Joel Setoguchi warms up his deadlift during a training session at Impact Nutrition in Lethbridge on Saturday morning.
A Lethbridge man who battles Cerebral Palsy isn’t letting his physical disability stop him from competing in the sport of powerlifting.
Joel Setoguchi is a 26-year old Lethbridge native that has been dealing with the neurological disorder all his life.
“I was born two months premature and I wasn’t breathing when I was born,” said Setoguchi. “The lack of oxygen damaged the part of my brain that controls motor functions.”
As with most cases of Cerebral Palsy, Setoguchi wasn’t diagnosed until he was able to walk.
Setoguchi said his mom noticed he was walking pigeon-toed, preferring his left leg. They went to a doctor, where he was officially diagnosed with spastic cerebral palsy.
Spastic Cerebral Palsy is the most common form of the disability, accounting for nearly 80 per cent of all cases. Spastic Cerebral Palsy causes muscles to move in an exaggerated manner, or in Setoguchi’s case, be unnaturally stiff.
He would spend the next decade walking with a brace on his right leg, which led to social challenges in middle and high school.
“It was terrible,” Setoguchi recalled. “From grade one to grade nine, kids would say something to me every day. I was called a retard, a gimp. Whatever kids could think of, they said.”
Setoguchi says it took a long time to adjust to living with the disorder, but he is a better person now because of it.
“For a long time, I just wanted to be normal. Everyone has something, but mine just happens to be very visible. I used to get really upset about it, but now I just laugh.”
Setoguchi’s journey into fitness started shortly after graduating high school. He says he was still very undersized, weighing only 130 lb. at the time.
“Honestly, I started going to the gym for the wrong reasons. I wanted to be a big tough guy because of what I’ve been through. No matter how stressful my day was, it just seemed to melt away once I got to the gym.”
He says his mindset changed when he realized that he could be able to influence people to overcome hardships in their lives by going to the gym, just like he did.
He dove into the sport of powerlifting after meeting a personal trainer while in school.
Powerlifting combines the deadlift, bench press and squat to test competitors’ total accumulated weight across all three lifts. In competition, competitors have three chances at each movement to increase their weight with a successful lift.
Setoguchi says he had a successful three months of training before his first competition this past August, but it was not without its challenges.
“I failed to register enough depth on the squat. I had 300 lb. on the bar, but I couldn’t get deep enough for it to be a successful lift.”
Despite going 0-3 on squat attempts, he had success in the other two lifts, registering a 451 lb. deadlift and 254 lb. on the bench press.
Setoguchi is currently in his off-season for training, but still goes to the gym five times a week. His main focus before his next competition is increasing his squat mobility so he will be able to register a lift in that category.
He says that while not the most popular sport, powerlifting is definitely for him.
“I know I’ll never be the biggest guy around and in bodybuilding that’s the goal. I like lifting heavier weights and seeing myself get progressively stronger.”
While providing inspiration for himself, Setoguchi has also done the same to those around him.
“Through the years, he has used the gym as a way to lift himself up. He’s come a long way from (middle school) when people used to bully him daily for having a limp,” said Joel’s best friend, Justin Scherger. “Now he does his own thing and other people do theirs.”
The impact powerlifting has had on Setoguchi is something he says he thinks about often and he hopes to continue to inspire others while bettering himself in and out of the gym.