2/22/2014
Female Powerlifting Seminar
I promised a write-up, so here it is. Not sure how much anybody on here is going to take from a female-only powerlifting seminar but this is more for my sake than anybody else's.
I attended an 8 hour seminar today led by Caitlyn Trout. She's a competitive female powerlifter who just squatted a world record (391 @ 123 I believe). Most of the people that were attending the seminar were crossfit coaches or members and had pretty little experience in powerlifting. One girl actually had never even benched before. I think after the introductions and hearing about everyone's experience, Caitlyn took a more general approach to cater to the newbies. Almost everything she said had been a refresher for me and my friend, who have been lifting for quite a few years.
However, she talked about a range of topics from warming up, to preparing for your first meet, peeing while you train, girly topics that men don't talk about, programming, and nutrition. For me, the best part of the seminar was hearing her talking about how she motivates herself and her attitudes toward her body image. A few girls were commenting about how they were upset that their bodyweight had increased since they switched from cardio to strength training. She didn't sugar coat anything and just plainly stated that it doesn't matter what the scale says, (besides when you weigh in) it's about how you feel and you have to be comfortable. It was refreshing to hear a woman, who is pretty highly respected in the powerlifting community, to say that. She talked about weight cutting but highly encouraged most lifters to avoid cutting weight unless they are going for something big.
Her programming advice was a little bit too complicated for me and I didn't really agree with it, at least not to be used by any of the lifters that were there in attendance. She only does one day for each lift, so only squats once a week, deadlifts once a week, and so on. For beginners and intermediates, I really don't think that's enough work but she insisted that it was enough. The rep schemes were bizarre and just a little too over-complicated for me.
She does a carb backloading approach for her nutrition but modified Kiefer's plan a little bit to fit a woman's needs. She talked about some of the different hormonal patterns that a woman goes through and that Kiefer's book clearly does not cater to women, so it was nice to hear her perspective on that.
We had a quick lifting session at the end and she watched some of our sets. She didn't have much to say about my form but said I might benefit from some upper back work to help me keep more upright in my squats. So, the one thing I took away from this seminar is she recommends a rowing exercise for every training day. I'll experiment with it for a little while, see if I notice a difference.
Overall, it was a good seminar. But it was really targeted for the newbie.
Here's her world record squat, pretty intense!