Serg and I began working together in November of 2022 directly after her qualifying for collegiate nationals. She was already an incredibly strong lifter, and gifted squatter. She had been making the cut into the 67.5kg class in each of her prior meets, but decided to compete as a light 75 in her national debut. Our first few blocks together were pretty rocky, but we had enough time gather data and adjust as needed by the time meet prep came around.

Although squat is where Serg excels, it’s also the lift we were most nervous about heading into nationals. Depth was our biggest hindrance in training, and is what caused a miss with 150kg at her prior meet. Changing bar position definitely helped this issue, but was still something we had to keep a very close eye on all through prep. Luckily, progressing strength was never the issue. We had a relatively basic layout that worked very well all through prep. She was squatting two times per week, with a heavy single on her primary, and a slightly lower RPE top set of 3-5 on her secondary early in the week. All of her rep work was in the 5-6 rep range. Serg was able to walk away with her first 3/3 squat performance, getting 9 white lights, a 27 lb meet pr, and an 8lb ATPR.

Similar to squat, we were able to see very consistent bench progress all through prep. Although some of that progress was definitely due to sitting at a slightly heavier body weight, we were also able to make some very effective technique changes as well. We changed up her foot position/leg drive strategy and saw massive improvements in her ability to create/maintain an arch. With her more efficient bench technique we also saw improvement in her ability to handle workload, so bench progress was basically driven by just feeding in a little more volume when needed. We had some issues on meet day with extremely long press commands, the head ref called me up to tell me that he “can’t tell if the bar is touching her chest or not.” We tried to take this into consideration and make it more convincing for her third attempt, but no dice. I do not see this being an issue in future meets.

Deadlift was the lift we saw the most struggle with off the bat. Switching to sumo too aggressively caused some pretty substantial knee pain that pretty much put all lower body training at a stand still. After about 3 blocks of tinkering, we decided to scrap sumo altogether and just do what we knew we could do pain free. Although we didn’t see the same rapid progress on deadlift as we did squat or bench, switching to conventional allowed us to get much more productive training in, which had a massive impact on getting in quality sessions across the board. After being very patient and slowly chipping away at deads all through prep, we were able to squeeze out every last kilo on her third pull and walk away with an 11lb meet pr and 5lb ATPR.

I am beyond excited to move forward with Serg’s training. I’m very proud of all the work she has put in the past 7 months we have been working together, and I cannot wait for her to really start showing that she is going to be a force in the 75kg class.