You don’t have to be in weightlifting for long to realize it’s much different from other sports. One of the main differences is the frequency of competition. Many of you grew up playing mainstream sports like football, basketball, and baseball. In these sports, you usually have games every week, or possibly even twice a week.
 
But in Olympic weightlifting, it’s a totally different story. Competing five or six times a year would be an exceptionally busy schedule for a weightlifter. The most I’ve ever personally done is six meets in one year, and that was when I was young and just getting started. For many lifters, three or four meets a year is fairly typical, especially when you’re talking about uber-elite lifters who are pushing the maximum limits of what their bodies are capable of.
 
I’m writing this article in December 2019. Just last month, seven US masters lifters were recognized for completing the 2019 Grand Slam of masters weightlifting. The Grand Slam is winning the four major competitions on the US masters calendar in one year: National Championship, Pan Am Championship, World Championship, and American Championship. These four meets are packed in a fairly tight time frame, by weightlifting standards. The Nationals was the last weekend of March, Pan Ams was the first week of June, Worlds was mid-August, and American Masters was mid-November. Basically, you’re talking about four big meets in eight months. If you can win all four of them in the same year, you’ve done the Grand Slam.
 
There are two main twists involved in winning the masters Grand Slam; one of them is easy, and the other one is hard. The easy one is the fact that it’s not uncommon to have a lack of competition in the masters division, especially as you move up into the older age groups. If you compete in your 60s or 70s, you very often show up to meets with nobody else in your division, or maybe just one other lifter. In these cases, “winning” the Grand Slam might be a simple matter of buying four plane tickets and totaling four times. In situations like this, it’s easy to rack up victories.
 
The hard part is just staying healthy enough to show up four times in eight months when you’re old, whether you have stiff competition or not. Staying healthy can be tricky in weightlifting, as you probably know. The harder you push yourself and the more times you lay it on the line to attempt maximum lifts, the more risk of injury you undertake. Needless to say, this only gets worse as you age. Even if you’ve got nobody in your division and you can win just by totaling, it’s still difficult when you’re trying to get your body to cooperate with the whole thing.
 
In this article, I want to talk about competing frequently. All of you are either lifters or coaches (or both), and most of you probably compete. It’s important to have some solid ideas about how often you should get on the platform, and how to manage it if you ever decide to lift in multiple meets in a short time span. If you’re a coach, and you work with new lifters who are excited to jump in every meet they can find, you need to know how to navigate it. Do you let them compete in all these meets? Should you pull them back? How do you train between each meet? How do you stay healthy? How can you put up quality performances in each one?
 
It’ll probably come up, at some point. Either you’ll want to lift in a cluster of meets in a short time frame, or your athletes will. It’s very easy to screw up if you’re not pretty calculated about the whole thing, so let’s take a look.
 
Preliminary Considerations
 
Attempting to do something as challenging as this requires organized thinking and intelligent strategy. If you try to compete in four meets in eight months (or something like that) with a poorly planned willy-nilly approach, the possibility of disaster is high. Here are some of the things you need to consider:
 
Competitive level of the lifter: When lifters are new, they’re usually not lifting enough weight to put any significant wear and tear on their bodies. If we’re talking about a 71 kg woman who snatches 55 kg, or a 102 kg guy who clean and jerks 115 kg, the physical pounding isn’t horrible (unless the lifter has a predisposition towards injury). Frequent competitions might be easier to get away with for these lifters because they’re simply not lifting enough weight to chew their bodies up, to state it bluntly. When you start talking about a 71 kg gal who snatches 95 kg, or a 102 kg guy with a 175 C&J, now we’re looking at a different level of punishment. If these lifters are properly trained and conditioned, they might be able to put up maximal lifts pretty regularly. But still, the point is that you want to be a little more attentive as the lifter graduates up to bigger weights.
 
Individual recovery capabilities: All weightlifters are going to have their own personal levels of bounce-back after maximal efforts. Some people need a ton of recovery time, plain and simple. They can put up huge performances, but you’ve got to back them off for a while afterwards. If you try to keep them at max level for a long stretch of time, everything goes to hell. Other lifters can compete on a Saturday and break a bunch of records, and then come back to the gym fresh as a daisy three days later. As a coach, you need to know your lifter’s history in this department before you line up a bunch of meets. Part of your job is keeping an eye on the lifter’s trends and patterns. If they’ve proven they can recover quickly, you’ve got more options to play with. If they’ve proven they need a lot of recovery time after a big day, you’ve got to adjust for that. Also, generally speaking, heavier lifters are going to need more recovery time than lighter ones. Keep that in mind as well.
 
Making weight: Lifters who have to kill themselves to make their weight class shouldn’t lift in a bunch of meets close together. Let’s say you’re working with a lifter who competes in the 81 kg class. He walks around normally at 87 kg between meets, even without eating like a pig. When he starts getting close to a meet, he has to diet hard and strip off a bunch of weight to get down to 81 kg. He can do it, but he has to go through hell. Asking him to do this every two months is a dicey proposition. Frequent competitions are generally going to be better with lifters who don’t have to cut weight.
 
Need: Does the lifter HAVE to compete in multiple meets in a short time frame? Is it a requirement for something? An example of this would be somebody who makes the qualifying total for a big national meet right before the entry deadline, like at a last-chance meet that’s only five weeks before the national one. In this situation, you don’t really have any choices. The lifter has to recover quickly and then get back up for another huge day at the national competition. If you’re in one of these “we’ve got no choice” situations, so be it. You go for it and do the best you can. But if we’re talking about most other situations, where your back isn’t up against a wall and you don’t HAVE to compete in multiple meets in a short time period, you might want to ask yourself if it’s a good idea. If you’re wanting to jump in a bunch of meets simply because you’ve got a raging weightlifting boner and you want to compete all the time, that’s a different story. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t line up multiple meets unless I absolutely had to. This isn’t youth soccer, my friends.
 
Game Planning and Strategy
 
One of those masters Grand Slam winners was my lifter, Dionne Dunham. Dionne won gold in all four meets, with American and world records in each one. She had one of the best years of any master in the sport.
 
Let me tell you a few things about how I approached this whole process for her, and you can take some lessons from it. First of all, it was pre-planned. She told me she wanted to win the Grand Slam two years prior, so this wasn’t a random thing that we just flung ourselves into. We worked long and hard for it, and I spent an entire year putting together a plan to get her ready. There were a few primary ideas that were top priority:
 
1) Staying healthy was the whole ball game. If she got injured at any point, we were probably screwed. And she had a history of lower back injuries, so I needed to give her a training workload that A) worked her hard enough to lift the big weights she needed, and B) didn’t go over the line and injure her. Keeping her snatch pulls and clean pulls under 100% was one of the main tools that allowed us to do this, along with squatting hard…but not balls to the wall.
 
2) With four meets in eight months, we needed to come into the first one with a huge strength level that we could basically maintain for the next three. I didn’t view the process like a slow progressive build from the first meet to the last. Too many interruptions to make that work. I believed we needed to come into the first meet at peak strength, and then maintain that peak level for the remaining three. I knew she would need a little back-off time after every meet, and you can’t build upwards when you’re backing off every two months. Plus, we needed to win the first one (National Masters Championship) at all costs. If we didn’t win the first one, the whole thing was shot to hell right from the beginning.
 
3) I made sure she kept her bodyweight right around 82-83 kg. This gave us the option to compete in the 81 or 87 kg class from meet to meet. In the masters division, you can change your weight class right up until the day of the meet. I wanted us to have options for which class she competed in. I knew she had the numbers to beat anybody she went up against, but I wanted to have the option to move down to the 81 kg class, just in case some big 87 kg monster chick we hadn’t heard of showed up with numbers we couldn’t beat. As it turned out, we won Nationals at 81 kg, Pan Ams and Worlds at 87 kg, and then back down to 81 kg for the American Masters. We had vicious battles with tough competitors at Nationals and Worlds, and easy wins at Pan Ams and American Masters.
 
And there were dozens of other pieces of the puzzle that we both juggled and managed throughout the year, including an incredibly busy career life for her (she’s a state trooper). I often had to adjust her training on the fly from week to week because of double-shifts and every other kind of curveball you can imagine. She was amazingly disciplined and mentally tough, and it all worked out.
 
The reason I’m telling you about her journey is to illustrate a point: the more of these rapid-fire meets you decide to undertake, the more advance planning you have to do, especially when the stakes are high. And I’m not just talking about programming workouts. I’m also talking about looking at the kinds of X-factors I described above. As they say in the military, you have to understand every aspect of a problem before you try to develop a solution to the problem. The more you can anticipate and plan for ahead of time, the less chance you’ll have of getting caught with your pants down when the bullets start flying.
 
Save it for special times
 
Bottom line: I wouldn’t make rapid-fire meets a habit. You might have occasional situations in your career (lifting or coaching) where it has to be done, no way around it. But aside from those rare times, I’d normally play it straight and compete three or four times a year (at the most) with big gaps in between. Some of our current Olympic hopefuls are competing several times a year because the Olympic Team selection process requires it. If they want to make the Olympics, they have to rack up a ton of points, which can only be done through big performances at major meets. Like I said: if you’re in a position where you HAVE to do it, then that’s what you do.
 
I’ve been competing for 31 years, and I’ve only had a handful of times when I strung together multiple meets with short gaps between. Back when I was 19, I once lifted in three meets in five weeks. I did well in all of them, but then my training was in the crapper for quite a while afterwards. I also tried to do it a few times when I was older, and they usually didn’t work out very well. But I was also a superheavyweight, and I think that’s one of the main reasons it didn’t go well. You can’t max out those big rhinos too often. Big bodies take a while to freshen up after they’ve been thrashed.
 
Winning the Grand Slam was the big goal of Dionne’s career, so we set up a plan and committed to it. But as of right now, we’re not planning to make a habit of it. In the future, we’ll work up to big peaks twice a year, probably with one or two local meets thrown in during the year that we don’t peak for. This is a good overall plan for a weightlifter: two big meets in a year, where you peak and go for broke. And then maybe one or two small meets where you just show up and have a good time.
 
Some people love to compete, and they want to jump in meets all the time because that’s how they have fun in the sport. If you’re like this, there’s always a temptation to overdo it. That’s how I was. Competing was my favorite part of being a weightlifter, so whenever I heard about a meet, I wanted to jump in and do it. It’s good to be hungry and enthusiastic like this, but it has to be tempered and managed correctly. That means strong advance planning where you try to navigate as many landmines as possible before you’re standing on top of them.