Virtualmeet.net

Everything and anything concerning the 13-15 March 2009 Powerlifting meet is welcome here.

To sign up for the meet, see the registration thread (http://virtualmeet.net/community/forum/meet-talk/284/0/).

      Hello I am new to this sight.  It looks like very motovational and a smart idea.   I am doing deadlifts only to stay in shape.  My question is and can I compete in the powerlifting meets doing only deadlifts or do I have to wait untill you have deadlift meets only.   thanks

Hi Heath,

Warmly welcome to the site! :)


That's a very good question!

In a regular powerlifting meet, you need to get a score for each of the lifts in order to have any lift accepted. You are also not allowed to continue to the next lift if you miss or skip all attempts on the previous lift. Sometimes a lifter will come into a meet focusing on only one lift due to injury or for the purpose of saving energy towards setting a PR or breaking a record. In these cases, the lifter would pass one light attempt on the other lifts to make the result for the main lift valid.

Our rules are a bit different in that we will accept individual lifts even if the lifter did not get a score on all lifts. This means that you can still get a deadlift count as a personal meet record despite bombing out on both the squat and the bench press. Obviously, because our meets are judged after the fact, lifters cannot know whether they got a score for a lift until after the meet. The lack of direct judge feedback also makes it easier to bomb out due to a trivial reason like a bad camera angle or forgetting to remove a sweater on one attempt. Accepting good lifts as PRs or ranking entries is one way of allowing users to walk away with something to show even if they would bomb out due to a trivial mistake.

But this policy was never designed to allow lifters to turn a powerlifting meet into a push-pull, a bench press only meet or a deadlift only affair. In my view, a powerlifting meet is still a powerlifting meet and lifters are expected to show up for all lifts. I therefore suggest adding a clause to the rules that require lifters to at least make bona fide attempts, i.e. take a serious shot at each lift, in order to be accepted into a meet. This would put our meets more in line with real meets, while still retaining a bit more flexibility to make up for the above mentioned challenges associated with the virtual meet format.

To sum up, you would not be allowed to skip the squat and the bench but you could consider going light on them in order to put all the ammo on the deadlift. There's also a deadlift only meet on May 15-17th as you've probably noticed.

As usual, all feedback and suggestions are welcome, but at the moment this solution makes the most sense to me.

 Thanks for explaining the rules for powerlifting meets Iidn't realize that you had to make a try at all lifts to complete the meet.   I saw the deadlift  meets for 2009 and there only one meet.   So to keep my motovation up on training I am going use your idea about doing light benches and light squats.   I am going to compeet in my first powerlifting meet 3/15/09!  Thanks for your help.

A bit less than three hours left to sign-up for the meet. Looks like it's going to be a strong one with many lifters.

The meet sign-up deadline has now passed. The final line-up will be posted tomorrow.

All lifters lifting in this meet should now have received their info e-mail with upload details etc. If you haven't, please e-mail kristoffer@virtualmeet.net.

Good luck everyone! :)

The second judge slot has now been filled thanks to Ben Crispin (http://virtualmeet.net/bencrispin/) who was kind enough to volunteer. If anyone is interested in filling the last slot, let me know please.

Thanks Ben! :)

Are you still looking for someone judging the meet?

It's meet weekend again! Good luck everyone lifting today!


Yes, the third slot is still open. However, there's the usual fallback (me) so it is not a problem if nobody volunteers. If you have anyone in mind, please have them contact me. Unfortunately you can't judge a meet you're lifting in.

Oh, sure, i forgot that one!  :)

Hey, no problem. I appreciate the thought and will be most happy to have you as a judge in any future meets. :)

As these meets grow, we will at some point need to have more than one judging team as to not overload the judges. At that stage, it may be possible to both lift and judge in the same meet since different judge teams will be judging different groups of lifters. We'll see when that time comes.

The first lifters are uploaded now.

12 uploaded lifters now... tomorrow is another intense meet day.

Just finished the upload of my videos for the meet. All in all not a bad meet I did set a 20lb. PR on the deadlift. My legs didn't seem as though they had any power in them today when doing the squats. Maybe due to the fact I took my son fishing at 6 a.m. and standing in the boat for three hours really zapped my legs and back not a smart move.
Plus I am feeling overtrained because this meet was so close to one I did in February here locally. Time to scale back a bit in training for a few weeks and then begin preparing for a meet locally on June 20th.
Hope to be back for another Virtualmeet soon although I am sorry to say my days lifting raw could be numbered as I have been struggling for months with hip pain and a single ply suit really seems to help. But I really do enjoy the Virtualmeets and will try to stick it out.
Hope everyone else had a good meet and best of luck.

Thanks for the update Brian.

I found that trying to hit IPF depth with a wide stance produced some major hip pain in the long run which was alleviated by loose single-ply briefs. Anyone correct me if I'm wrong, but I also believe that IPF lifters at large lift with a narrower stance than those in federations where parallel depth is enough. I don't know about your situation, but you seem to be going quite wide and narrowing the stance in a bit may help. In my case, I had to ease up on the squatting for a while to get the hip back in shape.

And yeah, standing in a boat for a while is probably quite the workout for your stabilizators... but I bet your son loved it. :)

Update: all the lifts have now been confirmed as being uploaded. 24 lifters made it to the meet and submitted a total of 214 clips.

However, six lifters had minor omissions in their lifter info. This info is needed before the meet can be moved to the judges. The meet is still likely to be with the judges by late Wednesday GMT unless it takes longer than anticipated to get the outstanding info.

So, looking quite good so far. :)

We're working on it. In Canada we only have those wind-up computers made of wood. They're slower than normal. Some of the people are that way too......made of wood and slower than normal.

Sorry for any inconvenience. Everyone had a great time and lots of new Personal Bests.

I predict Canada will win the team title - AGAIN.

TNT

I predict that sometime this year, we will see the first real team competitions enter the arena. Until then, the team title is likely to perpetually go to Canada.  ;D

Canada will populate the earth with strong people. Darwin WAS right.

TNT

Update: I got the missing info from one of the six lifters. The meet will move to the judges as soon as I have all the missing details.

The info for one lifter is still missing. I just sent the lifter in question a reminder. Sorry for the delay folks. If I don't get the info by the end of this week I will drop the lifter so we can move forward.

I got the last piece of missing info, the meet is now with the judges! \o/

As nobody volunteered for the third judging slot, the usual backup was enlisted (me). Each judge is facing 9 rounds of 24 lifts so there's some serious work to be done. As usual, we are shooting at having the meet judged within one week from today, e.g. at the end of next week's Sunday (March 29th). You can follow the judging progress in real time in the box above the forums.

Hang in there everyone! :)

Sign up for the April meets will open tomorrow late GMT time.

To add to the above, a description of how the judging works can be found here (http://virtualmeet.net/community/forum/technical-questions/245/0/).

Hey gang, another lack in the documentation was just uncovered. :)

The intended policy is that judges should not discuss meet lifts until the judging has been completed as to remove even the smallest chance of influencing other judges. However, this policy has not been documented anywhere so judges cannot know this. I'm posting this because I removed two posts by one judge so that nobody wonders why they suddenly disappeared. To make it very clear, these posts were not bad in anyway, but I think it is a good policy to release the whole meet in one go as opposed to starting discussing it while the meet is still in progress.

If anyone has any questions about this, please ask. :)

I'm happy to report that the meet has been judged. Out of the 213 clips, two where cut short and were thus not judgeable. To be fair, I will give the affected lifters until Tuesday to re-upload those clips for judging in case this was caused by upload problems. The schedule now is to have the meet released by late Wednesday.

A warm thanks to Ben (http://virtualmeet.net/bencrispin/) and Chris (http://virtualmeet.net/catalystfitness/) for doing a good job with the judging.

No results yet???

I'm sorry to say that this meet has been a very long process and I am fully aware that lifters are eagerly awaiting the results.

To put it in context: the meet was first delayed for five days due to missing lifter info (which I rather wait for than have six first-time virtualmeeters disqualified off the bat), then the judging took the full seven days to complete mainly because it was a relatively big meet (213 attempts) and I had trouble finding the time to do it in short order. While judging I also noticed that two clips were cut off before the lift commenced, including your second bench press attempt, so I decided to give you and the other lifter a fair chance to re-upload with a late Tuesday deadline in case it would have been a technical glitch (you should have received two mails about that). Out of all the 14 meets we've held so far, only one lift has been confirmed as corrupted so this is not a common occurance. The intention was to have the meet results out yesterday, but due to family reasons it didn't pan out. So this meet is really only one day late due to these circumstances, but yes, it is way behind our target of one week turnaround after the clips have been uploaded.

Frankly, it is still a bit of a challenge to get meets in and out the door in seven days because there are quite a lot of moving pieces involved. I have a lot of supporting scripts, but preparing larger meets for judging and having them released afterwards still takes several hours of work depending on how much manual intervention is needed with video codecs etc. With two young kids at home, most of the time I devote to running the meets and correspondence plus coding on the next generation of this site comes straight out of my sleep. I wouldn't have it any other way, but the truth of the matter is that sometimes I also need to sleep.  ;D

Anyway, I truly hope that this post doesn't come off as blunt, but I figured it may be a good idea to put this into context a bit especially as the meet is so delayed. Again, I will try to make sure that this is an exception rather than a trend. A big thanks to everyone for your patience. :)

Enough said, I will start preparing the meet for release now.

The meet has finally been released (http://virtualmeet.net/meets/200903pl/), rankings updated (http://virtualmeet.net/rankings/), lift trackers generated, stats refreshed...

There was some stellar lifting in this meet. Among the highlights was Christie Attwood (http://virtualmeet.net/christie/) becoming the first woman to break into Class III on the total rankings, but it was also great to see many lifters coming back stronger than ever.

On the downside, this meet also saw quite a few bomb-outs due mainly to the usual suspects, eg. failing to hit depth in the squat and not pausing the bar properly on the bench press. Claudia Gerhards and Ramon Gysin, who otherwise showed solid lifting, unfortunately forgot their proper shoes at home and resorted to squatting and deadlifting in their socks (which is forbidden both in real meets and our meets). Lastly, the UOIT softball team was nearly disqualified due to not displaying the newspaper on any lift. However, they did send me a close up of the paper and because it was posted on the wall visible and easily identified as the same paper on all video the meet date is beyond doubt.

I can't say this enough: everyone, please read the meet instructions and the rules (http://virtualmeet.net/meets/rules/) (and don't forget the meet checklist (http://virtualmeet.net/meets/rules/)...).

So a mixed bag, but I'm sure that many lessons were learned and we will probably see many of these lifters come back to do even better. As usual, thanks a lot for participating and a pat on the back to the judges for doing a good job.  :)

Thoughts? Comments? Questions?

Almost forgot: the video player on the meet page apparently did not like the long playlist with well over 600 items (attempts, images, judge lights) causing the Flash player plugin to hang. I will investigate alternatives for dealing with this, but for now I have disabled the round-by-round footage for this meet. Of course, all the lift video is available as usual by clicking the weights on the results.

And: this meet also broke a small milestone... now over a thousand attempts have been submitted (1002 to be precise). We are also approaching 100 unique participating lifters (now 89) and 200 forum members (now 197) and 2000 forum posts (now 1977). This is of course just the beginning, but it's still very exciting to see that we already have some mileage behind us.

THanks Kris for finishing up the meet. Good job everyone participating.
Though I am not contend with my squat depth and BP performance, I was quite happy to deadlift over 200 again without any pain.
I set the squat's up much too wide and need to work on bringing in my stance and get more mobility. I ordered Mark Riptoe's Starting Strength. I hope it can help me with that.

Still need to look at all the videos but already saw some very good lifts.

Kris,

Thanks for doing such a great job. I apologize for some of the screw-ups on our end. We had a lot of first time lifters. I'm sure it gave them a taste of what a real PL meet is like. I still can't get over all the yelling and screaming and cheering during our Sunday session. You would have thought it was the World Championships.

A slight correction. It was the UOIT ROWING team. Brittany Lee is from my youth weightlifting and was the only softball player.

Thanks again.

Tom Thekan

Regarding Ramons bench press, the bad attire call should come from the usage of wrist bands, correct? Maybe the permissable powerlifting attire should be added as an item to the meet check list.

Philipp, did you get the 175kg Squat? Good form on the other squats! Also a strong deadlift.

Nice job Christie on the meet. Especially the deadlift looked fast and easy.

Correct, wrist wraps are not allowed.

The current checklist is purposefully brief on the details in order to provide a good bird's eye view of the whole process, but also to remind lifters to at least read the most vital parts of the rules. So when the checklist asks the user to "make sure you have competition legal clothing" it should be clear that you find out what this means before checking this step as done. That section is a whole page in the rules and I think that it would be quite hard to distill it in a sentence or two without loosing details that could have you disqualified. But the idea was definitively a good one.  :)

I think the fundamental question is whether we should continue maintaining close compatibility with the official rules of the sports or whether we should create a more permissive simplified version. My personal opinion is that close compatibility with the real-world powerlifting and weightlifting rules is well worth the trade-off of complexity as it helps prepare lifters for official meets and also gives credibility within the communities at large in a way that laxer rules would not.

Having said that, a major challenge is the lack of immediate feedback when competing virtually. In an official RAW meet where wraps are forbidden, Ramon would simply have been asked to remove them before taking his attempts. The possibility of bombing out due to an oversight like this is one of the main reasons why our rules accept any passed lift towards the rankings. Creating an authoritative video representation of what you can and cannot do on the virtual platform would help a lot, but since that is a rather large undertaking I unfortunately won't have time for it before I have finished the more pressing task of getting the completely overhauled next version of the site out the door.


Thanks Tom. Like I wrote above, there is a lot to take into account for first timers and the occasional misses are bound to happen. On the upside, lifters tend to only make the same mistake once. But we obviously have more work to do in order to make our meets even more user-friendly. In the meantime, I think we should continue to err on the side of resolving any resolvable problem with the lifters at the expense of delaying a meet.


Ah, thanks for the correction. I recall you earlier mentioning the softball team and seeing the text on Brittany's shirt I jumped to the pre-mature conclusion that they were all softball players.