USPLA San Jose Open Meet Report

I went to my first powerlifting meet on Sunday, and it was an awesome experience.

Meet Prep:

I wrote a few times about this, but I basically ran 5/3/1 for 2 cycles, hit my openers one week out, and did 3 very light workouts that were basically warmups.  The week before, my weight hovered around 191-193.  The night before I ate a ton of carbs.

Weigh-in:

Weigh-in started at 7 and ended at 8:30.  San Jose is about an hour and a half from SF downtown, so I got up at 6am, and my friend who was also doing the meet picked me up at 6:30.  It turns out I might have overdone it with the carb loading, because I weighed 196.2.  A little too close for comfort since I was only 1.8lbs away from the 198 cutoff :)  We then figured out rack heights, and submitted our openers.  I was going to do 185kg squat, 110kg bench, 192.5kg deadlift (408,242,425).

Squat:

They divided us into three flights.  Flight one was women + lightweights; flight two was middleweights (75kg to 90kg), and flight three was the heavyweights.  My opener was relatively high, so I was near the end of the second flight.

My warmups were as follows: bar x 2 x 10, 135 x 5, 225 x 4, 315 x 3, 365 x 1.  The weight felt pretty light.

185kg went up pretty fast, so I called for 195kg for my second attempt (430).  My PR is 425 back in May (June?).  This one also went up pretty fast, but I FORGOT THE DAMN RACK COMMAND SO IT WAS RED LIGHTED GRRRRRR.  Since it felt pretty light asked for 200 for my third attempt (440).  I didn't groove this one right, and it felt kinda weird out of the bottom, so I got stuck.  I was also retarded because I bailed the bar, and basically let the 3 spotters take the full 440lbs.  It's hard to break habit since I've been bailing that way in the gym for a year and a half, but yeah it was kinda scary.  Definitely have to remember that in the future.

Overall, I was pretty disappointed.  I should have had 195, and possibly the 200.

Bench:

I think 5/3/1 helped me the most on bench, because I think I underestimated what I could do.  I would have been happy with something like a 250 bench, but my first attempt at 110kg (242) felt very easy, even though it was paused.  I asked for 115 for attempt 2.  That also went up very easy.  I then asked for 120 for attempt 3, which, again, was pretty easy.  I also listened to all the commands so i was 3/3 in bench.  I think I could have had 125 for sure.  130 is possible, maybe.

Deadlift:

192.5 felt pretty good, so I asked for 200 for my second attempt.  I didn't set up very well for this one, so the weight ended up in front of me.  In order to bring it back in, I put my knees under it instinctively, which is called "hitching" and red lighted the lift.  I tried again for attempt 3, took better care to set up correctly, and got 200.

I ended up with a 505kg total, or 1113lbs.  which means I hit my target of 1100.  I definitely left 20-30lbs on the bar for squat and 10-20 for bench.  1150 was definitely possible.

I ended up 2nd in my weight class out of 3, and was only 3 wilks pts away from 1st.  If I hadn't jumped the gun on the 195 squat, I would have had first :(

Overall, the meet was an awesome experience, and I'm definitely going to do another one in a few months.  My short term goal is to fix my shitty technique and get a 1200 total, and my longer term goal is to become a class 2 lifter: http://www.usapowerlifting.com/lifterscorner/ipfclass.shtml  I'm currently barely class 3.

So I took video of all of my lifts.  I'll probably make a separate post for each lift, and post my videos for critique :)