Weightlifting is a year-long sport unlike others that have seasons so it is important for our members, especially our competitive athletes to stay in top shape year-round.
We wanted to try something new last year with our members and decided to do a 6-week squat challenge to keep them engaged as we neared the end of the year. The 6-week squat challenge would be a different training cycle that focused exclusively on the back squat and incorporating a lot of body building movement and accessory work to supplement the training. Those that decided to do the challenge had to be okay with no Olympic lifts during those six weeks since the recovery time needed to do the squat cycle successfully wouldn’t really allow for much weightlifting to happen.
As a club, we’ve never completely removed the lifts from a training cycle, but we needed to experiment and figured that it would be beneficial to their overall strength development and a great foundation to work with going into 2023. Many expressed hesitations thinking that they would forget how to perform the snatch and clean & jerk by the end of the squat challenge, but we reassured them that coming back to lifts would be like riding a bike and even better because they were going to be much stronger.
To build up interest to the squat challenge we added the “Booty Jar Competition” to it and asked interested members to throw in $10 into a booty (pun intended) where the winner would take all. While we had more members doing the squat cycle, of those we had 16 participants competing for the Booty Jar. The winner would be decided by the greatest percent increase and the prize was now at $160 which was a fun way to try to grow your funds while growing your butt.
So, without further ado, the winner of the Booty Jar Competition is…Josey!
| Name | Starting 1RM BSq | Final 1RM BSq | % Increase |
| Josey | 103 | 125 | 21.36% |
| Liza | 85 | 102 | 20.00% |
| Doris | 85 | 101 | 18.82% |
| Laura | 109 | 125 | 14.68% |
| Erica | 95 | 108 | 13.68% |
| Salma | 63 | 70 | 11.11% |
| Carlos | 150 | 166 | 10.67% |
| Brenda | 104 | 115 | 10.58% |
| Weiser | 100 | 110 | 10.00% |
| Emmy | 150 | 165 | 10.00% |
| Jessica | 101 | 110 | 8.91% |
| Kim | 120 | 130 | 8.33% |
| Jen | 78 | 84 | 7.69% |
| Mei | 85 | 90 | 5.88% |
| Pez | 130 | 137 | 5.38% |
| Johnny | 200 | 210 | 5.00% |
| Kevin | 125 | 130 | 4.00% |
| Dom | 112 | 116 | 3.57% |
| EJ | 150 | 155 | 3.33% |
We really found this training cycle to be a good break from the classic lifts and made folks more excited to come back to them. And so far, we have loved the results and will do this again!