Local Meets vs. National/International Meets
The purpose of this article is to provide the reader with enough insight to make an informed decision about which type of meet would fit THEIR needs BEST:
LOCAL meets or NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL meets.
We will discuss various factors such as the:
COSTS
Meet REQUIREMENTS
EXTERNAL FACTORS such as anxiety and travel
SERIOUSNESS
1.COSTs
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
local meets
The local meet would obviously be the MUCH CHEAPER option:
The only three expenses would be the:
Meet registration fee
Transportation (gas)
Food for the day (if you didn’t pack any from home)
The meet registration for local meets is CHEAPER than national/international meets and on average would be around $75 for one age division. It costs around $25 per division to add others, so it’d cost about $100 to register at a local meet as an Open and Junior competitor.
Meet T-Shirts:
Are seldomly included into this registration fee and cost about an extra $20 to pre-order when you register for the meet.
They always sell these shirts at the venue, so I never recommend buying them ahead of time since you don’t know how the shirts will look, feel, or fit.
I’ve definitely bought shirts at meets ahead of time and regretted them because I didn’t like the design.
Let’s say the meet is an hour away from your house. The most you’ll be paying for traveling expenses is roughly $20 total on gas🚗. If you stop at wawa for post-weigh in snacks🥨🌭🥪, that’s another $10.
At most, you’re paying $130 for an ENTIRE meet experience.
Takeaway:
Local Meets are a very rational option for Lifters who:
Have obligations they can’t miss such as work/school.
Like to compete recreationally
Want to be a little tighter with their BUDGET.
national/international meets
National/International meets on the other hand might require you to contact Sallie Mae to take out a loan💰😑. Here are the costs I’ve compiled:
Meet Registration📜: $150
Plane Ticket✈: $250-$500
Hotel/Airbnb🏡: $300
Food🥗: $100
Transportation🚓: $100
Let’s examine each category closely.
MEET REGISTRATION
Meet registration is a bit more expensive on the national/international level. For example, this year’s Raw Nationals costs $150 to register which had the powerlifting community ENRAGED. Several higher level lifters have reported boycotting the event for this spike in pricing.
I’m not sure if the surge was a supply and demand thing, where they deliberately raised the prices as a result of prior years having too many competitors. Perhaps doing this in an attempt to purposely drive people away this year, while making the same amount of money and running a smoother event with less competitors. Maybe it was a result of actually needing more money to pay for more help or equipment at the event. I have no clue of the actual reason for the drastic increase, I’m only speculating, but this is what it costs to compete at a higher level now.
I can definitely speak for other lifters when I say we’d appreciate it if SPONSORS covered travel/meet registrations costs. It’s expensive to continuously compete, especially when these are the lifters being exploited to bring attention to the sport, but that’s another discussion…
PLANE TICKET/HOTEL
I used my trip to Spokane, Washington for this year’s Raw Nationals as an example for the plane ticket.
Photo by Daniel Olah on Unsplash
It costs about $250 for a round-trip ticket from New Jersey all the way across the country. The plane ticket alone is ALREADY more than what it costs for the TOTAL local meet experience. This is without me getting into the minutiae of finding the best plane ticket offers by ordering at certain times.
At the very LEAST, you’ll want to arrive there the day before you compete and leave the day after you compete, so you can plan for flight delays and other unforeseen circumstances.
You definitely do NOT want to arrive the DAY OF competition for obvious reasons. You do not want to rush to catch a flight right after you compete because these meets tend to run longer than expected, although some people do it.
For my example, I planned on arriving the day before competition and leaving the day after, which means I’ll be staying for two nights. I estimated $150 per night at $300 total for my stay.
FOOD
If you are staying for 3 days and spend about $20 twice a day on food going out to eat, I predict about $100 total.
This is considering you bought post-weigh in snacks and you didn’t eat the third day because your flight is early in the morning.
TRANSPORTATION
Lastly, you’ll have to get around.
If you didn’t rent a car, which is already expensive enough, you’ll have to UBER everywhere.
Out to EAT, BACK to the hotel, back and forth to the VENUE. I’m sure you’ll forget something, tack on ANOTHER trip to the venue.
Then, you want to celebrate 🎉a solid performance by checking out the night life🥂 in the area before you nearly oversleep your flight in the morning. That’s another trip.
I predict this will cost you around $100, granted everything is within a 10 mile radius, which is being generous.
total
Your grand total is $900 right now, with all GENEROUS conditions: you stay the bare minimum amount of time, avoid buying anything miscellaneous outside of food, assume everything is within close proximity of each other, and everything is going as planned.
2. REQUIREMENTS
local meets
Local meets don’t have ANY requirements.
They are all-inclusive meets and everyone of all skill levels and ages are encouraged to register and compete.
You’ll see a ton of first-time competitors and even senior citizens👴👵 busting out grindy reps, which you wouldn’t have expected otherwise.
Although these are all-inclusive meets, they fill up FAST because they have to cap the roster for how many people they can accommodate with the space.
Competing at the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, OH in March 2018.
national meets
National meets are exclusive, and require you to hit a certain qualifying total, or a certain Wilks score to be eligible to register (The Arnold Sports Festival).
I haven’t seen one that caps how many people can register. If anything, they will
Divide the sessions differently
Add lifters to certain flights
Add more sessions.
It’s as if they are rewarding you for hitting the said qualifying total by not turning you away when a bunch of people have already signed up. Plus, the meet venue is large enough to accommodate this many people.
For a meet like Raw Nationals, you need a certain qualifying total to be eligible to register. As the sport gets more and more popular, I imagine they’ll keep RAISING the qualifying total to keep from overcrowding.
3. EXTERNAL FACTORS
Anxiety
NATIONAL MEETS
National meets have a ton of variables that can cause a lifter to feel PRESSURED and therefore, perform differently from how they perform in the gym if they’re not mentally prepared. We have:
Competition against other HIGH LEVEL lifters
Unpredictable wait times within and between flights because of the large amount of lifters competing
Stricter judging from National refs
More EYES watching (especially in a primetime session)
Announcers
Crowd
Livestream and people watching from home
More of the experienced lifters won’t find an issue with any of the above mentioned variables because they’ve competed under these circumstances before, but this is more for a novice lifter competing on the national level for the first time.
LOCAL MEETS
Let’s take a look at local meets, where the same variables apply on a LESSER scale. We have:
Family and friends watching you in person, which could throw you off if you’re not used to dealing with this type of pressure
Less competition if you’re a stronger lifter, which typically wouldn’t make you nervous. First-time competitors will have more competition and will probably be nervous.
Some local meets are really unorganized and also run WAY longer than expected (especially single platform meets).
This could cause the lifter to be nervous because of how unfamiliar it is to them. They’re not used to waiting this long in the gym, and will likely start stressing about things they don’t normally stress about.
Longer meet times could cause inconsistent judging from the officials simply because they’re tired. It’s perfectly normal; human error exists, especially in sports.
Travel
national meets
Most national meets require a FLIGHT unless you’re lucky enough to be close enough to the meet where you can just drive.
Photo by Anete Lūsiņa on Unsplash
Jetlag: These flights✈ can cause JETLAG and therefore restlessness if you’re traveling to a different time zone🕓 and general anxiety if you have a fear of flying.
Water Retention: I know some people who have reported retaining too much water💧 while they are water cutting because of the altitude changes while flying.
Sleep: Sometimes you have to wake up at the crack of dawn to catch your flight. Other times you have delays or have trouble sleeping😐 on the plane (I speak from experience).
All of these factors can affect your RECOVERY and therefore, your PERFORMANCE on meet day. That’s why I recommend showing up to the competition at least 1-2 days before you compete so you can settle in and plan for the unexpected.
local meets
Local meets are just a car🚗 drive away.
If it’s far away and/or you have an early weigh-in because you’re in the first session, you’ll have to wake up extremely early to get to the venue.
Long car rides do cause stiffness, but all of this is INCOMPARABLE to a long day of flying.
4. SERIOUSNESS
The LAST factor I am going to talk about is the seriousness of the competition.
nATIONAL MEETS
National meets have MORE at STAKE.
The types of people who go to these meets are people DEDICATED to the sport and are looking to place well. Some people go just for the experience or just to have fun, but I think that makes up a smaller percentage. With that being said, although the powerlifting community is extremely supportive, people are looking to WIN🥇, which means they take it seriously.
If that scares😨 you, then maybe BIG meets aren’t for you.
Some meets like Raw Nationals are used as qualifiers for even BIGGER international meets like Classic Worlds. There are LIMITED spots available and only the 1st place winner of Nationals can go to Worlds (unless someone declines their invitation of course), which raises the stakes EVEN HIGHER.
Best believe those TOP 5 guys will all be jocking for position and making chess moves such as changing attempts to secure a certain placing. These types of strategies can be fun to watch and unfortunately don’t happen as much at local meets.
LOCAL MEETS
In my experience, both coaching and competing, most local meets are just for FUN.
It’s mostly beginners feeling out the sport or more advanced lifters using it as a tune-up meet for a bigger meet.
If you’re not in a position where you have the time/money to travel and/or you’re just looking to do meets to hold yourself accountable to train, then this is probably the best option for you.
CONCLUSION
I hope this read has given you some insight to the ins and outs of both local and national/international powerlifting meets. Again, my goal wasn’t to tell you which meet you should do, but to provide you with the insight to make that decision YOURSELF, and to hopefully push you to do a meet you didn’t think you’d do otherwise.
I am encouraging everyone who has the resources to venture OUT of their comfort zone and try at least ONE big meet. You never know who you’ll meet, what you’ll do in the places you travel to, and how you’ll stack up against your competition.
For my advanced lifters, I’m telling you to stop being a big fish in a small pond and go to one of these meets, if you can, and test yourself against others of YOUR capability. It’s a different ballgame.
This will segway into my next blog topic, about the mindset of elite athletes and some of the reasons lifters compete well at local meets, but not at bigger national/international meets. I will also talk about HOW you can improve your MENTAL🧠 game on meet day so that you can perform under pressure and your results will be consistent with what you’d hit under normal circumstances💪. Stay tuned...