Enter the symposium here.

Symposium – a meeting or conference for the public discussion of some topic especially one in which the participants form an audience and make presentations

Gubernatrix is hosting an online symposium on women and strength training on March 8th, 2010, which is also International Women’s Day. You can access the symposium here, pre-register on the forum and introduce yourself. The symposium itself opens on 8th March.

Strongwoman Joan Rhodes chucks a man over her head for fun (photo from Life magazine)

The purpose of this symposium is to share experiences, generate ideas and inspire people to take action – to change perceptions of women’s strength, bust myths, get more women lifting heavy and generally break down barriers to strength training for women.

How will the symposium work?

I have invited several writers/strength athletes to compose a ‘think piece’ on a particular issue or challenge, to generate discussion.

These will be posted at the top of the forum thread for people to discuss within the thread. People may want to start new threads if discussions seem to be taking off in a certain direction. It’s up to you the participants to decide where you want the discussions to go.

What’s the big issue?

As most of you know, I have been lifting heavy weights for years, as a powerlifter, olympic weightlifter and even strongwoman.

But in the ten years I have been lifting I have seen very little progress in attitudes towards women strength training. The same myths about ‘getting bulky’ persist, year after year; women are still given bad advice in gyms and magazines; the free weights area is still an intimidating environment for most women.

I know that there are many women out there who would not only benefit from lifting heavy things but would really enjoy it too. I want to find ways to make weight training more accessible for women.

Understanding the issues

Putting the issues out there in a discussion forum should lead to some real insights into what motivates women with regard to training, strength, muscle, personal empowerment.

Of course you don’t have to be a woman to benefit from this kind of discussion – or indeed to take part! Since strength training is so male dominated, men are a very important part of the discussion and can have an immensely positive impact. Guys, we look forward to your input.

Taking action

I am lucky enough to have access to an incredible resource, women across the globe who are having fun and getting stronger, defying convention and forging their own paths. I have met you through this blog and through the Women’s Strength Training Network I set up on Facebook.

I hope this symposium encourages people to put their heads above the parapet and make a small difference in their communities. This could involve anything from encouraging friends to start lifting, to starting an all-women lifting group, writing about strength training, running workshops or even just be able to explain to people how beneficial and empowering strength training can be and cut through all the negative perceptions.

So do come along and take part at http://gubernatrix.co.uk/forum. You can drop in on 8th March at any time and join in the discussions. You will also be able to access the forum in the days following the symposium to see what was said and to continue the debate.

Photo by Takver

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems”
- Mahatma Gandhi

Getting stronger and fitter is an immensely powerful and rewarding process on a personal level. We can take that energy and ability and use it for even greater good and I am keen to explore – with you – ways of doing that.

Transition to what?

We are living in an age of transition, between a wasteful, energy-dependent, over-consumptive age and …well, we don’t quite know yet, but some kind of fall of civilisation is approaching – in fact it is probably already here.

As my favourite crash philosopher Ran Prieur comments, “It won’t be like falling off a cliff, more like rolling down a rocky hill. There won’t be any clear before, during, or after. Most people living during the decline and fall of Rome didn’t even know it.”

But what do we know? That food shortages, energy shortages, extreme weather, financial crises and massive migrations of people are just a few of the challenges we will be facing – are already facing – in the near future.

Those in charge tell us that if the system breaks down we will get anarchy and chaos, but in fact when the system fails us we tend to move closer together, create communities and find innovative ways to meet challenges.

This new society will require us to be more skilful, practical, adaptable and resilient. Physical strength and fitness is an important part of this resilience and the ability to cope with the inevitable changes (or improvements, if you prefer) in our lifestyle.

“…life will change less than the peak oilers are predicting, because we have so much room to cut out waste: to drive less often in more efficient cars, ride bicycles, turn off the heat and air conditioning, take the machines and industrial chemicals out of agriculture, stop flying food around the world. Gradually, more people will grow their own food, raise their own kids, tend their own health, do stuff with their own bodies instead of machines, and turn their attention from the stock market and TV characters to their more real lives. Those who can adjust mentally will recognize this as an improvement.”
- Ran Prieur

The functional fitness model is particularly well suited to a post-peak oil world: there’s no reliance on machines or heavy energy use; tools are homemade, equipment is simple; the movements are applicable to real life tasks; in fact the entire approach is about being strong and healthy, not just looking good.

Functional fitness tends to take place in small scale businesses such as garage gyms, involving local communities. There’s an emphasis on learning new skills, helping others and making progress, not an obsession with things being so easy that you switch off completely or simply follow like an automaton what an instructor tells you to do.

“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general.”
-    Mark Rippetoe

Functional fitness gives people strength, ability, confidence and independence from large scale systems, all of which are needed to build a new type of society. For me, functional fitness is strength. Strength is more important than endurance in a transitional age. I’d rather have the ability to pick up heavy, awkward objects than trot for ten miles.

I’m not dissing cardio endurance entirely, it all goes into the mix. But I’ve reached the point where the sight of millions of people fruitlessly pounding the pavements, who can’t even carry the equivalent of their own bodyweight across a car park, makes me want to jump up and down and possibly set myself on fire. Why hark back to a distant hunter-gatherer tradition when we don’t even have the ‘dad strength’ or ‘mum strength’ of the second world war generation?

Specialisation in terms of energy systems (long slow distance) is as counter-productive as any other type of specialisation. If you can run, that is fantastic. Now take the logical next step: pick up something heavy and run with that.

New challenges

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
- Dr. Howard Thurman

There is a transition that takes place, from pursuing physical fitness for purely selfish motives to thinking about wider, altruistic motives. Selfish motives are a perfectly good place to start – perhaps it is even necessary to go through a self-centered process in order to get completely comfortable with your physicality (my friends at Bodytribe have examined this issue in the past), but I don’t think that’s where it ends.

Having identified functional fitness, and strength in particular, as being ideal attributes for the new world we are living in, how do we join all these new ideas together? How do we start to make a difference to our communities? If you have a passion for strength and fitness and if you care about what happens in and to our world, why not use the former to help the latter?

It can be as simple as doing a workout in aid of an issue you care about: my friends at Crossfit Reading organised a sponsored workout for Haiti last weekend. Or it can be a longer term project running low cost training sessions for the local community, like Chip Conrad does in Sacramento.

There are a number of issues that have caught my eye over the years and I want to start personally making a difference in these areas.

1. Strength bias

Governments and local authorities think they are making great strides in ‘health and wellbeing’, but from what I can see there is very little emphasis on resistance/strength training and functional fitness, and far too much emphasis on high impact cardio and – for want of a better term – pointless jigging about.

I’m part of FK.UK, an umbrella organisation for functional fitness in the UK and I hope that we can influence the agenda by making sure that sound and trustworthy information about strength training gets to as wide an audience as possible.

2. Strength equality

There’s still a real issue around social inclusion and strength ‘equality’. For anyone who isn’t a policy wonk, that means making sure that people who are disadvantaged or marginalised can still get the benefits of better strength and fitness. The functional fitness world appears to be very much a white middle class male pursuit at the moment – shouldn’t we take active steps to change this?

Strength in particular is a gender equality issue. Women haven’t had the same access to strength training that men have, nor is it nearly as socially acceptable for women to be strong as it is for men – and there’s no good reason why this should be the case. Quite frankly, we need all the strong people we can get!

Fitness professionals and governments alike persist in giving out wrong information to women about strength training. I’ve recently set up the Women’s Strength Training Network on Facebook to help combat this by supporting women who are already strength training and generate new ideas about how to get the messages out to a wider audience.

3. Sustainable food

It is important to link healthy eating with sustainable food and farming. Personally I put ready meals and battery farmed chicken in the same ‘utter crap’ category. I’ve stopped eating meat because I just don’t trust it any more. Even if you are careful only to buy free range chicken at the supermarket, for example, what happens when you go out to a restaurant – do you check the provenance of the meat there? I thought it was easier not to eat it at all.

The food industry is now so global, mechanised and industrialised that it is no longer possible to be a responsible citizen and ignore the politics of food production. Food and farming are a big part of climate change (impact of livestock farming on carbon emissions and potential food shortages due to the effects of climate change being two examples), environmental damage, animal welfare, people welfare (fair trade). Food security is as big a concern as energy security but the solutions are likely to come from communities getting together and deciding to do something about it.

So I want to know what you think about all of this. Do you link your fitness with broader aspirations in your life, and if so, how? Are there particular issues that the strength community can contribute to? How do you shape not just a new person but a new world?

“It took me years to fully appreciate the value of the lessons I have learned from the Iron. I used to think that it was my adversary, that I was trying to lift that which does not want to be lifted. I was wrong. When the Iron doesn’t want to come off the mat, it’s the kindest thing it can do for you. If it flew up and went through the ceiling, it wouldn’t teach you anything.”

- Henry Rollins, The Iron

The last year has been a new chapter in my strength training journey as I made the move into competitive powerlifting in December 2008. It happened smoothly, naturally, but it has significantly changed the way I train.

Instead of exploring how strong I can get from week to week or from month to month, I now think long range. I think about what is important to me over the coming year, what competitions I want to do and how I am going to manage the training volume. In fact this is a good way (though not the only way) to plan your training whether you compete or not, but it has taken the move into competitive lifting to teach me the value of this process.

My friend Tommy Meredith prepares to squat

I have now completed one year’s ‘cycle’ in the sport. I started in the BDFPA (British Drug Free Powerlifting Association) with a regional competition, qualified for the nationals and then got an invitation to the Worlds – which conveniently were held this year in the UK. Most recently I’ve done my regional qualifier for this year’s nationals, so starting a new annual cycle.

Over the past year I’ve done five meets, won two silvers at national or international level, set four regional records and managed six competition Personal Bests (not including my first competition).

This is an opportunity to look back at what I’ve learned, tell a few stories and pass on advice to anyone who is interested in getting started in this sport of powerlifting.

Being a novice

Some people say that the best way to improve is to get involved in competitions as early as possible. It took me several years before I started competing but you don’t have to follow my example.

I have seen some novice lifters lift fairly small weights; they are clearly capable of lifting much more. It’s up to you where and how you choose to start. Novices get just as much respect and support as everyone else. We all like to see new lifters coming into the sport and there’s no minimum weight at the local or regional level.

After my first meet I wrote:

“The fact that you turn up and lift is enough for people to get behind you. It really doesn’t matter how much is on the bar; if you are out there making an effort everyone supports you.”

This experience has given me the confidence to enter an olympic weightlifting meet next year. All I need is the ability to execute the snatch and the clean and jerk with some kind of form and I’m there!

Read more about my first meet

Fellowship

I was struck by the friendliness and fellow feeling at my first meet and this experience has continued.

“It’s a nice sport…Although you are competing against other lifters, you’re also competing against that numb lump of iron that’s on the floor, so everybody shouts for everybody else.”

-    Eddie Bennett, Bradford University Powerlifting Club

The way everyone shouts and cheers for you is quite addictive. It is a privilege to feel a crowd of complete strangers willing you to make your lift. I’ve heard elite athletes say this in post-event interviews but never imagined I would get to have that experience too.

Psyching up

“There seems to be a trend in some strength sports, especially powerlifting (not so much in weightlifting), that the violence against the bar needs to be demonstrated in personality and action before the lift and by everyone involved. Shouts, screams, huffs and the loudest music available seem to be common staples, dare I say trends, amongst powerlifting gyms. Why? Because it works. It really does.

But not for everyone.”

-    Chip Conrad, Bodytribe, Effort over outcome

This is probably most people’s idea of a powerlifting meet, especially if you’ve been watching videos on youtube. The reality, at least in my experience, is quite varied.

Everyone has a different way of psyching up. Some people get very quiet. Some people are plugged into their ipod. Some people need a shout and a slap, others prefer a quiet but intense few words in their ear.

Personally I like a quiet lead up but when I’m actually going out on the platform to lift, I like a lot of loud encouragement. To outsiders it might seem a bit silly, but it truly makes a difference to have someone yell the word ‘Strong!’ in your ear as you go to lift. For those of us who train for strength, it’s a powerful, emotive word.

Hearing your preferred cues is also very helpful. When I walk out onto the platform sometimes my mind goes blank. You might think there’s nothing simpler than a deadlift but sometimes I find it hard to remember what I’ve got to do. This is when a coach or friend shouting “chest up!” or “knees out” can really help.

The influence of a good spotter can’t be underestimated either. To have a strong, trusted person behind you who knows what to say and when to say it, is often the difference between making a lift and not making it. My friend Andy used to say “breathe, take your time” when spotting me for the squat. It sounds simple but one of the easiest things to do in powerlifting is to rush your lift and not breathe properly.

It might look lonely out there on the platform but there are times when I feel not alone at all. With a friend spotting you behind and a great crowd yelling at you in front, you can feel wonderfully supported.

I think it’s a beautiful thing, the strength and belief you can instill in someone with the right word at the right time.

Dave Beattie of Genesis Gym psyches Andy Bolton up to break the world record in the deadlift. Whatever he said, it worked!

Being present

When you lift a very heavy weight, as heavy as you can, you have to be in the moment, you have to be right there, otherwise you won’t make it. This is for me one of the compelling aspects of lifting weights – and one of the most difficult.

Sometimes it’s hard to finish a lift. Doubt creeps in, something goes a bit awry and your will to finish can disappear. This can even happen in an Olympic lift; it’s fast, but it’s not faster than the speed of thought!

However, if you can summon every ounce of concentration and really put yourself in the moment, you can banish these thoughts.

“All you have control of is now, make the most of now…when you think ahead in the future it prevents you from being in the moment now, and when you are in the moment is when you are able to do things that other people can’t understand”

- Daniel Ilabaca, Traceur

During the Worlds, the atmosphere backstage was more intense than I had experienced before. Between attempts, especially failed attempts, lifters tended to sit quietly, concentrating on what they needed to do next.

I missed a couple of my second lifts. I found that missing a lift focuses the mind much more than if you make your lift. I knew why I had missed and I knew what I had to do to fix it. So I just concentrated on that, repeating what I had to do over and over again in my head.

Technique

“The term ‘gym lifters’ has been applied for many years to lifters who can lift much more in training than on the platform. In this case it is apparent that emotional stress during competition exerts a negative effect, not on the obviously adequate levels of strength or power, but on the technical skills required.”

- Mel Siff, Supertraining

When you miss a lift in competition, at least at my inexperienced level, it’s not always to do with lack of strength. Often it is a technique issue or a mental psyche-out that can be fixed in time for the next attempt or the next meet. I missed my opportunity to attempt PBs at the Worlds because I missed some of my second lifts, but I made them a few weeks later at the regionals, not because I suddenly got stronger in those weeks but because I sorted out the technique and mental issues that were bugging me.

The one cue that seems to work for every lift, especially squat and bench, is ‘down slow, up fast’. It should perhaps be a powerlifting motto, although it’s not as cool as ‘dip, grip and rip’ (which refers to the deadlift, if you didn’t get it).

For a small number of people, dropping fast into the squat or bench kinda works, but for most people it seems to cause mistakes – usually going too deep or low and not being able to come back up. So, slow it down.

But ‘up fast’ is important too. This doesn’t mean that you actually move very fast; the weight is too heavy for that. But the intention is to move fast, the intention is to lift the bar explosively.

Peaking

Peaking for your event is hard. That’s one of the reasons top athletes have coaches. Dan John conveniently doesn’t believe in peaking:

“It’s true there are people who’ve peaked. I’d argue, however, that there are far more people who’ve trained to peak and failed.”

Verkhoshansky is also not a fan of periodisation and peaking, particularly for elite athletes (of which I am definitely not one!), since the competitive calendar has become so full.

I have learned a lot about expectations this year. I have had PBs in most competitions and yet there have been many times I have come off the platform feeling a dissatisfied. Why? Because I didn’t set the world of powerlifting alight? Well…..duh! (eloquence fails me at this point).

After the nationals back in April 2009 for which I trained hard and tried to ‘peak’ for the competition, I simply felt knackered and jaded. I took a long time off lifting – two and a half months. I came back into the gym at the end of summer somewhat detrained, but I did feel better and enthusiastic for the task in hand.

I’m not drawing too many conclusions about peaking from this one experience, but I feel that I perhaps invested too much emotional energy in this one event, which ended up disrupting the rest of the year.

At 34, I’m not trying to qualify for the Olympics. Next year I plan to adopt a more relaxed attitude to the competitive calendar. I will still structure my training to some extent around key dates but I plan to maintain a state of strength ‘readiness’ for a longer period of time. More frequent de-load weeks may help, rather than a training binge followed by collapse.

You have to experiment of course, but as you get older it seems to become more important to ‘nudge up’ the increases gradually rather than go all-out for significant improvement.

Meets

Powerlifting, being a multi-event competition, is a bit like a triathlon. You can win a meet on the deadlift, just like you can win a triathlon on the run. You can also win a meet by having a good squat and bench, just like you can win a tri by being a good swim-biker. But it is more difficult and you have to be decent in all three events.

You also need to be having a good day right from the start; big deadlifters can fall back on their deadlift at the end of the day. Not literally, though. That would be a ‘no lift’ and possibly a bit painful…

At the Worlds, going out for my first deadlift, I stood in front of the bar and suddenly had a complete blank on the rules. If you don’t follow the rules you get a ‘no lift’ regardless of whether you lifted the weight or not. But I simply looked at the judge in front of me and said, “Can you just go over the rules for the deadlift please?”. There’s nothing wrong with asking and it is always better to know. I have seen many people fail a lift because they weren’t sure of the rules and got them wrong. Heartbreaking when you’ve just put your soul into the effort and it hasn’t counted.

Conclusion

There haven’t been many ‘amusing’ anecdotes from this year. It doesn’t seem to be that kind of sport. We turn up, we lift, we cheer, we go home. A lot of the drama happens on the inside.

Many people think that watching powerlifting or weightlifting is boring. I have a lot of sympathy with this. If you are not involved on some kind of emotional level, it probably is a bit boring. But once you are in it, that’s a different story. So don’t go to a meet as a spectator, go and enter it! You’ll have a much better time.

More from gubernatrix

• Mystery of the squat
• On not making progress
• National powerlifting championships: where next?
• First powerlifting meet

Folks, I have started a group on Facebook called the Women’s Strength Training Network. I hope many of you will join it. It is independent of this website, although clearly there’s a lot of synergy in the content.

The aim is fourfold:

Be a source of support for women who are ‘out there’ strength training, usually in a male-dominated environment.

Lots of us are or have been the ‘only woman in the weights room’ and while most of the time we just get on with it and enjoy it, sometimes it is nice to have other women to chat to about strength, or simply to know that there are other women doing what we are doing. It’s hard not to feel like a freak sometimes – but there are more of us than we think! The group will demonstrate this clearly.

Highlight inspirational feats of strength by women and positive role models for female strength – not necessarily elite athletes either!

No matter how internally driven you are, it is always good to see inspirational people doing amazing things. From elite athletes pushing the boundaries to ‘ordinary’ people overcoming obstacles to achieve their goals.

Something I hear about from men in particular is the difficulty of finding postive role models to show their partners or female friends, and to combat the many myths about strength training for women that abound. Guys, this group is your answer!

Raise aspirations and standards in women’s strength training.

Women have the potential to be very strong but most women – and men who train them – have little idea what they should be aiming for. Someone once said to me that the biggest problem with female athletes is male coaches – and he was talking about the low expectations that some coaches have for female strength. So without getting too gung-ho, let’s explore what some objective strength standards are (I’ve done this elsewhere on this site but let’s expand that discussion) and back it up with experience and evidence.

Get more women into strength training

This group is primarily for women who have already decided that they want to get stronger. I’m sceptical about attempts to proselytize to so-called cardio bunnies; I don’t want to force anyone to lift weights who doesn’t want to.

That said, there are messages about the benefits of strength training that are being lost. If more women knew that strength training would strengthen their bones and joints, help them lose fat, make them fitter and more mobile and generally improve their quality of life for decades to come, maybe they’d give it a go. There are many people out there pounding the pavements who don’t particularly enjoy it but think it is the path to good health. Maybe they’d prefer weight training…

Discuss!

In the next few days and weeks I’ll start some discussions on these and similar topics in the group and I do hope you’ll join in – and start some of your own.

I’ve disabled comments on this post because I hope that if you have thoughts to share you will post them on the group site.

More food for thought:

• The toning problem: why women are missing out when it comes to free weights
• Why do most women still avoid the free weights room?
• Strength standards for women

So, an Irishman, an Australian and an American walk into a bar….and among other things they decided to open a gym, Informed Performance in Dublin, and invite coach, athlete, philosopher and all-round good guy Dan John to come and deliver a two-day seminar, download 42 years of strength training wisdom and share a few beers in the process.

As soon as I heard this was happening, I knew that I must go – if I had to sell my grandmother, swim the Irish Sea and sleep in the carcass of a dead sheep to do it.

Dan John has garnered many fans over the years through his straight-talking, insightful articles, recently collected into the book Never Let Go. Every article is an ‘a-ha!’ moment that suddenly makes one’s goals seem clearer and closer. It’s a rare gift and one that Dan has always been keen to share with as many people as possible.

From far and wide we came, from Finland and Germany, from Aberdeen and London and from all over Ireland. We were a mixed bunch, from powerlifters to rugby players, personal trainers to enthusiastic amateurs.

But what we all shared – Dan John down to every last participant – was a passion for training, a desire to plumb the depths not just of particular movements but strength training philosophy, programming rationale, maximising nutrition, supplementation and recovery, the emotional landscape – in short, everything that makes the difference between success and failure.

Read on for the full story >>

Goal setting is of the utmost importance in training successfully. It is probably second only to not injuring yourself (which would mean that you couldn’t train at all).

The problem with most of us – the people reading this blog – is that we want to do too much. We don’t, on the whole, spend all our free time lounging on the sofa stuffing our faces. Not unless we’ve done a hundred burpees first. So we’re less likely to die from heart disease, which is nice, but we want more than simply not to die from a preventable illness.

How many people have read (or written) a post on a forum like this:

“I want to lose fat, gain muscle, run a marathon, get a triple bodyweight deadlift, do twenty pull ups, become a competitive Olympic weightlifter and play football with my mates at the weekend…”

I have a lot of sympathy with this; I want it all too. But here’s the problem: often such goals are listed as if they are all achievable in around the same timeframe with around the same effort. But this is not the case at all. Here’s how I think it breaks down:

Fat loss
This is actually one of the easiest goals there is (and weight loss is even easier). It is also one of the quickest to achieve. The problem for most people is that they are not prepared to do what needs to be done to achieve it. Dan John showed in his Velocity Diet experiment that you can drop a lot of fat in 28 days if you go at it with complete focus. Whereas no-one in the world can master the Olympic lifts in 28 days.

You might choose to lose your fat nice and slowly, but you can lose half a stone of fat in 4-8 weeks without too much hardship.

Playing football with your mates/running a marathon
I’d put these in the same category even though they sound like vastly different challenges. In fact you can train for a marathon in around six months, less if you have some fitness background. You probably won’t post an elite time but we are built to run long distances very slowly. Getting fit to play football (soccer) is similar – we’re talking a few weeks or months of conditioning.

Competitive weightlifting
Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about qualifying for the Olympics, I’m talking about entering a local meet. Even so, mastering the lifts to the extent that you can do something reasonable in a local meet will probably take at least a year or two. Powerlifting is the same; it’s not as technical but it takes time to build up the strength needed. I have seen people go into their first meet and lift very light weights; there’s nothing wrong with that to gain experience, but if you want to be close to competitive even at a local level, you need at least a couple of years of training behind you unless you are naturally gifted.

Triple bodyweight deadlift
I admire your ambition but is this even a realistic goal? Most people will never achieve a triple bodyweight deadlift and even for those who do, it could take years.

Doing all of the above in the same year

This is where people lose the plot (including me, all too often). Have you ever trained for a marathon? You can’t do anything else! You have to spend so much time out pounding the roads that you can barely fit in life, let alone other training goals. So that is six months, at least, where you will be doing extremely well if all your other abilities are simply maintained.

The same applies to maximum strength goals. If you want to get very strong, you may have to consider not doing anything else. That means no jogging, no Frans, no playing rugby on ‘off’ days….

The number of times I see people who want to get very strong saying that they still want to play football twice a week. Yeah, right. There’s no problem lifting weights and playing football, but if your deadlift is at 2 x bodyweight, the chances of you getting to 2.5 x bodyweight are very slim.

Of course there are goals that don’t take quite so much effort. Getting 100 push ups non-stop for example. You can train for that doing 10 minutes three times a week.

So there’s an issue with what it takes to achieve a particular goal. Sometimes you just have to focus on one thing and get it done, before moving onto the next thing.

Crossfit is an attractive system to many because it offers an opportunity to gain competence in a variety of cool-looking exercises while dropping body fat. For many people, this is perfect. But once you get seduced by particular movements and want to start competing, then you need to take a different view. You are training a sport now, and that means making choices.

Read Dan John on goal setting

Louise Fox deadlifting 3 x bodyweight in competition

Strength standards

It is always useful to know what a decent standard is in a particular lift. Perhaps a triple bodyweight deadlift is beyond most of us, but we’d like to get “good” at our lifts. Have a look at these strength standards. They were designed for women but they all work equally well for men apart from the bench press standard (where ‘good’ would be 100%, ‘very good’ would be 150% and ‘excellent’ would be 175%).

Here’s something else to bear in mind. I know this might shock you, but people on the internet don’t always tell the absolute truth about their lifts. Reading internet forums, it might seem as though there are millions of people in gyms up and down the land pulling over twice their bodyweight off the floor – so it’s strange when one doesn’t actually see this happen very much.

Often what happens is that people generously ‘round up’ their lifts. So perhaps they are 10 kg off their target but they think that 10 kg isn’t very much so they feel comfortable rounding up. This is like someone buying a dress that is a size too small thinking that they will definitely fit into it in four weeks’ time. Neither party has any idea how much effort it will take either to increase their deadlift by 10 kg or drop a dress size in four weeks. In my case, it could take me a year or more to increase my deadlift by 10 kg – if I’m really lucky!

Here is another shocking fact, folks. Many people who quote their maxes are quoting something they achieved ten years ago, not something they achieved yesterday. What really matters is how strong you are today.

I’m saying all this because it seems to me that many people’s ambitions are based on what they read other people on the internet claiming to achieve. If you want a reliable source of information, go and look at competition results in your chosen sport or activity. You don’t need to look at the world records, find the results of a local competition. See what people are achieving who actually turn up to an event, perform and are judged by their peers, not what people achieve in their own heads and then post on the internet.

Serena Williams

Sport strength standards

If you are training to support a particular sport, it is a good idea to have a set of standards that adequately reflect the needs of your sport. As a rugby player, say, or a martial artist there are going to be diminishing returns to increasing your strength and conditioning. It’s not that you can be too strong or too fit, but getting there can impinge on your ability to play your sport.

Coaches like Will Heffernan or Dan John, who work with athletes all the time, have evolved their own set of standards. Getting strong for sport is not about going in and hammering the power lifts to get as high a number as possible. It’s more about developing a well rounded athlete who doesn’t have glaring weaknesses.

As an example, here are Will’s strength standards:

• Trap bar deadlift 2 x bodyweight
• Bench 1.5 x bodyweight (1 x bodyweight for women)
• Push ups 50 in 1 minute
• Inverted rows (chest to bar) 30 in 1 minute
• Pull ups 12+ (if under 100kg – will be less for women)
• Pull ups 8+ (if over 100kg)

The point is to be able eventually to achieve all of these standards as a way of maximising your capabilities for your sport. If you can cane 50  push ups in 1 minute easily but you have trouble getting more than a handful of inverted rows, you have an imbalance that would benefit from being sorted out, since it is probably having an effect on your game.

Of course, testing well won’t instantly make you an elite athlete. If you achieve all these standards and you’re still not very good at your sport it simply means you can no longer blame your lack of strength.

Read more about Will’s testing philosophy

Setting expectations

Generally for any sport or activity improvements are initially made quickly but slow down over time. You will not usually make the same progress in the second year as you made in the first six months. There may be exceptions – you may be introduced to an astounding new methodology that causes a great leap forward – but you can’t bank on it.

Similarly as you adapt to a particular movement or activity, it becomes harder to improve it. So it is not wise to base your expectations of getting your mile under 6 minutes on the period it took you to get your mile time from 8 minutes to 7 minutes.

This might sound painfully obvious but I see people do this all the time. Technique also plays a role here. The better your technique, the harder it is to improve, since you can no longer make those easy gains that come from simply doing the movement better.

In fact the longer you have been training the further you have to extend your training horizon. After years of training, I’m now starting to feel like a year is not long enough to plan my training because I’m now aware of how much (or rather, how little) progress I am likely to make in one year.

Here’s an example from powerlifting: I put 5 kg on my competition squat in the last year. To people who are relatively new to lifting that doesn’t sound like much at all. I have a long term goal of double bodyweight squat. If I continue to improve at the same rate, I will have a double bodyweight squat in five years time. I will be 39 years old. Actually, that sounds pretty cool. Five years seems a long time, but I know enough to understand that for this particular goal, we are talking years not months. A year ago, I wouldn’t have understood that.

The next thing to think about is whether I want to continue training powerlifting for the next five years in the way that is necessary to continue putting 5 kg on my squat. If I get distracted by running a marathon next year, then that five-year timeline will be retarded. How important is a double bodyweight squat to me? Is it cool enough to spend five years working on it? Obviously only I can answer that question but these are the sort of things we need to be asking ourselves. If a double bodyweight squat isn’t that important to me, I’m not going to do what needs to be done. I’m not going to be able to “keep the goal the goal”.

Conclusion

I’ve made every mistake in the book when it comes to goal setting. I’ve chosen incompatible goals, unrealistic goals, too many goals. These days I’m trying to apply to my goals a philosophy similar to what I apply to my life: fewer, simpler, slower.

The emotional involvement in training goals can take its toll. It is common for motivated individuals like us to put a lot of pressure on ourselves, to start out with high expectations and grand schemes. So it is correspondingly tough not to meet those expectations. You may think you did something wrong, but perhaps all that was wrong was that your expectation of progress was too high in the first place.

More from gubernatrix

• Strength standards for women
• Testing your one rep max
• Are you having a training experience?
• On not making progress

Christmas has come early here at gubernatrix.co.uk! Coach Dan John answers your training questions below. We got some interesting questions from people with a variety of needs and goals – from military personnel to bodybuilder to rugby player. So even if you didn’t ask a question, there is plenty to think about, try out and inspire.

Carolyn W from Sioux Falls, USA asks:

I’m in training for the USMC Officer Candidates Course for summer ‘10. As a female, I have to do a 70-second flexed arm hang, 3 mile run and 100 situps. However, I’m having trouble gaining the upper body strength I need to hang on the bar (I can only hang for about 40 seconds now) and survive OCC. As a former varsity D1 athlete, I learned a variety of lifting techniques, but my progress/gain is so slow I’m frustrated. I need/want to be stronger and I also have the goal of being able to do 25 pullups before I ship in May. How can I accomplish that?

Dan says:

First, focus on what you HAVE to do versus what you want to do. If OCC wants the hang, the run and the situps, that is what we are going to do…now. So, I want you to hang for twenty seconds in groups of five sets. Easy as you can…no stress. Try to do that up to five times a day. When that becomes so easy you can’t believe you are wasting your time doing it, sneak up to 35 seconds. Same plan…lots of submaximal attempts. Then, after about a week or so, test again. I’ll be amazed if you don’t nail the test easy, but if you don’t just keep doing the submax attempts. The situps should be a breeze, but try to do some every day. I suggest sit up “races” where you pound out as many as you can in ten seconds or 15 seconds. That’s how we groove push ups at our school. Once a boy can get twenty push ups in ten seconds, we know he is good for 100.

Running? Well, run. Same idea. Submaximal…easy breathing…don’t get crushed. From here, you can add some pure strength work. If you have the background, do the powerlifts. Learn to stay tight. For the pullups (25?), you will do what I do: whenever you can, you do some easy pullups. I’m up to dozens, if not 100s a day, simply doing 1-5 at a time whenever I pass a bar. But, goal one is goal one.

John Heaton from Wakefield, UK asks:

Hi Dan
I am a Natural Bodybuilder but I am heavily into functional athletic training as opposed to isolated aesthetic exercises. Do you have any good tips for incorporating Olympic lifts and kettlebells into my weekly programme to not only imporve my strength, but also enhance my physique especially hamstrings which is my weak area?
Thanks. Loving the seminar DVD series.

Dan says:

There are thousands of options. Here is a simple one: the first part of your training is ALWAYS going to be an O lift (or variation). Press, Snatch or Jerk. Then, do the “other stuff.” At the end of the workout, use the kettlebell swing or snatch as a finisher. Then, do some Get Ups and go home!

Damien Murphy from Edinburgh, Scotland asks:

I’ve spent nearly a year trying to snatch properly. I’ve tried teaching myself, I’ve been to olympic lifting courses but all I end up doing is having a sore back and stiff shoulders. Do you think some people just shouldn’t do some exercises and if so what would you suggest instead of it?

Dan says:

Damien, you might be on to something. This is going to sound repetitive, but, first, what is your goal? I knew that I HAD (!!!) to learn the O lifts so I was sore and beat up for two years to do it. For others, it is like a cool bar trick. So, maybe the ‘want’ is there, but not the ‘need.’ As much as I love the O lifts, few of the people I work with do them. Few. We can get you from here to there with easier methods, whether kettlebell work or other basic lifts.

Instead of snatches: Vertical and Standing Long Jumps. Kbell swings and snatches (done right). Front Squats with the bar or Double Kettlebells. That’s a pretty good list!

Charlie from Dover, UK asks:

Dear Dan,

I only have time for one gym based strength session per week. I love my powerlifting and squat, deadlift and press every week. How can I best use this one session?

My goal is to be strong and get stronger for rugby.

Dan says:

Well, Jim Wendler would tell you to do all three, but why don’t you just be sure to Bench (as it is really hard to mimic that in the real world) and alternate DL and Squat each week. I strongly suggest (strongly!!!) that you do Goblet Squats with a dumbbell or kettlebell each day or as often as you can to keep the movement and that you do organize a home gym or whatever to make sure you are doing something. You can get damn strong on one or two workouts a week, but rugby is going to demand more than minimal work.

John from Stoke on Trent, UK asks:

How you would advise someone when wanting to improve over head pressing strength as mine sucks?

Dan says:

Well, John, (beautiful name) you are one of many with bad pressing strength. The good news? There is a fix. The bad news follows: you MUST press overhead every workout or, better, every day. Pressers press. It doesn’t have to be much…a total of 15-25 reps each workout. So, 3 x 5, 5 x 3, 5 x 5, 2-3-5-10 (my favorite), or any other variation is fine. Go heavy, go less heavy, go medium, it doesn’t matter. The key is to press, press, press. Give it about six weeks of multiple sessions of pressing and get back to me. It should be MILES better. Or, in your case, kilometers.

Mild attempt at international humor…humour. Ah…comedy lost a great one when I decided to go into coaching.

Dan Coats from Suffolk, UK asks:

Two questions – I just brought your excellent DVD which is actually three DVDs in one [this one - ed].  If you were training three times per week would you organize your training like this ie a workout of cleaning and snatching, a workout of pressing, a workout of carrying movements. Alternatively is it better to combine elements of all three lifting movements in one workout.

Secondly I do judo three times a week.  From your work with wrestlers what movements are particularly worth training and how do you ensure they are still fresh enough to grapple?

Dan says:

Wait, a question from a “John” and now a “Dan?” I’m getting set up here. Do a carry EVERY workout. If you want to do it as a warm up, it works very well. We do the Waiter Walk, the Suitcase Walk and the Farmer Walk every day. We used to do the Crosswalk, but the numbers make it hard to have enough equipment. You can snatch three days a week, and probably press three, but the Clean and Jerk, for most non O lifters, is best done once a week.

So,

Day One:

Carries for Warm ups
Snatch
Clean and press
Some kind of squat

Day Two

Carries
Snatch
Press
Serious Farmer Walk as a finisher

Day Three

Press
Snatch
Clean and Jerk
Serious drag, pull or whatever as a finisher

For fighters and wrestlers, you have to really push them to get stronger. They tend to always want to do conditioning stuff, but they will do 10,000 pushups and not be able to Bench 200 (90k). So, I work with them in a different way: get stronger and use the mat for insanity. Again, they can bench 100 for 100 and 115 for a single. It’s odd stuff.

Chris L from Shropshire,England asks:

You mentioned in your review of mike boyles functional training book that “He demands “Olympic style” Front Squats for the same reasons I do”, would you expand a little on this. Reason i ask is that i dont have any power rack or squat stands at moment [money tight] so just have a bar and some of these so front squats are all i can do. You may mention the reasons in your book [which my brother currently has installed as his toilet book].

Dan says:

Well, I beat this question to death in my live presentations, but the Front Squat “insists” on a proper, athletic body position, depth is easy to regulate, and flexibility is a must. As a coach, I teach the squat in this pattern: Goblet Squat, Front Squat, Overhead Squat, Back Squat. I actually don’t teach the BS, I just tell them that is in today’s workout and the kids explain it to the new kids. The FS is one of those lifts that if you improve on it, you tend to improve on what you are doing in the real world. Not always true with the BS…

Gubernatrix from London, UK asks:

I’ve been self-coaching for years, in powerlifting and general strength training. Sometimes I know that in order to progress, I need to do something different, since the old routine or method slows down or stops completely. But I don’t often know what. How would you approach this? How do you know what to do next?

Dan says:

Good question. I approach this one of two ways, either with concentric circles or Pareto’s 80/20 rule. The question is this “what is core?” The inner circle. What is the 20 percent that gives you 80 percent of the stuff?

From this question, it gets simple. I think “core” is this, that and this. So, we can’t ignore that EVER. The outer circles, that is what I switch in and switch out. Okay, inner circle stuff: a squat movement, a snappy full body thing, a push, a pull and a carry or drag. I always keep those. Bizarre little cool ab move? Hmmm, let’s toss it in for six weeks and give it a go!

That is literally the thought process. I’m going to keep Front Squats, Bench Press, Pull ups, deadlifts and some kind of snatch or clean in the program…well, always. The other stuff, we can bring in, test, throw out, keep, whatever.

So, the “science” is knowing what to keep, but the “art” is knowing what to tease in and out of the program. The core stuff is what really works, but the other stuff supports and gives your brain some excitement.

More Dan John stuff

• Dan John DVDs
• Review of A Philosophy of Strength Training
• Review of Everything’s Over My Head

Photo credit peterastn

A reader suggested I write about staying focused over Christmas. It’s a great idea and so I shall.

At this time of year there will doubtless be many magazine articles suggesting ways in which you can navigate the demands of the festive season, ’survive’ the office Christmas party and all that nonsense.

My take is different: I say sod all that, why should Christmas be any different from the rest of the year?

It’s basically a big, fat excuse to be lazy about your health because you’ve got more shopping to do than normal. If you see Christmas as an opportunity to let it all hang out, you probably need to re-examine your motivations for better health and fitness.

Dan John tells a harsh story about a woman who was on a diet and in the last few days of her diet she said she was looking through cookbooks, presumably planning all the indulgent meals she was going to have once her diet was finished. As Dan says, “she failed”. Because what’s going to happen the day after she ‘finishes’ her diet? Or the month after? Or six months later?

If you’re looking forward to Christmas as a time to eat, drink and be merry excessively before knee-jerking into detox mode in January, then you’ve failed.

The ideal situation is to evolve a diet and training regime that can take the odd indulgent meal or party in its stride, and cope with the demands of family life, especially around holiday times. If you really can’t keep strictly to your usual routine – and I realise we all have people in our lives who simply don’t get this concept – then here are some things to think about:

Short, sharp workouts

Have some short, intense workouts ready that can be done in 10 or 15 minutes a day. If you can’t find 10 or 15 minutes a few times a week, you’re just not trying hard enough.

Burpees with a push up really get my heart rate going, so any routine incorporating burpees works a treat. Mix them up with push ups, air squats, swings with a kettlebell or dumbbell if you have them, some kind of overhead press and you’ve got a great circuit. Do 15-20 of each as many times as you can in 10 minutes. Or make up your own combination.

More workouts from gubernatrix:

• Bodyweight or bust!
• Deck of cards
• Workouts using a gymboss interval timer
• Quick and dirty push ups

Be inventive

You don’t have to have a kettlebell or a dumbbell. An overhead press with a bag of compost or something else from the shed (nothing sharp, people!) works just fine. Go crazy and make it a clean and press. Then add in some windmills or turkish get ups – which again can be done with many different implements if you haven’t asked Santa for a kettlebell this year.

Christmas parties/drinks

I’m not about to preach to anyone about alcohol but if you are serious about your health, diet and training, you gotta keep a lid on the drinking. Really. There’s no way around it. Drinking is detrimental to athletic performance, fat loss, muscle building, recovery – you name it.

It’s your choice how many times you drink but Christmas should not be an excuse for guzzling more alcohol than you do the rest of the year. I meet plenty of people who say that they are ‘not prepared to give up’ their drinking, or most of it. That’s fine, but they will find it much more difficult to achieve their health and fitness goals than those who do.

Get outside

I always go for a run on Christmas day before lunch. Not because I’m a huge running fan but because getting out in the fresh air on a national holiday is just nice. People smile more, the kids are excited. It freshens you up before lunch. If you can’t get out on Christmas day, Boxing day is always a good option. It’s generally the day when everyone gets up off their arses and goes out with the family, so make it an active one!

Start healthy Christmas traditions

My Christmas day workout/run has been a part of my Christmas tradition for a few years now and when I have kids, this will be part of our family tradition too.

It could also be a great way to keep the kids entertained after they have broken all their new toys. ‘Honey can you bench press the kids while I’m putting the roast on?’

In the UK countless families have evolved a ‘tradition’ of huge, belt-popping meal, followed by falling asleep in front of the Queen’s speech, followed by heading to the pub if they haven’t already passed out. Don’t let this be you!

Have a goal for the festive season

It’s easy to let goals lapse over the festive season. We tend, sometimes subconsciously, to plan for December to be something of a black hole where normal routines are concerned, knowing that we can ’start again’ in January.

Be different this year. Have a plan that starts now and takes you right through the festive season. This will keep you on track better than that nagging voice telling you that you need to do ’something’ to stave off disaster.

Have a goal for mid January, whether its fat loss or skill based or an increase in your lifts. You can achieve a lot in a month.

Need a bit more help to stay focused? Want a new toy?

A goal to be ready for your goals?

If you’ve let things slide recently, how about having an interim goal to be in shape for purusing your longer term goals?

So instead of starting off your new programme in January feeling fat and unfit, start it feeling reasonably good and ready for more. If you want to drop fat next year, perhaps have an interim goal to maintain over the Christmas period. If you want to improve your lifts, have an interim goal to work on some of your weaknesses in preparation. If you don’t want to push the heavy weights, use these few weeks to learn/improve a skill – the olympic lifts or leverage clubs perhaps.

I’m planning something along these lines myself. I’m refining my diet to get it in shape for the new year (I find it’s useful to ‘practise’ a new diet before getting into it properly), I’m getting in some practise on key skills that I want to develop in 2010 and getting outside for some short sharp workouts. Perfect!

What are your experiences of getting through the festive season unscathed?

Photo credit: Chris Barclay

Often trying something new can make certain movements, concepts or sensations really click for you. Recently I had a go at a Strength & Power event – inspired by strongman but scaled for all weight classes. I turned out to be the only female in the event, competing against the guys in the sub-75kg weight class.

Aside from being a fun day, I discovered in the training and then on the day itself  a number of things I’d never fully grasped before about strength. Part of the fun in fact was these ‘light bulb’ moments, things that perhaps people have told you or you’ve read about, but until you actually experience them you don’t really grok what they mean.

So here are some of my strength revelations from that day.

Pushing through the sticking point

There are events in strongman – and in powerlifting – where, when you start pulling, the load just does not move. It’s tempting to give up at this point and think that you are not able to move it, but if you keep pulling you can eventually overcome that inertia and get it to shift.

I had never before experienced so completely the difference between pulling hard for a second or two and pulling hard for several seconds, despite the fact that I’ve been deadlifting for years.

It is similar to the experience of learning to push through the pain barrier when running. Years ago when I first started going for runs, I would basically run until I got really out of breath and felt like I couldn’t run any more and then I’d stop. The point at which I got really out of breath got further and further away, so I thought I was doing okay. Only when I started training with British Military Fitness did I learn how to keep running past the point that I thought I couldn’t possibly continue.

The mind always gives out before the body. You’ll pass out before you die.

The same applies to lifting very heavy weights. Most people, naturally enough, will try to lift a weight and if they can’t shift it within a second or two of trying they will assume that it is too heavy. But it takes time to develop the kind of force you need to shift that weight. You don’t have access to it instantly.

One of the starkest examples of this is in the truck pull. Overcoming inertia and getting that truck moving is one of the most prolonged efforts in strength sports. You dig your toes into the ground and push and strain for what seems like an age and just when you think you are never going to manage it, someone calls out – oh joy! – “It’s moving!” and you have that Beethoven’s Fifth moment at last (towards the end of the 3rd movement going into the 4th movement; listen from when it goes really quiet and you’ll see what I mean: it’s the orchestral expression of a truck pull).

A max deadlift is also a perfect lesson in this force-time curve. There is the isometric phase, where you are exerting force but the load remains static, then eventually it starts moving.

I realised that I hardly ever pull for long enough in the deadlift.

Travelling with weight

This is something I discovered while training for this event and I’ve mentioned it recently. Moving from A to B with a heavy load is an awesome workout. What it does to your heart and lungs is akin to hill sprints – I kid you not.

Shouldering a very heavy sandbag (close to bodyweight, if not more) and running even a few metres is punishing.

How many times do we actually travel with weight in the gym? We tend to do all our lifting rooted to the ground like ancient trees. Become Ents! Start moving.

Incidentally, how many times do we actually travel with weight in everyday life? All the time! We rarely pick something up only to put it back down again in exactly the same place. I mean, where’s the use in that?

So is strongman starting to make sense now? Dan John has been talking about this for years but it sounds a bit strange and a bit too simple so most people, including me, have ignored it. Dan’s “things that I believe can help anyone improve on the road to health and fitness” are:

1. Pick stuff off the ground
2. Put stuff overhead
3. Carry stuff for time and distance

I’d gradually made forays into the first two but for me, number three was the missing link.

Here’s an important point though. This stuff has to be heavy. Picking up a sandbag that weighs the same as your briefcase and running with it won’t have the same effect. That’s just like commuting. We’re all at different stages along the road of strength but don’t be afraid to make it challenging. You won’t die, really.

(There’s a fun workout on Bodytribe’s Strength Rituals DVD that involves shouldering a sandbag filled with your bodyweight from a prone position, then standing up with it and running across the room. Really tough, and a great lesson in how conditioning workouts don’t have to be ‘light’.)

Your deadlift isn’t your biggest lift

Most people think that the most they can lift off the floor is what they can deadlift – right? Well, that’s what I used to think anyway. But the powerlifting deadlift is not the strongest position for the body to be in.

One of the events in this Strength & Power competition was a farmer’s walk with 65kg in each hand. This was more than twice my bodyweight and equivalent to my lifetime best deadlift (which I had not done for several months) and not only did I have to pick it up but I had to carry it 15 metres.

I honestly thought I would not even be able to pick these bad boys off the ground, and I approached the event with this attitude in my head.

But lo and behold, that farmers walk position is way stronger than the deadlift position. Dare I say it, it was easy carrying over two times my bodyweight across a car park! Or at least, by far not the most difficult thing I did that day.

It is in fact possible to deadlift more with one hand than half of your two handed deadlift – something else I’ve mentioned recently. And great fun to try!

The one handed deadlift used to be a popular competition lift and is still done in some circles. In fact in the days when feats of strength were popular spectator sports, all kinds of lifts were performed which makes today’s range of standard lifts look extremely limited. One handed lifting is hardly ever done and yet it is possible to move a great deal of weight if one has the training and the technique. One handed lifts of over 1000 lbs have been recorded.

The secret of core stability

Well, one of them anyway. If you aren’t sure where your core is, stand up and press something heavy overhead. Your torso will either engage or collapse. That’s your ‘core’.

Once again, I refer you to Dan John’s three pillars above.

Strongwomen?

If there’s one strength sport even more male-dominated than powerlifting, it’s strongman. The name says it all.

I don’t particularly mind about the name (Germaine Greer strike me down for saying so!). Just because its known as ‘strongman’ doesn’t mean it’s not for girls; strongman is just a technical term. I’m not even that bothered about using the term ‘strongwoman’ since this could imply that its something different from ‘strongman’.

In his latest DVD, Dan John says “There’s no right and wrong; never put a moral dimension on strength training”. I’ll add to that by saying “never put a gender distinction on strength training either”.

My recent event was called a ‘Strength & Power Invitational’ and I competed against the guys in the appropriate weight class. Gender wasn’t an issue at any point. Long may it continue.

More from gubernatrix

• Review: Everything’s Over My Head by Dan John
• Testing your one rep max
• Assistance exercises
• How competitive are you?

Photo credits: All photos by Emmie Bates apart from the first photo which is by Chris Barclay

One of the nice things about going to national or international drug free powerlifting meets is that I get to catch up with the other female lifters. There aren’t many of us and we are scattered around the country. It’s mainly at competitions where we can renew our acquaintance and watch each other lift.

Louise Fox deadlifting more than 3 times her bodyweight

I am always enormously impressed by the ladies who compete. Not only are they awesomely (and naturally) strong – some with strength I can only dream about – but they are all lovely and inspirational people.

Meet some of the girls

There’s Louise Fox, the petit powerhouse with a triple bodyweight deadlift; champion Patricia Kim who has a smile for everybody; Mel Golding who always looks fabulous with great hair and nails even when pulling 150kg; Helen Isaac who when she’s not lifting is taking all the official photos for the event; the incredibly strong Mary Anderson, who warms up with your max deadlift; young Kirstie Freeman and Gaby Bennett, teenagers who are in the gym pulling big weights instead of trying to imitate the latest train wreck celeb; and the amazing Pat Reeves who at 64 and with bone cancer which is currently in remission, still turns up and lifts at every competition. And many more I haven’t space to mention!

I’m in awe of these girls but it is great to compete alongside them and learn something every time.  The ladies’ contingent is also very supportive – we always cheer each other on, even our closest competitors.

Most of us train with or alongside men, so getting to lift alongside other strong girls is good fun. In fact it’s a pity that the nature of a competition event means that we don’t get to see as much of each other’s lifts as we’d like, since we’re often warming up or getting into the zone when others are lifting.

Getting into lifting

Like a lot of guys, many of us migrated into powerlifting from bodybuilding-style training or just from being in the gym. We discovered that we were kinda strong and that we liked it. Some of us were encouraged to start lifting or competing by someone else. I got into lifting on my own but it didn’t occur to me to enter a competition until the owner of the gym I was training in suggested it.

18-year-old Kirstie benches at the European Championships

If you give more women the opportunity or the encouragement to get into serious lifting, you might be surprised at what you start. Leaving women to the machines or the treadmill isn’t going to light that spark.

Women won’t necessarily jump at the chance to ‘do powerlifting’. The two women interviewed in the video clips above, Patricia Kim and Mary Anderson, both say that they weren’t particularly keen to get involved in lifting when they first started going to the gym. It’s not something most women see themselves doing at first.

I read posts from anguished boyfriends online bemoaning the fact that their women don’t want to train the same way as they do. And I have some sympathy – it’s hard to find the role models, it’s tricky to find pictures of ordinary but healthy-looking women lifting.

However, show a woman some real pictures, start talking about the kind of weights that girls like them are lifting and you may find the curiosity piqued, the competitive hackles rising.

Many of us girls are interested in finding out how strong we are, how strong we could be, how far we can push ourselves. If this quest leads us to the sport of powerlifting, or any other strength sport, that’s a bonus. The bug can take hold surprisingly quickly.

Gubes flips tyre during strongman event

Challenge

I’ve started doing strongman-inspired events (more on this in my next post) not because I harbour an ambition to ‘do strongman’ as such but because I want to continue to challenge myself in different ways and this seems to be a route that is fun and rewarding – to my twisted mind anyway.

One thing that I notice is that all the female lifters I meet have a quiet confidence about them. This goes for all sportswomen, actually, but we’ve chosen the path of strength.

I am wary of trying to speak for the other girls but I think most would agree that we’re not trying to be like guys, nor are we trying to be overly girly. We’re just being ourselves, but a stronger, more confident version of ourselves.

More from gubernatrix

• Strong is beautiful
• First powerlifting meet
• Strength standards for women
• A weighty topic

I can’t let this post go by without a shout out to my e-friends at Bodytribe, who hosted a powerlifting meet on the very same day that us UK girls were competing at the World Drug Free Championships. Out of 37 lifters at the meet, 17 were women, a very encouraging number. Read about it here.