Latest news with #powerlifting
Forbes
10-06-2025
- Health
- Forbes
Charlotte Metcalfe Pursues Olympics After Daunting Brain Injury
Charlotte Metcalfe overcame a brain injury that coincided with her silver medal lift at last fall's ... More World Championships. Her ultimate goal is the 2028 Olympics. Charlotte Metcalfe says that when she first got into competitive weightlifting, she was given some advice by her coaches. They told her, "Remove all emotional attachment to pain." 'That tells you everything I think you need to know about the sport,' Metcalfe joked. The 21-year-old English powerlifter took that advice, along with other bits of weightlifting wisdom on everything from nutrition to the intensity and consistency of her workouts last year, as she prepared for the Global Powerlifting Committee (GPC) World Championships in Slovakia. Little did Metcalfe know that she wasn't just powering through pain, but had something else going on in her body. Alongside the usual burn and muscle ache after her daily routine of squats and deadlifts, Metcalfe said she felt unusual symptoms and some fatigue that just didn't feel right. Just a month before Slovakia, Metcalfe hit her head on a barbell at her local gym, initially thinking her injury was nothing to worry about. 'Weightlifting is definitely taxing,' Metcalfe said, over our recent Zoom interview. 'Each lift that you do temporarily increases intracranial pressure.' But Metcalfe said that weightlifting, just like bodybuilding and martial arts, present 'so many risks' that athletes sometimes can become desensitized. The symptoms came at different times after hitting her head, but eventually got worse. Soon enough, the pain became unbearable. Metcalfe explained that while training further, her spatial awareness started to become 'awful.' And despite experiencing recurring headaches and bouts of fatigue, she chose to compete and flew out to the continent anyway. There, on the first weekend of October, Metcalfe went on to win a silver medal at the GPC World Championships. As it turned out, the English powerlifter suffered a brain injury just weeks before that major competition. Unaware of her condition, Metcalfe had suffered a potentially deadly subarachnoid haemorrhage, or bleeding on and around her brain. 'It was a matter of risk, but does the risk outweigh the opportunities?' she said she thought at the time. Now, looking back, she feels that her decision to try to ignore her headache was a misstep. In March 2025, during an interview with the Manchester Evening News, Metcalfe went so far as to call her choice to compete 'a mistake that almost killed me.' The remedy for her brain injury entailed spending an initial 16 hours in a hospital for standard neurological tests. Thereafter, she was sent home to rest, spending the next two weeks in bed before having a follow-up brain scan. Another thing that may have led to her brain injury, she said, is the fact that over the years she had eight prior concussions. She felt that they were definitely a factor. 'Typically, when injured, I adapt,' Metcae added. 'I train around it, shift focus, and keep going. If it's upper, I train lower. But the brain injury stopped everything.' Despite her efforts to continue training and reclaim some normalcy, Metcalfe said that a terrifying episode after a 573-pound leg press forced her to stop. And when she could not lift, Metcalfe explained, 'For the first time, I felt like an athlete without a sport.' At the World Championships, Metcalfe saw a competitor achieve a 100kg deadlift and decided to push herself beyond her normal limits. Drained and in pain, and again feeling a fatigue like she'd never felt before, Metcalfe pulled off a personal best of 112.5 kg and won the silver medal in the 2024 World Championships. Metcalfe poses with her silver medal after the 2024 GPC Weightlifting World Championships in Trnava, ... More Slovakia. Despite her risky gambit, Metcalfe, who is studying to be an attorney at the University of Law in Manchester, England, admits that her sport has helped her through some of the most difficult times of her life. 'I always loved combat sports, mixed martial arts like Muay Thai, and my weightlifting came from that," Metcalfe explained. "But as a sport, weightlifting forces you to be present. It was a very grounded move for me.' Once she began a lifting routine for strength and personal fitness, she quickly moved to powerlifting at the end of 2023. Metcalfe said she took up Olympic-style lifting the following summer, and in the mix soon established an impressive set of personal bests, and others started to take notice. 'One of the guys at my gym asked me if I had ever considered competing. Up to then, I hadn't really thought about it.' Acknowledging the risks she took last fall, Metcalfe said she hopes others will be more cautious and urges young athletes to take head injuries seriously. Now, several months after her second-place finish and dealing with post-concussion syndrome, Metcalfe explained that she's altered her weightlifting and fitness routines, as well as her self-care and nutrition. As a law student, Metcalfe is set to finish law school in 2026 and find gainful employment as a barrister, a role akin to a litigation attorney, as it's called in the U.S. After being 'called to the bar,' Metcalfe plans to start her work immediately. 'I'll be 24 for (the 2028 Olympics in) L.A. Typically, weightlifters can be in their prime into their late twenties and thirties. I'll plan to be doing full-time law, and full-time weightlifting,' Metcalfe said, 'for the next five to eight years.' And yet, Metcalfe has another big goal on the horizon: making Great Britain's 2028 Olympic team. She said that to prepare for the Olympic trials, she will shift her focus from powerlifting, which emphasizes maximal strength in the squats and deadlifts, to Olympic-style weightlifting, which focuses on explosive power, speed, and technical skill, primarily through two main lifts: the snatch and the clean and jerk. Along the way, Metcalfe plans to vie for a spot in the upcoming Commonwealth Games, which take place next year, from July 23 to August 2, 2026. Fellow Team GB powerlifter, Roza De Oliveira, who competed alongside Metcalfe at last fall's World Championships, thinks his teammate has what it takes to compete at the highest level. De Oliveira says Metcalfe possesses the right skillset for the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics, and describes her in the following way: 'Truly believes in her own capabilities and will never second-guess herself in the process. Always consistent in her character. Filled with confidence.' 'It's not just the discipline or integrity,' De Oliveira concludes, 'but (her) refusing to compromise on who she is, no matter how hard it gets.'
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Pilot soars to new heights with weights
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — A pilot for Sanford AirMed is hoping to soar to new heights later this month when he goes to Atlanta, Georgia, for a special competition; not with wings, but rather with weights. Being a pilot for a hospital carries a lot of responsibility and weight, 'I've always wanted to be a pilot, it's always been a dream of mine since I was a kid,' Braxton Large said. Teen sentenced to 20 years for fentanyl death But Braxton Large is used to weight…a lot of weight. Large is a nationally ranked powerlifter who will be going for a national title. 'Going into this competition takes a lot out of you, you got to make sure you eat right, you're sleeping right, I've been prepping for this probably for the last six months,' Large said. Large placed first in the regional competition with bench press, squats, and dead lift, but he knows it'll be tougher at nationals. 'There's some really good competition there I'm excited to compete against people that are relatively the same strength,' Large said. Large works out five days a week, Liberty Barbell, but his coach actually lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. 'The best part for me has been being privileged to see how hard he works every single session and just how hard he's able to push himself,' strength coach Desi Cooney said. Large says what drives him is competition.'I'm a very competitive person, I just needed to find something, I'm not really good at cardio, I've always been pulled to strength, because I've always been a stronger individual,' Large said. His coach thinks he has what it takes. 'He's ranked 3rd right now going into it, but of course we are going to be going for that gold medal and I think he has a really really solid shot,' Cooney said. Large says he won't fly through the competition, but being a pilot will help him get there. 'In aviation there has to be a lot of discipline within your job in operating the aircraft, there's a lot of checklists, you're always going through checklist 1,2,3,4 so it's easy for me to follow a list and execute the list,' Large said. Right now Large benches over 500 pounds, but when he competes on June 28, he says his goal is to lift a total of 2,000 pounds in bench, squat, and dead lift. If he does that, he thinks he'll win the national title. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
BBC News
05-06-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
'I found gyms terrifying - now I'm a record holder'
Visiting new gyms was once a prospect Ella Brincat-Smith found "terrifying".The 19-year-old, who is autistic and also has ADHD, explained she "doesn't do new places", but decided to take up powerlifting to spend more time with her said she found a powerful community within the sport and she has progressed to such an extent she recently set a new British junior record after bench pressing 132.5kg (292lbs)."Through this sport I have met so many people and done things I never thought I would be able to do," said Ella. Ella, from Newark, Nottinghamshire, said she struggled with traditional sports but took up weightlifting five years ago because her father competed and coached."I have autism and ADHD so I don't do new places and I was really scared," she said."You need to go to new gyms and for me that was absolutely terrifying, but I feel like that through this sport I have met so many people and done things I never thought I would be able to do.""It's nice to be good at something," she added."It makes me so happy. You can have a bad day but then be good at this and it is 'Yes, I have achieved something, I'm happy now'."There's a really great community. You can't do this sport alone, you have to do it with other people."You see other people achieve as well as them helping you and everyone gives something back and I love that."She now trains three times a week, which, along with working as a nurse, has been "a challenge". 'Really transformative' But her dedication has brought rewards. Ella she recently set a new British record in the junior 84+ category when she bench pressed 132.5 kg (292lbs). She also came second at the World Equipped Bench Press Championships in Norway. Ella added: "I want to win as a junior girl at the world's, that would be amazing, but also to inspire more people to get involved in the sport."We need more junior females lifting and I feel that people won't realise how much they will enjoy it until they do it."Some girls are scared to start lifting because they think 'oh no I don't want to get big and bulky'."But once you start it is so fun!"Her father, James Brincat-Smith, described her progress as "mind blowing" and said he believes she has the ability to set new Jenni Sherwood added: "The change happens when you become confident, when you become excited about something, when you know you are good at something and just want to share it."I think that has been a really, really transformative thing for her."The family are all targeting taking part in the world championships next year, in the junior and masters Youth Sports Trust, is a charity which has campaigned about access for those with Oliver MBE, YST CEO, said: "Every child is unique and therefore there is no one-size-fits-all approach to engage them, but we know that with the right understanding and support, sport has the potential to be a powerful force for good. "It can help autistic young people to develop social connections and skills, increase their self-confidence, and support their emotional wellbeing, with lifelong benefits."
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Jan Todd May Be the Reason You're Lifting Weights
On a foggy day in the summer of 1979, Jan Todd pulled on a navy tracksuit and combed her long blond hair, letting it hang loose down her back. She had flown to Scotland to attempt to lift a massive set of boulders known as the Dinnie Stones, each outfitted with an iron ring. In the 120 years since a Scottish strongman famously hoisted the stones, thousands had tried and failed the test of strength. Of the 11 who had succeeded, all were men. She was 5-foot-7 and 195 pounds; the stones together weighed 733 pounds. As she approached the boulders outside a 240-year-old inn, a crowd gathered. Finding the right stance was challenging, but eventually she straddled the rocks, adjusted her hand straps for a better grip, clasped the rings and pulled. One creaked off the ground but the other held firm. She felt her face flush. Then she reminded herself why she wanted to lift them: to show herself, and the world, that a woman could. She bent her knees, took a deep breath and yanked one boulder off the ground, then the other. The feat wouldn't be replicated by another woman until 2018. In the ensuing decades, Jan Todd went on to shatter powerlifting records, earn a Ph.D. devoted to the history of strength and exercise, create a doctoral program, launch an academic journal and open the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center, a sprawling museum, library and archive dedicated to the pursuit of physical potential. Collectively, through relentless force of will, she helped to transform strength training from a fringe activity into the cornerstone of healthy living that it is today, particularly among women. 'I do think that I have helped make it possible for more women to understand that it is actually OK to be strong, it's OK to have muscles,' Dr. Todd, now 73, said while giving me a tour of her museum on the fifth floor of the University of Texas at Austin football stadium. She had greeted me in the museum's lobby alongside a 10-and-a-half-foot replica of the ancient statue of Farnese Hercules, with its rippled abs and huge quadriceps. Wearing a billowy floral blouse and large hexagonal glasses, Dr. Todd walked with a pronounced limp and gave the impression of a proud den mother. She guided me through the museum's galleries and backrooms, all shrines to strength. The rooms were filled with artifacts of strongmen and strongwomen throughout history, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Josephine Blatt, a turn-of-the-century weight lifter known as Minerva. The center holds more than 40,000 books, and in a back corner there's a chunky early 20th-century dumbbell ('almost unliftable,' Dr. Todd said) next to a Shake Weight. 'I need to save them,' she said of the artifacts around her. If not, she added, 'maybe nobody else will.' Once a sideshow oddity, weight lifting has seen a surge in popularity since the late 1980s, with strength training now more popular than cardio, according to some reports. Everyone today, from pregnant women to older adults with arthritic knees, is encouraged to build muscle, thanks in part to people like Dr. Todd and her students. 'Jan Todd is a legend in the world of strength,' wrote Mr. Schwarzenegger, who has known and collaborated with her for decades, in an email. 'She's a pioneer who led the way for strongwomen all over the world. She's studied it more than anyone I know, and she's also lived it.' Once known as 'the world's strongest woman,' Dr. Todd once bent bottle caps with her fingers, lifted her Ford Fiesta for fun and drove nails through wooden boards with her palms. But greater feats were still to come. Learning to flex Growing up in Western Pennsylvania, Dr. Todd, then Janice Suffolk, wasn't encouraged to flex her muscles, physically or intellectually. Her family was poor, without an indoor bathroom for a while, and her father, a steel mill worker, didn't see the point in educating women. And neither was he a fan of girls playing sports. Janice was always bigger than her friends, wider and sturdier, 'like a larger species of the same animal,' she told me. More like a 'Clydesdale than a thoroughbred,' she said. After her parents divorced, her mother encouraged Janice to join the high school swim team, but she felt ashamed when she couldn't fit into the required swimsuit. 'I didn't have any appreciation yet that the bigness of my body,' she said, would 'make it possible for me to be who I became.' As a college student at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., she met Terry Todd, a 6-foot-2 national powerlifting champion and a professor there. Terry fell in love with Jan when he saw her flip a massive log at a barbecue. 'She was a natural force. Mount Rushmore,' he told Sports Illustrated in 1977. 'There was something about the way she stepped up to that log and lifted it,' he later told People. 'No giggling, no false modesty.' According to family lore, when he told his grandmother about Jan, he opened with: 'You know, she is perfectly leveraged for the squat.' They married and Terry encouraged her to start weight lifting and then powerlifting. She was a natural. One day at the grocery store, she picked up a giant watermelon and was surprised to discover that it felt light. She began to see her strength, even her size, as an asset. 'If the watermelon is not heavy, the dog food bag is not heavy and your grocery bags aren't heavy,' she said, 'you begin to realize that so many things in your life are easier.' Still, she had few role models for what a physically strong woman could look like. After all, even Wonder Woman's muscles were relatively small. Around this time, Terry told her about a storied early-20th-century strongwoman, Katie Sandwina, also known as Lady Hercules. A star of the Barnum and Bailey circus, she was nearly six feet tall, more than 200 pounds and billed as the world's strongest and most beautiful woman. Jan was captivated. It was a whole new model of womanhood. She began looking into the histories of other strongwomen, with names like Vulcana, Athleta, and 'Pudgy.' She found that understanding the people who came before helped her embrace her own power. 'It was reassuring to me,' she said. In the mid-1970s, the couple moved to a farm in Nova Scotia, where Jan taught high school English by day and trained by night. She kept a set of barbells in the back of her classroom. Throughout this time, Dr. Todd set more than 60 national and world records and was profiled by Sports Illustrated in 1977. Coaches around the country began tearing out the article and posting it in girls' locker rooms as inspiration. Johnny Carson invited her onto 'The Tonight Show,' where she deadlifted 415 pounds for an audience of 14 million viewers. The pursuit of power In the early 1980s, Jan and Terry moved to Austin, and Jan got a job at the University of Texas teaching weight lifting and coaching the school's powerlifting teams. She realized that few people studied the history of sports, let alone strength training, and that most exercise physiologists focused on aerobic activities, like running and cycling. So she started a Ph.D. in American studies, crafting her coursework around the history of muscle and exercise, particularly among women, and became an outspoken promoter of strength. It wasn't easy. Around the department, she often felt eyes on her biceps. It seemed you could be a meathead or an egghead, but you couldn't be both. Her degree was delayed more than a year when the department chair decided that, despite her excellent grades, her work in the women's studies wasn't serious enough. 'I don't think I could ever be anybody for him other than the weight lifting lady,' she said. She kept pushing. She co-wrote the first scientific guidelines on strength training for women, helping to dispel fears about its potential danger to women's bodies. She and Terry created the first academic journal dedicated to the history of strength sports and exercise — Iron Game History — in 1990. It gave strength scholars a place to publish, and Dr. Todd still edits the journal today. In it, she has documented dozens of strongwomen lost to history — women who hoisted cannons, twirled their husbands like a rifle or lifted two men with one arm. Longtime colleagues say Dr. Todd is unrelenting, building up the people around her and lifting her field and students — many who have become leading exercise scientists, health researchers and historians. 'Jan is a really good — I won't call it a pusher, I'll call it a masher,' said Kyle Martin, a longtime colleague and curator of her museum. She is constantly mashing together people, sources and ideas, he said. Pumping the iron game Not long after they moved to Texas, Jan and Terry started trying to have children. Getting pregnant was taking longer than Dr. Todd had hoped, and in her darker moments, she wondered if the fearmongers who said lifting could wreck a woman's fertility were right. Then at 36, not long after learning that her degree would be delayed, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and was told she had less than a 25 percent chance of survival. Driving back from a doctor's appointment, Terry turned to her and asked: 'When have you not been in the top 25 percent of anything?' What followed was surgery and treatments and moments when she struggled to get out of bed (though she kept lifting). Throughout the ordeal, she called on the same drive she used as an athlete. She eventually beat the cancer, but she would never be able to have children. So she got back to work. For years, Jan and Terry had filled rooms of their home with strength memorabilia and artifacts they had collected, convinced that they might someday be of interest to scholars. The Todds knew that researchers depend on historical objects, photographs and texts. The couple threw their energy into creating a museum. 'I'm not going to have children,' she remembers thinking at the time. 'If there is a legacy for me or for Terry, for both of us hopefully, it's going to be this place.' In 2008, after decades of petitioning, lobbying and fund-raising, they opened the Stark Center in a 27,500-square-foot space inside the stadium. There are posters of Katie Sandwina, the circus strongwoman, photos of the Muscle Beach star Pudgy Stockton (one of Dr. Todd's mentors) and of Mr. Schwarzenegger posing on the cover of Iron Man magazine. There's also the four decade backlist of Shape magazine, the first dedicated to women's fitness. 'I remember clearly seeing the very first volume,' she said while thumbing though a copy. The cover featured Miss Universe in a purple catsuit promising to help readers 'bodysculpt.' 'That was a big thing.' Strong like Jan In 2018, Terry died. Then, five years ago, on her 68th birthday, Dr. Todd went for an evening drive with friends in their off-road vehicle. Suddenly, a couple wild boars darted in front of them. Her friend slammed the brakes and the vehicle skidded into a ditch, then flipped. Dr. Todd, a woman who had lifted countless cars, was trapped under one for more than an hour. The accident shattered her ribs, wrist, ankle bones and a hip but didn't damage any organs. Doctors told her that her muscles might have protected her from more serious injury, even saving her life. She moves differently since the accident — 'like a drunken penguin,' she told me, as she sipped a Diet Coke from a large tumbler with the words 'DON'T WEAKEN.' We sat in lounge chairs on her back patio, as her two 150-pound bull mastiffs played by her feet. Nowadays she lifts less, likes to garden and travels to Scotland most summers to watch others try to lift the Dinnie Stones. Dr. Todd is also finally getting wider attention for her academic work, which is featured in two new books about the science and history of weight lifting. In them she is portrayed as an almost mythic figure. 'Nobody has integrated the greatest powers of muscle and the greatest powers of mind in athletics and academics as seamlessly as she has,' said Michael Joseph Gross, author of 'Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives.' Near the end of our interviews, Dr. Todd brought me into her garage, which is bursting with overflow from the Stark Center; shelves of artifacts and keepsakes from her own life and the history of strength training. She opened boxes at random to show me medals, log books, posters, hundreds of photos and an archive documenting decades of Dinnie Stone lifts. We eventually arrived at her rack of weights, unceremoniously squeezed into a back corner. She hasn't used them much since her accident, she said. She greeted them quietly, like a relic from her own history. But she seemed OK with this. 'Even as broken down as I am,' she said, 'I can still pick up the 50-pound bag of dog food and pour it in the bowl and not have to worry too much about that. And I can carry in my firewood.' And she can still bend bottle caps with her bare hands.
Times
22-05-2025
- Times
Powerlifting blogger secures pupillage after 52 applications
A powerlifting legal blogger who is renowned for his online summaries of public law cases has finally been offered a pupillage place in chambers. It took four years of disappointment and 52 applications for Gabriel Tan to be offered a pupillage — the one-year barristers' training requirement — at Matrix Chambers. Tan, 30, will start the pupillage in October next year. He built momentum on 'legal Twitter', a network of social media profiles on X that are united by a love of pedantry about the law, where he posts as @finishedloading. Tan says the network, in which law students discuss topical legal matters with eminent silks, was 'massively' encouraging. He recalls that he became so prolific on the platform that at one stage he
