Masterton Bench Only Competition Recap

A few weeks back, I did a Bench Press only competition! My mind is still blown that I would even consider entering a Bench Press only competition given my struggles with Bench Press over the past year.

It was a long road to getting to the competition as I decided that I would cut weight and drop down to the 52kg class. I had done this once before at the East Auckland In House Competition back in December last year and it was tough.

As Bench Press has always been a tough lift for me I decided that entering some Bench Press only competitions may be a good idea to help keep me focused on improving my technique.

There were numerous frustrations with some wins in the training cycle leading up to this competition. It had been 11 months since I last got a PB in Bench Press and I was determined to finally break past the 62.5kg mark (a PB I had set in April last year at the Central Districts Powerlifting Champs.

The week of the competition I began my water cut to get me to 52kg on the day of the competition. Since I had done it once before and knew what to expect, it wasn’t as bad as the first time around but it was still tough. When I found out that the weigh in for the Bench Only competition had been moved to 12pm I wasn’t stoked as you could imagine as this meant another 4 hours to wait until I could eat properly again and another 4 hours with limited fluids in my body.

Competition day came around pretty quickly and we arrived at the venue nice and early as Kyle was participating in his first ever three lift competition! It was pretty cool that Kyle was also competing, I was super excited when he decided to enter his first ever competition and he did awesome on the day! This did also help the morning go nice and quickly for me too which was an added bonus.

After Kyle had finished with his lifts it was time for me to get warming up. There weren’t many of us entered in the Bench only portion of the competition – which is probably just as well as there weren’t many benches to warm up on.

During the warm up I was feeling a bit yuck after eating sugary and salty foods that I don’t generally eat very often and my body was struggling to eat too much after doing the cut during the week. My warmups were going well until I decided to try my final warmup attempt and I failed the damn thing – what the heck?!

My opener was originally 62.5kg – which while it is my PB, is a weight that I haven’t failed in a very long time as was fairly confident I could do it. I had to get my head back in the game, go and change my opener and move on from there. I changed my opener to 57.5kg and spent some time trying to start afresh in my mind before the first lift.

First lift came around and it moved very quickly so I decided to jump up to 62.5kg for my second attempt, which also moved pretty well. This left me with no choice but to face 65kg and try as hard as I could to make today the day that I broke through that PB which I DID! Finally! It wasn’t a pretty lift at all, but it got up and I have since done it again with much better form which is great!

Overall I was really happy with how the competition went, despite having some hiccups along the way. Below is the video with all three of my attempts.