GPC Push Pull Meet

I recently competed at the GPC Push Pull Meet on the 18th of November. It was a great experience and I got to see a lot of big lifts. I came fifth overall.

My attempts:

• Bench 1st attempt: 107.5kg
• Bench 2nd attempt: 115kg
• Deadlift 1st attempt: 220kg
• Deadlift 2nd attempt: 242.5kg
• Deadlift 3rd attempt: 250kg (failed)

Here's the video of my attempts:



Meet Prep:

Even though the squat wasn't a contested lift in this meet, I still trained it, wouldn't want it to fall behind :P

So I planned ahead what numbers I wanted to hit. Everything pretty much went according to plan, I ended up squatting 185kg x 4, deadlifting 225 for 3,2. I was doing Texas Method for the bench press but it stalled earlier than I expected so I did Smolov jr just to make a bit more progress. I'll be continuing with the Texas Method for the bench in the future but adding more sets on intensity day to get in more volume because I feel that's what was lacking the first time.

In Week 8 I hit what I expected to get for my 2nd attempts. For the squat I did 205kg, and for the deadlift I did 240kg. I decided to do doubles for the bench that week and did 110kg x 2. You can see the video here.

At this stage I don't feel like it was worth it doing the '2nd attempts' in training, because the fatigue built up over the weeks made these attempts feel pretty tough. I didn't end up deadlifting much more than 240kg in competition anyway.

Week 10 (the week of the meet) was a deload week, so I was just lifting light weights to reinforce technique.

Weigh-In:

For this meet there was a 24 hour weigh-in. I wanted to lift in the 82.5kg weight class but weighed about 84kg. It wasn't hard to make weight because during my deload week I lost 1kg of water weight because I wasn't drinking as much water (because I wasn't lifting heavy). So all I had to do was not eat as much on Friday night and I weighted 82.3kg on Saturday morning. After weigh-in I drank and ate a lot and was 85.5kg that night.

Thoughts about the day:

Based on how I went, I think I overestimated what I could do. I was hoping for a 120kg bench and at least a 250kg deadlift. I based these numbers off what I hit for triples in training. At least now I have a better idea of what maxes I can hit, based on what I can lift for reps in training. My paused bench and deadlift improved by 7.5kg since the last meet, so I'm happy that I got stronger.

There was a lot of big lifting at the competition which was amazing to watch, 200+kg benches, 300+kg deadlifts. Check out PTC Sydney's YouTube channel over the next few days to see videos of these lifts.