it's to review the last few days of training.
"Why does this feel so horrible? Why is everything moving so slowly? Let me have a look at the last three days," is how she describes the process - and more often than not, the explanation is already sitting there: a heavy squat session she hasn't fully recovered from, a missed rest day, poor sleep.
Sleep in particular is treated as completely non-negotiable. As she puts it, "I will get my sleep in," full stop - no late-night sessions to squeeze training in regardless.
Colour-coded blocks instead of percentages, serious attention paid to recovery, sleep as a non-negotiable, a weight class change and a niggle-tracking habit built on reviewing actual data rather than guessing. Maybe we could all learn something from this?
Given all of that, it's almost fitting that when asked what she'd tell herself at the very start - eight years, thousands of kilos and 18 hours a week ago - her answer has nothing to do with programming, colour systems, or weight classes at all.
"It's a very boring answer," she admits. "It's just: consistency is key. Just keep at it."
And strength doesn’t only show up as a heavier number on the bar. "There's how it moves, there's how it feels, how many times you can do it," she says. "There's so many different ways of improvement. It's not just the weight on the barbell."
Maybe we’re not so different after all?