The origin, the prep, the story of my experience at my first powerlifting meet!
It’s been a while since I actually blogged on my medium but I wanted to write this because I’m about 2 weeks away from my second powerlifting meet, and to those who know me know I’m super excited about it! So in commemoration for the fact that I’m a week and X days out, why not write the story on how I fell into the powerlifting rabbit hole and my experience of my first meet?
To those who read this, I’m sorry I ramble a lot, but I hope you enjoy this little entry. It should be noted that with the exception for the pic of me about to squat and the deadlift too much meme, all the other pics aren’t mine!
Weird Oversimplified Origin Story.
If you were to travel back in time to when I was 18 and tell my 18 year old self that i would be lifting consistently and enjoying it/loving it, my 18 year old self would give you the weirdest and confused look. That’s right, despite me constantly lifting and loving the process of getting stronger and seeing gains now, I absolutely hated it back then. It wasn’t until I was 2 years out of college that I started lifting consistently again and I only had two goals in mind which was to squat and deadlift 225lbs (102.05kg for those who are on metric). After I accomplished that goal I was kinda stuck.
So I generally don’t like associating with people from high school or anybody I know from high school for a variety of reasons. However, one person started following me on IG from high school who was younger than me and I saw that they were prepping for their first powerlifting meet. Despite having a huge deja vu moment and going wtf its a small world, after doing a bit of research I thought, hey this looks fun maybe I can do this too. I saw that they were going to this nice gym that wasn’t too far away but looked kinda hardcore, but because I don’t like running into familiar faces, I avoided going there for a while.
During this time in 2018, I had a very unhealthy obsession with deadlifting. I was attempting to max out every chance I get, which would lead me to injuring myself every few weeks. I basically had to ask my co-worker who carpooled with me to bring either an Icy-Hot patch or Salonpas to put onto my back so I wouldn’t be in pain at work.
So one day after work I stumbled across a gym that was on the way home, I decided to fill out a form and see if I could drop by. Compared to a commercial gym this place was so clean and hella expensive. Nonetheless, I fell in love with the place and considered getting a coach there to actually start doing this thing. So I decided to actually train there one day.The one day I ended up training there I embarrassed myself with the one lift I suck at, which is bench, and was told that I still had a lot to learn before I competed or did anything and they suggested that I should get an open gym membership and was going to offer me the student rate over there so I can train. The price was too much for me despite how much I tried to calculate it, and on top of that i was planning on traveling at the end of the year, so I ended up declining the offer.
After that experience, I fell off the lifting train for a while and ended up deciding that I was going to start from square 0, which meant relearning every lift from scratch. I was still following people on IG who lifted and also I had this bad habit where I consistently compared myself to like the other girls in my would-be weight class who were easily squatting 400+ and deadlifting 500+ meanwhile there was me and my not-so-great deadlift, garbage squat, and even more garbage bench. At least until I ended up following the other person from my high school that was powerlifting too in 2019. Surprisingly, they actually remembered me from back in the day complimented on me lifting and recommended I looked into powerlifting. Again I gave the same answer which was the fear I wasn’t strong enough.
He gave me the answer of to not compare myself to others and to not worry about it. At that point I still had no idea what i was doing at the gym, I was literally just squatting one day, benching one day, and deadlifting another day and after 4 weeks, I would max out then deload then do it all over again. So he suggested if I wanted to get into powerlifting seriously I should start looking into a coach, and invest into some equipment. There was a problem, I was funemployed at the time so he told me to try out this six week program to start getting used to being on an actual program. During the first week of that program, I was humbled. I couldn’t complete the programmed deadlifts, I bullshitted my depth with squats (which is a big no-no), and bench was bench. Nevertheless, I did make some newbie gains from it even though I bs’d my way through it.
Fast forward to towards the end of the year when I decided to go to this gym that I keep seeing these people go to. The person working the desk was a chick who was super nice who I now call my gym Ate (big sister) today! I introduced myself and told her I wanted to compete in the future and how I heard about the charity meet that this gym normally hosts. She was super encouraging and told me that I should do NJStates as my first meet since it was a good one to do as a first meet, and to again also not worry about comparing myself to others and to just compare myself to how I was before. So I made it a point to actually shoot for that as my first meet in addition to the charity meet, but there was still a very big missing piece of the puzzle.
Fast forward to the end of the year on new years eve, my friend’s friend showed up to the gym the same time I was there while I was doing a mini SBD day, sooo a couple weeks before that I remembered running into him and his friend at the bar, unfortunately thanks to alcohol he didn’t remember me. So talk about awkward, so I reintroduced myself and as I was leaving the gym and saying bye I went up to him and asked if he knew any coaches, at first he thought I wasn’t being serious, and then after 5 minutes he realized I was being serious, so he told me to get in contact with him in a couple of days.
The Prep, the registration, the lockdown, the reopening, and the prep (again)
Ah yes a new year, nothing bad is going to happen, even if there was it’s not like I have 2020 vision amirite? (okay that was really bad)
A couple days after the new year started, I found the same person online via Instagram, and once again got asked if I was being serious about getting a coach, so I said yes. Next thing I knew, I was sending over my contact information, getting a message from his coach, and sitting in a phone call with my coach at 8AM two days from that day.
I was super excited about being on a formal powerlifting program, and reading it on paper it wasn’t too bad, then after my first day on program, I could literally feel my soul leaving my body. I was unfortunately introduced to the devil that is known as split squats since I had never done them before.
I also had never done that many reps with a 2 second eccentric (basically the part going down in the squat) and same with bench, and don’t even get me started with deadlifts where the reps were pretty much x > 8. For those who know me, know that I can get really lazy and don’t push myself. Being under coach changed that completely from me, I would push myself even when I felt like I wanted to give up doing my lifts. It was definitely worth it because I felt myself getting stronger and more confident with lifting. Despite this I did get roasted on a lot of things, notably my depth of squats because I watched too many people on IG and it looked like they were only squatting parallel so I thought hey I should do that instead of going ass to grass.
A month in I ended up signing up for States, and contemplated on my life choices because I was going “OMG I’m finally doing this”
So after 2 months in being on program, ‘rona started ‘rona-ing around the area I’m at. Which meant the gyms shut down because it was a non-essential business. As the lockdown went on, I kept getting multiple emails about the status of the meet I had signed up for, which went from August! to November, and if gyms don’t open up soon its cancelled!
I’m not gonna lie during August, I wanted the meet to be cancelled. At the time we kept getting emails, I had no idea how I was going to be able to train with the gyms still not being open, along with the fact that I was balancing out other things in my life at the time. When September came along, the tweet from the gov’na finally came the gyms were going to open, and at the end of the month the meet director got word that the venue that States was gonna be at approved his plan.
So I was at a crossroads, I could either:
- Drop out of the meet and compete some other time
- Compete and accept that I wasn’t probably gonna hit anything spectacular and hope that I don’t embarass myself on the platform.
Naturally, I texted my coach who gave me a very long explanation about why its not a bad idea to do it and to just have fun and get some numbers on the board. The last question I had was if 8 weeks was enough time to do it, he said yes then next thing I knew I was on meet prep for my first lifting meet.
The Prep
Prep was definitely something interesting. Due to the ‘rona, I didn’t want to train at the normal time when I wasn’t working which meant that I was forcing myself to wake up extra early like when I was working to hit the gym. It was a struggle waking up at 5AM twice a week when I wasn’t working and I had to force myself to get out of bed and force myself to sleep early despite wanting to play video games. As time went on, it wasn’t that bad waking up and as prep went on I found myself looking forward to some of the days during the week because I enjoyed the accessories I had programmed. Also deadlifts my first three weeks on block were definitely….something.
I ended up experimenting with deadlifts and thought “I’m gonna train overhand grip instead of mixed grip because the weights are not that bad and my grip doesn’t suck”
It was pretty bad, I was dropping weight that I can easily pull, I primarily blame my desire to lift double overhand due to reading horror stories of people tearing their bicep. ( 0/10 Do not recommend reading or watching YouTube vids). Also, I was experimenting with hook grip and my thumbs hated me since I felt like my thumbs were getting ripped out of my hand.
About I think it was 4 weeks into prep my coach pretty much had to intervene with my grip with deadlifts and bottom line pretty much just went “yeah, use chalk and mix your grip”.
As time went on, prep didn’t get any easier, but it’s nothing compared to what I’m going through now for my second meet prep, before I knew it 8 weeks were up and it was time for the meet.
7 out of 9 lifts and first place!
That Friday morning, I ended up waking up way too early and couldn’t go back to sleep. Before I knew it my alarm was going off and it was time for me to wake up.
When I arrived at the venue I was really shy and awkward registering and getting things ready, and it was pretty obvious. A lot of the people who were around could pretty much tell that my nerves were eating at me and gave me some very supportive and encouraging words. In fact, the person who weighed me and was in charge of taking my opening attempts was trying to tell me to be more confident while talking to them.
So due to the ‘rona, extra precautions were taken to make sure people weren’t crowding the warmup room, so there was a lot of down time in between flights and warming up. I hadn’t practiced commands, the most I did was watching my senpais IG videos of their meet videos, and watching raw nationals in 2019 to see how a meet is. While warming up I made a bunch of friends who were also first timers and understood the pain of being a newbie and having a fear of bombing out.
So how did I do? For my first meet, I went 7/9 and won 84+ in open!
Overall: 7/9
Squats — 2/3
OOO — 264.5lbs/119.8kg
OXX — 275.6lbs/125kg
OOO — 297.6lbs/ 135kg
Bench — 3/3
OOO — 121.2lbs/55kg
OOO — 137.8lbs/62.5kg
OOO — 143.2lbs/ 65kg
Deadlift — 3/3
XXX — 292.1lbs/132.5kg
OOO — 303.1lbs/137.5kg
OOO — 314.1lbs/142.5kg
Total-342.5kg/755lbs
No lie I had an amazing time after my first meet and was immediately bit with the competition bug after that day. I also had a goal to become a little bit more extroverted after that meet around the lifting community because as much coach said some of the people are the most supportive people you’ll ever meet. In terms of the actual meet, I was satisfied with my performance with only a short amount of time prepping, but I was also not satisfied because I wanted to be able to hit higher numbers. Unfortunately at that time, I couldn’t afford to compete again because, at the time I was still job hunting, so when it was time to register for that exact same meet again, I couldn’t do it, but a couple months later I would soon get an opportunity to potentially compete again.
Second Meet — 12 days out as of today
As of writing this reflection and entry about my first meet a year ago, I’m 12 days out to my next meet as of today. No lie every now and then I think back at how far I’ve come from being that girl at the weight room in college scared of bulking up to that girl who just wants to squat and deadlift two plates to now being that girl at the gym who random people go up to complimenting about either the gains I made or how much weight I’m lifting. In the span of I guess 5 years of lifting I’m amazed and also still slightly terrified at my progress at times.
I honestly probably won’t forget my first meet and the prep I went through for it as well as the struggles of wanting to compete in the middle of a pandemic. For one, as I constantly mention on my IG this prep for this meet is a whole other level compared to what I went through last year. Its an understatement when I say I’m extremely hyped up to compete for my next meet while also being extremely nervous, but I know I’m coming into it prepared and it’s gonna be magical. 8)
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading something different that isn’t coding related on my medium! It took me over a year to actually publish this because I forgot that this entry was sitting in my drafts!
