My Return To The Platform - IrishPF May 2015 Comp

Hanley

As some of you probably know by now, I did my first proper competition in over 5 years last weekend.

During my late teens and early 20s I went all in with powerlifting and did pretty ok at it. It certainly laid the foundations for a lot of things in my mid to late 20s (work ethic, business etc etc).

I really wanted to compete again, but struggled to find the headspace or motivation to put a proper training cycle together, or have a drug tested federation that I was welcome to compete in. But over the last 5 months a number of things transpired in my favour....

> I got out of my own way, hired some excellent coaches in RevFit and started to systemise the way we do things to free up time and energy for me to train properly again

> The IPF was reborn in Ireland by a group of really good and well respected powerlifters

> All the niggling injuries and problems I had cleared up and STAYED away

I started out the year just getting in shape and following the Amazing 12 program with Jason Kane over in Blackrock. It was the first time I completely outsourced my own training, and it was a mega decision.

I came out of it in the best shape of my life, with A LOT of new muscle and a greatly improved work capacity. But most importantly it opened my eyes to how much removing myself from the equation helps.

Once I finished up there I knew if I could get someone to prep me for the comp I'd cruise in and do myself justice, so I got in touch with Mike Tuscherer and jumped on his Guided Programming.

It has been a revelation. I'm squatting, benching and deadlifting 2-4x per week and pushing hard pretty much the whole time. The core principle of his system is the use of frequent bouts of high stress attempts on the competition lifts, and constant use auto regulation in training. So if you're having a good day, you ramp up a bit, but if you're not - don't sweat it, get some work done and move on.

The REAL benefit of having heavy weight on my back and in my hands constantly for the last 8 weeks became apparent on comp day. I made a balls of my opening squat (bar too low on my back) and bench (touched too low) and while I was able to save them, more importantly I was able to adjust for my next attempts and CRUSH them.

I remember a while back Mike said on a podcast "if the only time you ever go above 90% is in competition then it becomes a super high stress environment. But if you do it regularly it's no longer a big deal".

And I have to say I stepped on the platform with absolute certainty around my lifting for probably the first time ever, and it showed with me going 9 for 9 on the way to a 240kg squat, 155kg bench and 262.5kg deadlift at 97kg.

While EXTREMELY happy with that, I'm not satisfied. I know I left weight on the platform, but the goal of the competition was to get used to competing again, and set myself up for an even stronger comp in August.

This weekends total, 657.5kg @ 97kg, was good enough for 4th overall, and would have put me top 10 (I think) across all drug free results in Ireland in the last 18 months.

My immediate goal is to move that to top 5 and go on the hunt for a 245-250kg squat, 160kg bench press and 270kg deadlift on August 8th in Dublin.

I felt VERY rough yesterday, but as today wears on I'm starting to feel more and more excited about getting back under the bar tomorrow

Here's a video of the day showing 8 of my 9 lifts, unfortunately we missed the 2nd attempt squat, but it was a smoke show 230kg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHhJhZi58fo

Everyone involved has been thanked online already, and personally elsewhere, so no need to rehash that - you know who you are, and you know I appreciate it deeply.