This weekend I went to Kenton High School to the Ohio High School State Powerlifting Meet to handle two long time clients, turned training partners. Hunter, who lifted at 165, and Jack, who lifted at 195. Going into the meet I assumed they would both do pretty well and be at or near the top.

Both had great training cycles leading into the meet and were very confident going into the meet. A couple of weeks out we found pretty conservative openers and they were ready to go. The day of the meet they both made weight and both had about twenty kids in their respective weight classes.

I won't get into too much detail about all of their lifts but they both did very, very well. We didn't hit a couple numbers we wanted because of how the meet was run. Each weight class had their own rack and the bar never went down in weight, so both these guys got the short end of the stick because they had to follow themselves multiple times throughout the day with only 3 minutes between attempts.

Hunter ended up getting first place bench, first place squat, first place deadlift, and obviously first place overall by 100lbs on his total, and just missing an all time state record 555 deadlift. Jack also had a great day finishing second overall in his weight class of 20+lifters.

We also had 4 other athletes from The Strength Lab who competed and all of them had great days as well. More importantly to me, our guys all looked the part on the platform. They all knew how to set up, how to squat, bench and deadlift with great form, how to spot and load plates, things that seem like no brainers that apparently are not.

A couple things I took away from the meet:

1) Powerlifting is definitely growing. This was just smaller Ohio schools (division 5,6,7) and the bigger schools (division 1-4) competed the previous week, both meets having 270+ lifters.

2) With as much free information out there, a lot of coaches do not take advantage of it. I'm assuming it is a lot of high school football coaches that run the powerlifting clubs but for every 1 good lifter there were 5 that had no clue what they were doing.

3) Good coaching goes a long, long ways. It was obvious the kids who trained outside of their high school weight room or were fortunate enough to have a good coach in their school.

4) I saw a lot of good knee wraps- Elitefts krait, elitefts heavy, Metal All black, and so many people had no clue how to wrap them and the majority of them were so loose, so here is a video from my teammate Mario D'Amico on how to wrap knees:

All in all it was a great experience, the meet was run well and our Strength Lab Trained Athletes performed well and had a great time. I'm looking forward to training another group of athletes for the meet next year.