Raising the Bar:

In 2017, Yang Sen was wearing an “explosive” hairstyle (with upward-sticking long, yellow-dyed strands tied at the top of his head) that reminded people of the Biblical character Samson. But whereas Samson lost his strength when his hair was cut off, Yang progressed from 400 kg to 453 kg in the squat after cutting his. Even his coach Hsu Siao-li, herself a former powerlifter, exclaimed that this 50 kg improvement was “scary.”

Finding his best self

Based on her 30 years of experience in powerlifting, Hsu says that in the past, Taiwanese athletes in the 120 kg weight class, in which Yang competes, could at most hope to become the top lifter in Asia, or to win in a single event in the World Championships. But at the 2025 World Games, Yang won with the best cumulative total, and set a new world record in the equipped squat for the fourth consecutive year.

Hsu suggests that the reason that Yang, a member of the Paiwan Indigenous people, has been able to reach this peak is that he has innate explosiveness coupled with superior coordination and spirit, and he is not afraid of hard work.

Yang Sen enjoys riding his motorcycle through the mountains and looking out over the sea. 

(courtesy of Yang Sen)

The squat.

The bench press.

The deadlift.

The weight of disappointment

When Yang was studying physical education at Laiyi Senior High School, he was already capable of squatting 400 kg. However, unable to make further progress, he felt lost, and trained only sporadically for two years. This was the first low ebb in his athletic career.

Nonetheless, encouraged by his family, he decided to recommit himself. Thereafter record-breaking performances in major competitions became routine.

But later another low ebb occurred. At the World Championships in Dubai in 2019, the deadlift proved his downfall and he finished outside of the top ten. Then, at the 2021 World Championships in Norway, he thought he had broken the world record in the squat, but the lift was not registered because he failed in all three attempts at the deadlift. (Powerlifters must complete all three events in order for any single event’s outcome to be valid.) These disappointments hit Yang hard psychologically.

“I just blamed myself: You didn’t train enough! You simply didn’t train enough!” Absorbing these failures, Yang, who is not a glib speaker, says: “You can’t get frustrated. The more frustrated you get, the worse your results become. All I could do was go back and train more.”

A family photo. (courtesy of Yang Sen)

After winning the gold medal at the World Games, Yang returned home to celebrate with friends and family. (courtesy of Yang Sen)

From 420 to 450

“Every day I told myself, ‘Train well,’” says Yang. With these apparently trivial words in mind, he has trained at the Monster Gym in Kaohsiung’s Fengshan District for an average of three to four hours per day, repeating the same actions over and over. He has kept this up for five years.

During this time, Yang has been daily faced with nothing but cold barbells and weightlifting racks, with the only response to his effort being the reality of the weights. 

Having trained the muscles throughout his body to be highly responsive, Yang set a new world record in the 2024 World Championships with a squat of 452.5 kg, and in 2025 surpassed his own mark with his 453.5 kg squat in Chengdu.

“I was very happy and deeply moved,” says Yang. These are his feelings about being the first Taiwanese ever to win the gold in the 120 kg weight class powerlifting event at the quadrennial World Games, an achievement which proved that all his training had finally given real “weight” to his results. 

Yang set a new World Games record in the equipped powerlifting competition at the 2025 World Games in Chengdu. (courtesy of Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee)