Buzz about the 2014 Amateur Strongman Nationals in Reno has spread across the Internet and thus the country now that we know the events and weights for October 4. Many will qualify and attend this year, likely breaking whatever the previous attendance record has been in recent years. Many qualified athletes, however, will not attend, unable to afford the trip. Many more will not qualify at all.
If you are not going, I think the best thing to do is to continue competing. And I don't mean hide out in the novice division. Do contests that challenge you, and that, even better, have your worst events. When you cherry pick your contests based on your strengths you are just postponing the inevitable ass whipping that is coming your way.
By continuing to compete and perform your worst events, what you accomplish is twofold. Obviously, you will focus on the events that are your worst. Perhaps not so obvious, but more importantly, you will gain the extra contest experience that likely separates you from the top or even middle of your weight class.
It takes many competitions for some to gain the maturity to deal with contest pressure, with the yelling, with being on the clock, with competing for points, with crowds, with adrenaline and anxiety. The goal is to come in composed and to treat the competition like any other day. Eat the same breakfast, wear the same gear, do the same thing you did in the gym to prepare.
After you compete at least one or two more times and hopefully a minimum of 4 times that year you can begin your offseason with the goal of qualifying. You should have a handful of contests under your belt, you should know your strengths and weaknesses, and you should take a moment to be honest with yourself about how you will get better.
The scorecards don't lie when there are a number of them to read. You know the formula and you know where your points are coming from: pressing, deadlifting, moving speed, moving endurance, and loading.
It is possible to not be terrible at any of them but evenly mediocre across all five categories. In this case, your offseason plan can simply focus on rotating through events to get more practice while making sure to hit gym lifts hard and bring up overall strength.
If you one of those categories is well behind the others, then you need to prioritize that in your training. For example, if pressing is a weak point you can move it to first in your training week when you're most fresh. You can add an extra day or extra volume to your one day. You might discover some mobility or core issues are keeping your shoulders from obtaining the optimum position and then you will attack those. There are of course myriad ways to go about it.
If you want to know how I know all this, it's because I have gone through it. After my first year of competing, I felt I was sufficiently mediocre across the board. I rotated all my events, got bigger and stronger, and even went up a weight class. My placings went down but my strength was up. I was performing better with heavier weights. However, new weaknesses that I didn't know I had couldn't be masked by the lighter weights I was moving in the lighter division.
I spent the first half of that year focusing on one weakness, pressing, before turning to another, deadlifting. This competition season my placings have improved and I qualified for Nationals. But there is now another more glaring weakness that is coming to the forefront and is now the focus of my training...
After nationals, I, like everyone else, will sit down and look at the scores and look at the videos and be brutally honest with myself. I will probably confer with a few trusted others to verify my conclusion. Then I will start the process all over again.
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