Powerlifting...not that powerful!

A few weekends ago I went to a power-lifting contest. Its a contest of three different kinds of lifts. Squat, Bench and Dead-lift. It was very interesting what I saw. I only got pictures of the bench mainly. The reason I want to talk about this is because you may not know but I am studying exercise science with the idea to work within sports conditioning. Well anyway its a contest to see who is the strongest in all those lifts. The only thing is, competitors use everything they can to make the movement easier for themselves...not just wrist wraps, weight belts and compressed suits. Competitors try and do as little movement in the lifts as possible. I can only show you examples of the bench(because I only took photos of the bench) but I can tell you what they did for squat and dead-lift. For squat and deadlift (more deadlift) the competitor would use a largely wide stance. The stance would restrict how much movement they did making the lift as less taxing as they could. Here is some of the bench pictures that will help show you what I mean by how they make as little movement as possible.

 

You can see a heap of weight on the rack...impressive, maybe so however...

...however you will also note that how much the back is bent. He bends his back sticking his stomach up as much as he can. This means he doesn't have to bring the bar down as low restricting the movement of the lift. Here is a great example of this female competitor:

 

She looks like a pretzel!

You can see that her flexibility is helping her lift a lot more because she doesn't have to bring it down as much. Those are 100 pound plates on each side she is lifting at least 265 pounds. Its impressive but its not at all power. If you wanted to see real powerful lifting I would look at Olympic Lifting which movements are widely used among conditioning athletes. In the picture above you probably notice a denim jacket the spotter is wearing. That is another "cheat" that power-lifters use. It forces the arms to push inwards naturally. It basically gives you extra tension in the movement...its an extra strength. Here is a closer look:

You can see how tight it is and how it naturally forces your arms inwards which would definitely make the lift a whole lot easier. If that doesn't show how much of a cheat sport power-lifting is then you have lost me. Now I would mention some bodybuilders that attended the competition actually lifted with a modest technique. Word had it that those guys were juicing in some sort of way...I can't prove it but they were ridiculously large and toned.