My pre-contest routine

I love to compete.

The Contest is what makes your training fun and purposeful

For strength sports the contest is a report card of your training. What happens in the meet is 90% based off what you have done (and didn’t do) in the gym. So with that said I feel the pre-contest stage is about relaxation and only minor preparation.

I will summarize what I do before a contest in to three functional areas.

Movement/Training: 5-6 days before the contest I will typically drop the competition events out of my training. During this time I will continue to do other big lifts and a lot of contra-specific work for the primary contest events. I will train all the way up to 2 days before the event. My last two days are off days. I find squatting and upper body pressing does not slow down my grip recovery, the only total body movement I specifically exclude is the kettlebell snatch.

Being a grip athlete a key component of this stage is skin care. On a given day I have some kind of minor cut or tear somewhere on my hands. The week before a contest is used to completely heal up before the event. For me in particular I get a cut on my pinkie from the volume I do on my grippers, and scraps on the thumb from the hundreds of lifts on the Europinch.

For my hands I will soak them 4 days out, scrub the shit out of them with a pumice stone, and use a callous razor to shave off all the dead skin. The next few days I will heavily coat them with a lotion such as Corn Huskers. By doing this I have only had one tear in a contest, and in fairness that one was going to happen no matter what I did before hand.

Diet: 3 days before the contest I will increase my carbohydrate and fat intake. My last two contests I moved to a point where it was over 5,000 calories for the three days prior with 80% of them being carbs. I am a fan of pizza and coconut meat the day before. I pound water the whole time too. I increase my Omega-3 EPA/DHA the week before to speed up recovery. Being that I am way over the light weight class this year for WSH, I am trying to come in as heavy as possible. If a person does not have to make a weight class it makes sense to come in fully loaded. I have added creatine to my diet a recently and it definitely helps with volume training. I have not seen an increase to any of my lifts with it, but my energy levels are much higher through out the contest day. One of the things I am going to experiment with this time is cutting out all caffeine 5 days before hand. I will be interested to see if I have a higher effect from a few days off.

Psychology: As i said in the very beginning, I do not think a contest is much more than a report card of training. I do not practice or advocate the “psyching up” or freaking out a lot of people use in competition. In my opinion, my first two lifts are going to be something I have already done before, and I am only shooting for a PR if I know I can pick it up. Consider my numbers have been better every contest before you remind me how I am missing out on something with this.

Hitting an 18 lbs PR as calm as a hindu cow, make the hard things easy so they are always easy.

Taking out the psychological excitement, there is one particular technique I use. Mental rehearsal. This is an exercise where you visualize (technically for me it is done with a different sense than vision)  the movement over and over and experience yourself succeeding while doing it. I took the entire drive from Ann Arbor to Crooksville rehearing over and over the two hand pinch event. The next day I hit an 18 lbs PR.

This is how I approach the contest. I am pretty sure I will make changes along the way, diet experiments being the area I am most interested in. I was not taught this, it is something which has developed with experience. I will let performance dictate what stays and what goes in the future.

Curious, what do you do?