Amarillo SC Powerlifting Meet

Posted on April 5, 2010 by Justin

My friends Ryan and Heidi at Amarillo Strength and Conditioning hosted their first powerlifting meet back on March 13th. If I recall correctly, they were looking to get the event sanctioned, but by doing so it would have delayed the date. They just wanted to have a competition, and they weren’t worried about it being officially official, at least this first time out.

They had 20 people participate and Neil Eddins, who holds some national Masters powerlifting records in NASA, stopped by to help out. The meet went well, and they had a lot of their lifters set PR’s, and they raised some money for the Rockwell Road Baptist Church Children’s Ministry.

I commend the Amarillo SC crew for having this meet for a few reasons. First, it got a lot of their lifters to lift in a meet environment. This is good for the lifter and coach, and everyone learns from doing it. The lifter learns all that stuff about themselves, the coach learns all kinds of stuff about handling lifters at the meet, and then the meet director learns about running a meet — all important things to learn if you’re going to be involved in this kind of stuff. Some of you may be thinking, “Well, it wasn’t sanctioned, so it doesn’t count, so what’s the point?” I think it’s good that they ran a meet once before they did it for real. This way they won’t screw up the official one, they’ll have the experience, and they will be ready for it. It was also a nice, harmless way to introduce their lifters into competition since they didn’t have to travel away from their own gym, and probably didn’t have to pay a bunch of money for something that they hadn’t done before.

In any case, everything went well, according to Ryan when we talked about it. I’ve never been to Amarillo SC, but Ryan frequents the comments and always has good things to say about their lifters. I will be visiting Amarillo SC on April 24th for the first 70’s Big Workshop (more on this tomorrow). Below are the top finishers in the two weight classes per gender (they had light and heavy weights) as well as a video compilation (Ryan apologizes for some sideways shots, it was his first video — oh and the high squats were red lighted, so don’t worry about bitching about them).

All results were determined with the Wilks Formula.’

Top 2 Lightweight Males (<185 lbs)
1. Brent Gunnels
BS of 375
BP of 330
DL of 450

2. Jason Rel
BS of 375
BP of 250
DL of 405.

Top 2 Lightweight Female (<145 lbs)

1. Heidi Coffman
BS of 200
BP of 130
DL of 260

2. Whitney Rel
BS of 175
BP of 95
DL of 200

Heavyweight Male Winners (>186 lbs)
1. Brent Story
BS of 500
BP of 340
DL of 500

2. Grayson Benson
BS of 385
BP 0f 275
DL of 470

Top 2 Female Heavy Weights (>146 lbs)
1. Tina Lucero
BS of 220
BP of 135
DL 0f 340

2. Lindsey Criswell
BS of 230
BP of 125
DL of 250

The Overall Winners were Brent Story and Tina Lucero

The Amateur

Posted on April 2, 2010 by Justin

“Mmmm…you smell like outside!”

Dang, some of you are too gullible. In fact, did you know gullible is not even in the dictionary? Look it up if you don’t believe me.

In any case, it’s PR Friday. Post your weight lifted, consumed, or gained, and also post all of the temperamental moments you had when someone pulled an April Fool’s joke on you.

———-

My friend Spencer Hall from SB Nation is known as “The Amateur”, the guy who can’t do anything as good as those who can. Well, recently he shot up to Charlotte to witness his first powerlifting meet. This was the “Battle of the Border” meet that AC competed in a few weekends ago. Spencer wrote an article for the SB Nation readers who are more than likely not familiar with powerlifting. He highlights AC quite a bit, and there’s a pretty funny video at the end. Even if he didn’t talk about my pal Ace, I still would enjoy this article — Spencer had me laughing my ass off. For example:

Unfortunately…a mustache [that Spencer is wearing] brands you as:

a.) A gregarious pedophile

b.) A new expat from the Middle East

c.) A misplaced fisherman

d.) Nick Offerman, also known as Ron Swanson on NBC’s hit sitcom Parks and Recreation

And here is an exchange between Spencer and AC:

I ask him how much his hair is worth on a lift.

“The hair? Oh, that’s ten pounds, easy.”

“The beard is five, right?”

“Definitely. And you have to wear the singlet. This one is my dad’s. His balls were in this singlet.”

He wears a look of pride on his face as he says this.

“Singlets are cool. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

The article is very fucking funny, and Spencer has a nice little description of an outsider’s view of a powerlifting meet. We’ll probably hear from him again in the future.

A New Outlook

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Justin

Edit: The caption on the picture didn’t go through last night. It has since been updated.

Hey, maybe I’ve been to hard on the skinny guys. Whatever you want to do in order to be happy, you should do it. If you want to shave your chest, maintain some sexy abs, and pull in the ladies, then why not, eh? Nothin’ wrong with tryin’ to impress the ladies, right?

Look, we don’t need to eat all of this food. We can get BIG, and we can get strong if we eat healthy (it may take 10 years to increase your lean body mass by five pounds, but hey, slow and steady wins the race, knowhatImean?). I challenge each and everyone one of you to get a healthy serving of green vegetables today — THREE TIMES!! I think it’s time we start focusing on our health. After all, if you eat like we have been recommending for six months, then you’ll turn into a swarthy, obese, unhealthy mother fucker who isn’t very useful. By GOD, my friend Zach, the internet phenomenon, is SUCH a fat boy.

The 70’s Big stance is now one that revolves around lookin’ good and feelin’ good. Here is my 6 step program:

1. Eat less red meat. It has all kinds of things in it that you don’t need, especially if you are hitting glutes and cardio five days a week.

2. Three servings of vegetables a day keeps you slim, trim, with abs as sharp as a pin.

3. Cycle your abdominal exercises throughout the week so that you don’t exhaust one ab. If you want at least a six pack, then you better hit each pack by itself lest it shall be overtrained and grow angry.

4. Take your shirt off around other guys. It shows that you are okay with your sexuality and will be the primary method in finding a mate in the proximity.

5. Eat protein, but not too much. You can’t assimilate all of if anyway, and you don’t want it stored as excess fat!

6. Buy a mirror — two if you can. You should monitor your progress frequently. If your abs aren’t smashing diamonds in two, then you better sharpen your game, son.

But in all seriousness guys, it’s time to start lookin’ good and feelin’ good. Mmmm…can you smell it?

Continue reading →

Your First Lifting Meet

Posted on March 31, 2010 by Justin

I started a little series called Your First Weightlifting Meet that went into detail how a trainee should prepare for their first Olympic Weightlifting meet. I will follow up that post with some general stuff you should know about the meet itself. There will also be a powerlifting version of this post, and it will be either written by or commented by my friends (and powerlifting veterans) Andy Baker and Phil Stevens.

Today, I’m just going to give very general guidelines for competing in either sport. This will not be comprehensive on purpose as it will help you start thinking about what will happen on meet day.

Get Someone To Handle You
No, they aren’t going to have their hands all over you, pervert. “Handling” someone at a meet means you are their platform coach, and you will be dictating their attempts. If you are going into your first meet, it would be preferable to have an experienced lifter helping you out. I understand that this is a luxury for most people, but if you can weasle your way into it, your experience will be profoundly different.

A good platform coach will count your attempts (weightlifting) and/or know where you stand in your flight (powerlifting). They can update you on this knowledge so that you know when to hit your warm-ups in the warm-up room, or they will even dictate your warm-ups. They will be your objective friend, deciding what jumps you should make in your subsequent attempts. If this is someone that has been working with you, they will also be able to help out with your technique. In other words, having a platform coach will make you feel better. I’ve been fortunate enough to coach with and be coached by Rippetoe at meets. He is very good at challenging his lifters when they need an extra kick in the ass. My friend Josh Wells has helped me out a lot as well, and I don’t know if I would have had the small amount of success I have had without them.

Be Smart
Choose an easy opener, especially on your opening lift of the competition. You should gracefully execute your first snatch and you should fucking annihilate your first squat. This will set the tone for the rest of your day. You will do something that you know you can do. This means you are hitting a routine snatch — something you’ve done in training plenty of times. In powerlifting, this should be something you know you could do for a triple. You want it to be easy so that you get on the board. If you bomb out (or miss all of your attempts on that lift), then you don’t total. Trust me, you don’t want this to happen.

Your second attempt can match a gym PR so that you can bring your competition total up. The third attempt should be your PR attempt. If you play it smart, then you’ll add to your total with each lift. Your goal in your first meet should be to go 6 for 6 in weightlifting and 9/9 in powerlifting. This means you’ll play it a bit conservative, but this is fine in your first meet. It leads me to my next point…

Have Fun
For fuck’s sake, you’re in your first lifting meet. You don’t want to go home disappointed, so purposely set yourself to enjoy it. You want to walk away knowing that there was more weight on the bar. If this happens, then you’ll already be thinking about PR’ing at the next meet. You’ll feel so razzed and accomplished. This is what is supposed to happen. The last thing you want is for your first meet to turn into a shit storm. So be conservative with your attempts. Open with something that is painstakingly easy. It should be so easy your teeth hurt. Do something moderate on the second attempt. This means that you would have had to have done it before. Third attempts are when you do something hard. Stick to this template. Have fun. For fuck’s sake.

Weight
Oh, yeah. Don’t cut weight. That’s silly. You don’t need one more thing to worry about if this is your first meet. If you think you are going to be competitive in a certain weight class, then you will deal with that later. Just sign up for the meet, don’t worry about your body weight, lift well, and then take stuff like this into consideration. Don’t be silly, just set yourself to have a good day.

The previously mentioned Andy Baker will also talk about how a novice would tailor their linear progression to get ready for a meet, so stay tuned for that.

And the results are in…

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Justin

Yesterday’s polls will, at the very least, make good conversation material. I don’t necessarily know if the polls are a good indicator of the entire readership on 70’s Big, but they are at least a glimpse. We have to make a lot of assumptions in order to generalize; did I word the questions properly (probably not), did you interpret them correctly (unlikely), did you answer them truthfully (erroneous), and if the sample size is indicative of the entire readership (who knows?).

In any case, there are some telling results.

70’s Big Is A Sausage Party
I blame this on all of you. I try to reach out to females, really, I do. I do it at the gym too, but the truth is, there aren’t going to be a lot of girls coming into the WFAC, and not a lot of girls are going to accidentally coming across 70’s Big either.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t prefer sausage parties. It’s not a homophobic thing, it’s just that I’d prefer to have some gals hanging out too. This means that you, the guy who is more likely to be reading this, must chat to your girlfriend, your wife, your lady friends, your cleaning lady — whatever — about strength training. My main goal isn’t to get more females reading the site; I just want more of them to get stronger. Everyone likes progress, and this means more strong. It also means a nice lookin’ butt, and this is a win-win for everyone. So, either you have to talk to them about strength training, or send them to someone who can teach them, because letting anyone grow up thinking that 30 minutes on the elliptical is going to yield sexiness and longevity is gonna be bad news bears for everyone.

We Are Mostly Young People
I consider someone in their thirties young. They think they are old. I don’t really think thirty-something is old, because I sure as hell am not going to think my life is nearing its end when I’m thirty. My friend Scott in Washington state is in his forties, and he is probably the most enthusiastic guy on a quest to 70’s Bigdom. In any case, a lot of us are young. We have the potential to influence a generation of popular culture that has taught the country that emaciated is not only okay, but what is desirable. And this is what we’re up against, my friends.

Gant just sent me a picture of someone in the airport, a poor guy wearing skinny jeans. Gant was most displeased with this display of societal influence (except he said something about a person like that should get gender reassignment therapy), and I’m upset that a guy thinks that being obscenely skinny is okay. I’m not saying that everyone is going to weigh 225, but men don’t weigh 150 pounds. Period.

But 70’s Big Readers Need To Grow
Half of the dudes who voted on their weight are less than 200 pounds. It’s not like people who read 70’s Big are all 5’6″ or shorter, so this needs to be addressed. I want you all stronger. If you are going to really achieve some potential in strength, you will need to gain some muscular bodyweight. Jeez, you guys who are less than 200 pounds seem like you’re mad at me for wanting to help you get strong.

Adult Males > 200 lbs.

Someone Did Something Wrong
Either you guys didn’t know how to train until recently, or your training sucked. If you have been training for at least one year, and you weigh less than 200 pounds, then something is fucked (females, the few of you are excluded from this comment). Get your muscular bodyweight up, and then address your bodyfat if you want. But if you’re one of these guys running around the internet claiming that gaining a little bit of fat with a lot of muscle is bad, then you’re just as much a goober as the stooges that say you should never wear a belt. Do a proper program while eating like we tell you and you will grow into a muscular behemoth.

Most Of You Are At Least Sorta Serious
The majority of voters have a tangible training log. This is good. The internet won’t always be available, especially when the zombie outbreak occurs. The few of you that don’t have a training log aren’t training, you’re fucking around. Decide if you want to get stronger. Decide if you want to be muscular. Females, decide if you want to get stronger. Decide if you want a nice butt. Barbell training and food can give it to you.