Nationals Recap

We all flew into DFW last night, and everyone but Brent rode up to Wichita falls and got in bed close to 4 AM (hence the late post). This year only Chris, Mike, and Alex competed at nationals. Brent pulled his hamstring a week out (yet still attended) and AC didn’t get his application sent in on time. If you’ve followed the site or the training logs, you know this is an…interesting experience when we are all in the same place. See Brent’s post for some specifics. Here’s the cut and dry performance with what each guy needs to work on in in their program.

Brent
[spoiler]Brent went 0/0 and scored really high on the “leave it, rather than take it” scale. He is still yet to beat the SC2 campaign, and allegedly has officially retired from competition…mostly because he hates traveling and sleeping on the floor in a room with Mike and Chris. We actually got our own room on Sunday night so we didn’t kill ourselves. We also sat together on the first flight leaving Scranton. Here’s a pic that I texted Chris followed by his response:


Chris was crammed in a seat that was by itself on one side of the plane. From the back of the plane (where Brent and I were) you could see his back hanging out into the aisle. It’s fine.
[/spoiler]

Alex
[spoiler]Alex is Mike’s brother and played football for four years at Plymouth State. He has very good structure and potential. He competed at 110kg/242lbs and was about 248 the day before. We had to use some cutting techniques to get him down, and he weighed in about a pound under. Right now Alex is a stronger squatter than deadlifter, and he went 3/3 and hit an excellent 584 on his third attempt. At that point, I think he was third in the weight class. Alex is a pretty good bencher given his limited experience in powerlifting — recently he hit a touch-and-go 405 — yet he needs work on the pause. He hit a pretty simple 369 on the second attempt, but missed 380 when the bar shifted down (towards his waist) off the chest. I probably should have gave him a 2.5 kilo jump to 375 lbs, but his goal was 380. Lastly, on deadlift, he hit a smooth 534 on his third attempt for an overall 20 pound PR (he pulled a real shitty looking 520 a month ago or so). Overall, Alex did really well in only his second meet going 8/9 and getting two big PRs on squat and deadlift (with a meet PR on bench). Not to mention that most of his training occurred while he went through and graduated from a fire fighter academy these last few months.

Alex mainly will be developing his deadlift (which looked really solid at the meet, better than in training) as well as getting more experience with the paused bench.[/spoiler]
675 kg/1485 lbs total

Mike
Edit: Here is Mike’s recap. He references the ideas I had the other day for his programming based on our breakdown after the meet.
[spoiler]Mike historically has pretty good meets where we have a solid, meticulous plan and execute it. We normally go at least 8/9 and PR on pretty much everything, yet this meet had some more downs than ups. This is mostly due to the fact that every six months he has to cut weight to get his waist circumference within regs for his PT test, and having a short, thick torso doesn’t help. In the last month mike gained about…30 pounds since his PT test (he competed in the 125kg/275lbs class). We opened with 540 on squat, which Mike hit, but looked slow in and out of the bottom. That worried me, so I emphasized bouncing the shit out of his second attempt at 556, a weight that was lower than what we originally planned. Mike was much sharper and made this meet PR look much better than the opener, although he didn’t crush it. Then I made a 7.5 kg jump to 573 (our high-end plan was going to be closer to 584). Mike descended slow despite me emphasizing needing to bounce the fuck out of it (he said it felt heavy), and had a slow in-and-out of the hole just like on the opener. However, he ground the fucker out and made the rep. After racking it, he was 2-1 red lights: no lift because of depth. We don’t have good video of this lift, yet the middle judge gave a red light for depth, which I thought was very odd. Mike has a weird shaped body with long, thick femurs and a big ass, so it would be easy to perceive him high. I saw his right side (the red lighted side) and he looked deep to me, but the judges don’t overturn lifts red-lighted because of depth.

We took an opener at 303 on bench — a meet PR that has alluded Mike for some time, including Military Nationals earlier this year (our method of programming has worked well for him) — and he smoked it. But wait, it was a mis-load and only 297. I decided to re-take the lift at the end of the round at the weight we actually called for instead of accepting it as our opener. Mike then hit 303 plainly after asking “We good?” to the loaders (his opening bench was mis-loaded last year at nationals too), but had to follow himself because his second attempt was the lowest in his flight (he hates this, so don’t mention it). He had a 4 minute clock after the bar was loaded, and hit an easy 314 on a second attempt that I stepped in to side spot since the loaders went to get a snack during the 4 minute clock. We then made a small jump for 319 on the third and he went 3/3 on bench for the first time in a while.

We took Mike’s last warm-up on the platform for deadlift at 545 which was obviously easy. Then we hit the intermediary jump at 595 on his second (about 10 pounds below his meet PR) which, like always, came off the floor fast, but then was locked out a bit slow (remember the long femurs?). I would have given him something like 617 for his third, yet we needed 628 to get a 1500 total. I put the pressure on Mike to make the lift, and it came off the floor fast and then…pretty much stalled at his lower thigh. It was too much to lock out that day.

We’ll be aiming to continue developing Mike’s bench (his weakest lift) with some more frequency throughout the week and we’ll be working on his lumbar/hamstring integrity with heavy pulls by using rack pulls more efficiently. I’m also going to shift him into using speed squats along with heavy squatting in the programming (more on this soon). [/spoiler]
667.5 kg /1468 lbs total

Chris
[spoiler]
Chris’ meet was mixed — it could have been better, but it could have been much worse. He weighed in close to 300 pounds (his heaviest yet) and competed as a super heavy. We had to warm up kinda fast on squat, and he was sweating his ass off and huffing and puffing in the warm-up room. It wasn’t like he had to hit several attempts within a short span, but it was faster than he needed to. I thought he’d be ready, but his opener at 622 was slow — which is very strange for Chris who is a strong squatter. I should have called for a lighter second attempt, but I figured that with more rest before the second attempt and emphasizing bouncing the rep that he’d be able to stick to the plan on squat and called for 644 — something he hit in his last meet on a third attempt. Chris missed 644 — it was just too heavy. I blame myself: I think I tapered him a little to early, warmed up a little too fast, and most importantly we had to travel to get to this meet (including a 12 hour delay at the Newark airport on Friday for Chris). We decided to wave the third because Chris said, “In training, if I don’t have it that day, I just don’t have it.” We conserved energy for the rest of the meet. This is a tight spot for a coach, especially with an anxious lifter like Chris. I had to get his attention, and pretty much say, “I know you’re pissed and upset about squat, but we still have the rest of the meet. It’s time to step up and be a competitor — we can worry about squat later, but let’s put all our focus into getting good reps on the bench and deadlift. Go take a walk and let it go on the walk. When you come back, let’s fucking have fun and compete.” To Chris’ credit, that’s exactly what he did, went on a two minute walk, and came back as the fun loving, Rated R kinda guy he is.

However he mis-heard me when I said “work up to 275 on bench and I’ll be right back” — I had Mike and Chris lifting on two different platforms and was managing both of them. When Chris was about 4 out, I went back and saw that he had only done 225 a second ago. He normally would go 275, 315, and 330 before opening at 352, but we only had time for the 275 and 315, and had to go straight to the comp platform after 315. Again, this is my fault. I made sure to use up as much as the clock as possible and sent him to the bench with about 25 seconds left. You’re supposed to get the “start” command before time runs out, and he was fucking around with his set up and got the “start” command with literally one second left — I was so close to shitting my pants. Chris isn’t a great bencher because of a shoulder injury he got while weightlifting; it had been bothering him in the past few weeks. We wanted to hit around 380, which he’s done in training, but I was more concerned with building his confidence after the squat fiasco. We took a simple 363 on the second to tie a meet PR, and then a hard 374 on the third attempt to set a meet PR. 3/3 and feeling good, as evidenced by him flexing his pecs and yelling “COME ON, DO IT NOW, KILL ME” when warming up for deadlift.

We took the last warm-up of 584 on the platform, which was easy. Then we took the intermediate jump of 628 on the second; it wasn’t slow, but it wasn’t as fast as I wanted. Our high-end plan was to hit 675 or 680 on deadlift (he hit a pretty simple 665 about 5 weeks ago), yet after seeing the second, I decided to lower it a bit to give him more of a chance on getting it (also, a few minutes prior, Mike had missed his third deadlift on the other platform and I didn’t want Chris to miss his). I gave him 666 — the devil’s number and told him to summon the demons. I just got goose bumps thinking about this pull — it was a battle the whole way but he never even thought to give up on it. He had to grind through every inch of the lift past his knees, up his thighs, and to the lockout, but locked it out while everyone in the area yelled at the top of their lungs. Chris is nothing if not a fighter. Then he walked in the back and said to Brent, “Double overhand? Nah, I’m good.” since he pulls with a double overhand hook grip. Chris placed 4th overall behind some big mother fuckers.

We’ve been joking around that Chris has been SPF (a fed that has a 308 weight class) since he was over 300 the other day. He’s always told me he’s wanted to be a 275 lifter, and we’re gonna put him on a program and gradual diet plan to drop some body fat off and maintain strength for a couple months. I’m also going to emphasize mobbing his dinged up shoulder, tweak his bench programming, and probably transition him into a more advanced type of program by the end of the year, although it’ll depend on his body fat/weight.[/spoiler]
755 kg/1661 lbs total