What I was always told was you know, keep gaining weight until you can't get stronger anymore cause the fastest way to get stronger ... How can a lifter find the right weight class for themselves and is it better to get there slowly or to get there as quickly as possible?
As a competitive power lifter, I'm going to assume that you're serious about being a competitive power lifter and that it's not this little hobby you're playing around with. If it's a little hobby you're playing around with because you kind of think it's of cool right now then none of this means shit.
Just lift at whatever you weight, you know, have fun with it and enjoy it. Don't ... because you're not ... while you may do a meet, you're not really a competitive power lifter. Think of this like an intramural sports which could be, intramural soccer. Which wasn't really officially the school's soccer team. It was just guys who really love to play soccer and they liked to play soccer but they weren't practicing everyday and it wasn't, you know they weren't on scholarship and all that other stuff.
Then you have the official school soccer team. Now that's competitive soccer. The intramural guys are different that the competitive soccer guys. What I am trying to draw the distinction here is are you an air intramural power lifter or are you a power lifter? You're all power lifters. Okay? They're all soccer players but one's vastly different than the other one. I'm hoping people understand what I'm saying here, you know, with this. If you're intramural, don't worry about this gaining weight bullshit. Don't worry about all this other crap.
Just have fun, enjoy the sport. That's what you're doing it for. Now, if you're on the other side where it's the competitive power lifter. Then you need to do whatever you need to fucking do to be the best power lifter that you can be. Otherwise, what are you doing for? Otherwise just be at the fucking intramural. You know, there's options. You need to first off decide where, what it is. If you want to be the best power lifter you can possibly be of you. You know not you want to be better than this guy or this guy or this guy, that's unrealistic.
You need to be better than you every single time and you go out on the platform for as long as you possibly can. If that puts you at the top of the game, awesome, that's the goal. To do that, that commitment needs to be made that you're going to do whatever it fucking takes to get there, within the rules. Obviously there's always rules with each sport so federation plays into it, all those other things play into it. Within the rules, I'm not telling you cheat or any of that other bullshit because in power lifting there's many options, there's many federations, so there's no reason to cheat and anyway because you can find the federation that is going to cater to whatever you want to do and however you want to compete.
From that standpoint, I already answered the question as far as intramural, you just have fun and enjoy it and love it and try to make it last as long as you possibly can and still take the lift seriously guys. Learn the technique because you don't want to get hurt. Learn how to do all those things correctly and right.
On the other end, now you're dealing with how do you know if you're in the competitive side, how do you know what the optimum weight is going to be?
Pretty fucking simple. Whatever weight class you're in, look around the best lifters in that weight class and if you're like 7 inches taller than they are, you probably need to gain weight.
You're not going to be the outlier. I can guarantee you that. Even the outliers didn't know they were the outliers, until they became the outliers. As I've always said before, power lifting and body building and all this, yes they are very heavily, genetically weighted sports. How do you know if you have good genetics or not if you never fucking try and never really try hard. How do you know, because a lot of the guys that I've seen that have great genetics, I've seen their before pictures. Yeah, they had great genetics but they had to do some work before those genetics really started to kick in. A lot of people quit too soon. Go based upon the height and what everybody else looks like that's in your weight class and base it on that.
Should you try to get up there as fast as you can? I don't think so. I think that you need to actually, you need to keep a calorie surplus to be able to gain weight. You need to be making a conscious effort to keep trying to move up. The dumbest thing you can do is to diet down to try to make weight. If you're under an elite total, to me it just makes no sense to me whatsoever on why anybody would want to cut weight for any reason unless they're going to break a world record or they're competing for a title that actually matters. Not just ... boom over my head, I don't comprehend it, but keep moving up. What I was always told was keep gaining weight until you can't get stronger anymore because the fastest way to get stronger is to gain weight.
Keep gaining weight until you can't get stronger anymore and you get stuck, then when that happens, drop a weight class. Well, with all the guys I was training with we all ended up over 300 pounds. It didn't matter if they were 5' 4" or they were 6' 4". They all ended up over 300 pounds. Gain slow, I wouldn't try and put the breaks on it. Just let it come natural but you don't want to from a 1'400 pound total at 198 to a 1,500 pound total at 300. So, no you don't want to come fat and large as shit so take the time gaining the weight but at the same time don't take too much time gaining the weight either. First, before any of that even becomes a question, you need to decide if you're going to be a competitive lifter or an intramural lifter because that's going to answer that.
Read Her Training Log
FOR WOMEN
We had a seminar training camp last year that Clint Darden hosted. Had a small group of people that came out for this camp. Clint obviously covered a lot of different things, squat, bench, deadlift accessories, gaining weight, you name it. Any questions people had for Clint, they went ahead and asked.
There was a Q&A session going on where one of the women in attendance was asking Clint how to gain weight, which is a standard question. She wanted to gain 48 pounds. I'm sitting from a distance thinking, 48 pounds, are you fucking kidding me. I'm trying to figure out why's she wanted to gain 48 pounds. That's like frigging insane for a woman to gain 48 pounds and fast, before her next meet, 12 weeks, 16 weeks. I wasn't too sure the time frame that they were talking about because I was sitting back from a distance.
I kind of let it go on and of course Clint's talking about eating McDonald's and doing whatever you need to do to gain the weight. I just couldn't get this out of my head. Discussing with her later in the day, I asked her straight up, "Why do you feel like you need to gain 48 pounds? That's pretty excessive." She's a competitive lifter. She looked at me and she said, "Because you said so." I thought huh? It was the last Table Talk video I did. It was like, oh my, oh man. No. Then I realized ... Man, I'm sorry. I made a huge mistake.
I was kind of speechless at the time because I'm thinking to myself that's not for women, but I didn't specify that it's not for women. We have a growing, growing, vastly growing number of women lifters and women strength athletes coming to the site. Regardless of what anybody says, there are differences between men and women when it comes to training and nutrition and other things. Those of us that have been in trenches for a long time know those differences.
One of those differences, you're not going to tell a woman to gain 48 pounds in 16 weeks. That's just absolutely insane. They can't put on the same amount of muscle mass as a man can in the same given period of time. For instance, a male to put on 10 pounds of lean body mass, I'm talking straight muscle in one year, drug free, that is a hell of an accomplishment. For a woman to be able to do half of that is a hell of an accomplishment.
The other aspect when it comes to gaining weight between males and females, is males are generally going to hold their excess fat, which is basically what's going to happen as they're gaining weight to get into the maximal ... As I wrote before, to get into the weight class that better suits them. Yes they're going to get fat and where they're going to get fat is going to actually be ... It's going to help their leverages better. Men get a belly. They get a stability ball to be able to bounce out of the bottom of the squat for. These are all assumptions based upon what I would consider the majority.
Most women are not going to gain all the weight in their belly. They're going to gain it on their hips, so they're not going to get any mechanical advantage by dumping on all this weight at one time. The advice I gave her as she was going off of what I said, that most of the women who are in the top 10 or top 20 in her weight class at her height outweigh her by 40 pounds or so. The advice I gave her is yes you still want to try to move up into that weight class, but it's going to be a longer term process and to keep the focus mostly on the strength. You don't need to go pound a whole bunch of shit junk food and so forth, because the mechanical leverage advantage isn't going to be there the same way it's going to be for a male. When you're eating basically to get fat is what this is. When you're eating to get fat, a side effect of that is some muscle here and there.
Women, on the other hand, kind of got to go about it a little bit differently. They got to eat to gain muscle and then the fat will be the side effect of what that is, especially when they're into strength sports. The advice there was to never cut weight, unless it's just a pound or two that's over the weight class, which is just skipping a meal. That's it. Not even to the point of steaming or anything like that to cut weight. Never cut weight.
Read her coaching log
Fill out the weight class. She's been in the same weight class now for the past three meets. She does need to try to pop up into that next weight class. That means getting 3-5 pounds on and getting kind of out of there and then growing into the class from that standpoint. But by no means just bombarding the calories, because that's one of those things that doesn't work for women the same way as it works for men. I'm sure some dipshit's going to chime in here and disagree, but I'm going off three decades of experience to be able to know that it does not work the same for men or women.
When you're working with percents, a woman who benches 100 pounds, to increase 10% that's 10 pounds. For most guys that are training with her, if she benches 65-75 pounds and she does it easy, it's like hell throw a 5 on each side. That's a huge percent jump. If it was a raw bencher throwing that same percent jump on a 500, 600, 700 pound bench press, could be 50, 60, 70 pounds. Are you going to be willing to jump that much on your max set? To do one more max set, are you willing to jump that big of a percent? Because the percents get a little ... Percents get skewed when you're dealing with the high end and when you're dealing with the low end, because 10% of 100 pounds is 10 pounds; 10% of a 1000 pounds is 100 pounds. There's a big difference, it's not just 10%. You have to know how to work within those variables with that.
Women typically need to have a little bit higher volume than what men do for a lot of the training and for a lot of the accessory work as well from what I've seen. These are going to be some of the topics that we're going to cover in the future when we are writing about women and power lifting and women and strength training in general. Because it's not ... 90% of it, maybe a little more, maybe a little bit less, is the same for both men and women. That I will definitely agree with.
But there are some factors that are different and those factors that are different can kind of creep up. They can creep up on you and end up looking you right in the face at one of your own seminars by somebody saying I need to put on 50 pounds in 12 weeks and you're thinking what the hell. It's like a smack in the face. For me it was a smack in the face of reality that we need to start making a distinction between the two, because we don't want to create the confusion or any more confusion than already exists.
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