I know a guy who compete in IPF federation in the 110 kg class and he was suppose to lift on sunday but he do the lifts saturday whit 82.5kg class because he was busy sunday [...]
Good example. But my point here is not really about changing lifting days, you can do that under our rules if done no later than Monday meet week. It's rather about doing so close to the meet. Even if some meet directors may be able to accommodate such a request, in the vast majority of cases lifters will know that, say, Sunday 10am is show time. Even if you got a bad stomach or whatever at that time, you are under the bar or out. Being ready when you need to be is part of the game. In the real world, the schedule also tends to break slightly or severely which also adds its own dimension.
For official meets there must obviously be a time set for each weight class. With judging done after the meet and everyone lifting in their own gyms, we do not require one. For us, this rule serves no other purpose than forcing lifters to adapt to circumstances similar to an official meet (albeit with more wiggling room since you only have to name the day). And from that follows the question whether this rule really is worth it? I used to think so, but I find myself silently cursing this rule every time I see it become an obstacle to an otherwise good meet experience. So frankly, I would tend to go with Warren and just get rid of it. Meet time would be Friday to Sunday your local time, the paper just has to be from one of those days (but doesn't have to be from the same day... great suggestion there Warren!). Agreed?
I want to ask if there is a problem of the video don't have sound because I have camera 5megamixels whit no sound and cellphone whit 1.3 megapixels whit sound? I can ask a friend for a camera of there is a problem.
No problem there. Sound is always nice to have both for those watching the meet and the judges, but it is not required. As the rules put it:
10. Capturing sound is preferable if the equipment supports it, but not required.I know when you shoot the squat, the face of the lifter must be in focus ... but in the gym its easyer to shoot in the mirror so is it ok to shoot it that way?
No mirror shooting please. While it is perfectly possible that this can work well in some settings, there are potentially many things that can wrong here including light reflections, not being able to properly fill up the majority of the frame with the lifter etc.
One of the biggest challenges is to make sure that the video that comes in from the lifters is actually objectively speaking good enough to judge based on (and the judges do turn down clips that don't make the cut). If we allow shooting mirror reflections instead of the lifter directly we are in for trouble long-term. We want strict judging and for that we need good clips.
Having to squat the other way around than usual due to this rule is actually quite common since most gym racks have the hooks facing the mirror by default. With this also sometimes comes the realization that one has become conditioned to judge depth or form by checking the mirror. That habit is good to get rid of.
I'm not that much stronger today than I was 3 days ago.
That's for sure. But if you're cutting weight for a meet timing is everything. Most don't bother here though since there are no weight classes (I did cut some 4 kilos for one meet though... an interesting but not very pleasant experience).
As a side note, have you tried contacting dormant lifters who've previously participated, to ask why they no longer compete?
No, I haven't. But I have thought about doing a poll in the near future to get some broad feedback and sounds like a question along these lines would be a great idea, thanks.
But I've come to realize that it's quite hard to define who is dormant in Virtualmeet terms. I've been positively surprised on many occasions to see a lifter whom I haven't heard from in well over a year return to the stage. There is a vast number of different people doing these meets for different reasons. There is a core group who do many a year, but there are also many lifters who do roughly one meet a year or somewhat less (sometimes due to suffering a back or shoulder injury which take some time to heal, sometime because they also compete officially... the reasons are many here too). And from all the private conversations I have with members here I could right now name a few who have their eyes set on a meet more than half a year from now. And there's also a bunch of members who have signed up for the site, but who are yet training for their first meet.
Another way of looking at this issue is how many lifters come back for more. Counting judged meets, 49 lifters have currently "only" done one meet. About 30 of these lifters have competed as part of a school or university sports team involved in sports not related to weightlifting or powerlifting. These are the kind of people who often do a virtualmeet as a one-time common team challenge with their coaches setting this meet as a motivational milestone for a strength training period. Out of these 49, 3 are active judges with at least three judged meets behind them. So a rough estimate is that there's about 15 strength enthusiasts who for one reason or another have not come back for more as a lifter or judge. A few are probably planning to.
20 lifters have done 2 meets, 18 lifters 3-4 meets and 8 lifters 5-7 meets. So roughly half of the lifters have so far come back for more. If we leave out those who likely did a meet as a one-time challenge, the percentage of lifters who have returned to lift or judge is then around a whopping 75%. In terms of recency, 27 of these lifters were on the platform within the last year.
So my own analysis is that we don't have a problem retaining lifters. Based on stats and feedback, those who compete are quite happy with how things are ran and they tend to stick around. Seeing how Virtualmeet is fueling the fire for so many flesh and blood lifters around the world is basically what keeps me motivated to invest so much of my time into pushing this project forward. The concept definitively works.
Our biggest problem is in attracting new lifters. Part of the reason is that the threshold to compete for the first time is rather high (I'd be rich if I had a penny from everyone who said they loved the concept and might do a meet one day, but who never got that far); but this is how it should be as using real names, requiring clear face shots etc. keeps this real and clean. But it's a most telling stat that after March 2009, there's only been four new first timers over eight meets. This is an historical low, and something I partially blame on having focused so hard on coding the new version over being out here. But as nobody can fail to have noticed by now, I'm back in the driving seat. This weekend's meet is also looking very interesting in terms of the sheer number of first timers (in addition to the ladies from the same gym, there's also 5 other first timers... this effectively takes the 2009 stats out of its tailspin).
To sum up, I think the way forward is to get the next version out the door and to focus more on being out there in the iron community at large versus just squatting in here (pardon the pun). The recent push into Twitter and Facebook is a first step in this direction. I will also be setting up proper feeds and widgets to make it easy to embed meet results, own lifts etc. on third party sites for those who are interested in that. But first things first, I keep saying I wish there were more hours in a day, but as long as Virtualmeet is a one-man team handling everything the turnaround is not always what one would hope. But as long as I have your support I'll keep pushing this forward at whatever pace I can.
Long post. As usual I would value any feedback or counter arguments anyone may have. This is turning into one of the more interesting meet discussion threads so far...
