If there is anyone out there following along with my posts, then you know that I just recently competed in the RPS King of Spring meet here at NBS Fitness. What some of you may not have known is that I had two clients that were also competing in the competition, as well as my significant other, along with many other teammates. This was my first time having clients compete in the same event that I was participating in, in fact one of them was in the same weight division that I was in. Most of us, excluding my female client had water cuts leading up to weigh in day, which I think made some of us a little more nervous than usual. Check my cut out here.
One thing that made this competition a little more challenging than others was the fact that almost all NBS team members and just members in general were competing. This made little things like having a handler, and a person to wrap your knees a little difficult. With this being the case, most of us finally learned how to wrap our knees during the peaking phase of our training cycle. If you are interested in learning how to wrap, the check out this video. As long as I had another individual to pull the extra slack out of my knee wraps while I was actually doing the wrapping, I was good to go. Both of my clients had never really used wraps before, but I had both of them train with them in the last weeks of peaking, so they would at least have gotten under a heavy bar a couple of times with them before meet day.
With the day of the competition approaching rapidly, I knew that I would be wrapping myself, my girlfriend’s knees, and at least one of my clients, along with a superstitious teammate on the women’s powerlifting team who didn’t think she could hit a heavy bench, unless I wrapped her wrists. When I thought about all of this, it didn’t seem so bad, in fact I thought it would be a breeze.
So here it is, Saturday April 30th 2016. The day has finally arrived and we get to have our first powerlifting meet in the brand new facility for NBS. Anyone who has ever competed before knows that 9 times out of 10 you are going to be crammed into a pretty small place with a bunch of smelly and sweaty powerlifters all around you. During warm-ups I felt like a chicken running around with my head cut off, and I felt like that’s what everyone else looked like too. For many competitors, it was their first meet, which can always be a little nerve wrecking. Finally, the flights were posted. One client was in the first, another in the second, along with my girlfriend. I was in the last flight, along with some of my other close teammates, including my friend and fellow trainer who was going to pull the slack out of my wraps for me. In fact, he was about 3 people after me. After seeing the flight posted, I asked him if he still thought he would be able to assist me and he said he didn’t think he could swing it, and I couldn’t blame him one single bit. I got pretty nervous at first because I felt like things were already going wrong before I even got under the bar, but I just remembered what our coach had told us before, and that was the fact that things are never going to go exactly the way you want them to on meet day. You just have to adapt and change, so that’s what I did. Stay tuned for part two, to see how things went from there.
