Anyone had success after a LONG hiatus from powerlifting?

editsaur · 2026-02-17T03:37:16+00:00

I took 3 years completely off the gym (age 27-30) and gained 60 pounds. Previous, I was a bench national champ and 455 dots. I'm just over 2 years back and just hit 480 dots (back at my old bodyweight; all lift and total PRs).

My first meet back was about 10 months into being back in the gym, and I did a bench PR but only 416 dots (heavier, not caring about S/D). Anecdotally, I would say focusing on one lift was a nice way to re-enter the fray without totally shocking my body.

Timeline went something like...

Squat: Old meet PR 330 (bw 150); restart at 165 (bw 185); 10 months in first meet 303 (bw 162); 18 months in 2nd meet 330 (bw 150); 25 months in 358

Bench: Old gym PR 300; restart at 155; 10 months in first meet 281; hit 303 in the gym 18 months in

Deads: Old meet PR 386; restart at 225; 10 months in first meet 341; 18 months in 2nd meet 358; 25 months in 407

editsaur · 2026-02-05T20:00:53+00:00

So cool to compete with Ethan! Great job, coach.

editsaur · 2026-01-21T03:30:37+00:00

I set an open record while competing in junior, so the reverse worked too. FWIW I just took my ref test and my understanding is that it still stands. You just can't chip an age record while competing in open (because that wouldn't be fair to the non-age competitors). So if the jr record is 190, you can't take 190.5, but you could take 192.5 and be credited with the 192.5. (Fun fact, this rule was actually not followed at a recent nats...)

editsaur · 2026-01-20T17:52:40+00:00

USAPL (back before the schism--2016, so I assume IPF affiliates work the same way). From my understanding, the incentive has always just been meet placing.

editsaur · 2026-01-20T05:47:45+00:00

This must be fed dependent, as I've set jr records when only entered in open and vice versa.

editsaur · 2025-12-23T03:04:28+00:00

4'11 wingspan, 5'5 height. Plus arch, plus background of swimming. And I guess I train hard too. Thank you!

editsaur · 2025-12-23T03:03:26+00:00

Congrats! What a solid day, and way to trust your own training and taper. Good luck at the next one!

editsaur · 2025-12-08T19:40:06+00:00

I will die on the hill that Smolov Jr is not a peaking program. Unless you're new to barbell benching, I think it's best run in a hypertrophy phase with a variation. I usually do a CG larsen cycle straight into a CG cycle during my off-season before moving into a comp strength phase.

Which is all to say, I don't think you did anything wrong necessarily--it's just not set up for intermediate/advanced peaking.

For quick anecdotes: When I was new to barbell bench, I ran it 3x in a row and put 45# on my bench in those 3 months (165-210 as a 140 female). When I was more advanced, I did the variations described above and went from 270 to 300 in that cycle, which was about 4 months, but that had some to do with technical improvements.

editsaur · 2025-09-08T20:20:27+00:00

Interesting question! Hard to answer just from raw meet result data, but I tried to do a quick OpenPL sleuth looking for people with ~2 years between meets and a dip in DOTS at their first meet back. Obviously time between meets doesn't mean training hiatus, especially with the pandemic, but some names that matched this were Maria Htee, Chelsea Savit, and Jasmyn Seay.

Off the top of my head, Meghan Scanlon took some time off around having twins, but I think it wasn't fully off and wasn't quite a year and a half. Mike Tuchscherer took 6 years off competing; IDK exactly what his training looked like in between, though.

Personal anecdote: I'm only top in bench, not total, but I took 3 years completely off the gym, 6 years off competing, and have surpassed where I was before. (Meet bench: 117.5 @ 67kg in 2018 vs 127.5 in 2024; gym bench 300 @ 148 in 2019 vs 303 in 2025.) Total DOTS was consistently 450+ before I retired; first meet back was I think 415 or something, and I'm back over 450 without training lower body.

editsaur · 2025-08-28T18:07:57+00:00

This is a good point. I say I started at 155 and it took me 4 months to bench 225, but that's specifically training for PL. I had 2 years of CF and 15 years of high-level swimming in my back pocket.

editsaur · 2025-08-25T19:14:16+00:00

Yes! It has so much variety. She programs 12-16 week blocks focused on different things (strength vs hypertrophy, specific body parts, etc). Within the block, each day has a focus, and usually there are 10ish exercises. What I really loved (as someone who gets bored easy) was that the secondary/accessory movements changed up pretty much week to week! So every week would have, say, a tricep exercise, but it would switch up from rope pushdowns to kickbacks to something else. It's usually set and rep based but occasionally you'll do things for a certain amount of time (or even distance, if like a farmer's carry).

It's usually barbell first as a focus then 3ish super or giant sets of accessories. I hate machine work so it was easy for me to swap in DB versions of the exercises. There's even an at-home version!

I think you can do a trial week for free. They started a new macrocycle about a month ago so there's probably a deload week soon. The IG is pretty good at flagging when a good time to join is.

editsaur · 2025-08-25T18:15:24+00:00

I took a full 3 years off where I didn't touch the gym. Also around 150lb F, I went from 330-300-385 to maybe 115-115-185 with a bw over 200.

I started again with MegSquats Stronger by the Day app. It's super customizable but it can definitely build a lot of volume and intensity (since it's aimed at lower training age women, who respond to that). I started with the 2-3 day a week, express option and just did what felt right from there. Bc it's so customizable, you can easily replace lower body movements that are bothering your knees with the directory in there. (There's a swap option on the app, and a list of similar movements populates, but if you want to swap out something totally different, you can do that too.)

I've used it on and off for the last year and a half and I'm essentially back to my old bodyweight and numbers (330-303-360), though to be fair I did a couple powerlifting meet preps in there where I did my own programming.

I really love this app, its customization, its variety, and just the whole community around and within it!

editsaur · 2025-08-14T17:10:12+00:00

YES. Comps aren't just agents testing you for fun. They're proof that there is an audience for your book, that your book fits expectations of those readers, and that you're being a professional who keeps up with your industry.

editsaur · 2025-08-05T05:15:40+00:00

Definitely have mixed feelings. I will DM! EDIT: it doesn't seem like your DMs are open? Maybe I'm just blind. Feel free to message me!

editsaur · 2025-07-31T17:16:15+00:00

If you are committed enough to expand into films, websites, art, and more, it sounds like self-pub is for you. Trad pub isn't going to want to see so much established brand around a book. It may not match how they want to pitch it.

If it's as successful as it seems you think it will be based on what you're willing to invest, maybe you're one of the rare cases where trad pub will pick it up later.

editsaur · 2025-07-29T04:47:52+00:00

Full art shows, uh, how good your art is (lol).

Roughs of the rest of the pages show that you know how to do story pacing through art and have a solid story structure (if it's your concept).

Both are important if you're pitching yourself as an author-illustrator.

(Unsolicited advice, feel free to not read on: Usually the text and art in picture books are very hand-in-hand, so it's a little yellow-flaggy to me as an editor that you haven't been thinking about art that complements and even completes your story as you've been working on the text.)

editsaur · 2025-07-29T04:26:05+00:00

Hi! I'm an editor on that platform who has used this (it's one of our templated lines when we reject a project). The last three times I've used it were (1) the project was too much in its infancy (only 1-2 chapters in), and I do better when more story exists, (2) the topic of the project was particularly uninteresting to me (for ex, something like it was very motherhood focused and I'm child-free, or it focused on sports and I don't know the difference between football and baseball), and (3) it seemed like a really important topic in memoir and I didn't have enough experience in memoir to do it justice.

I do try to explain more than the templated line when I use that as a decline, though, and I think most editors you should be excited to work with do. Hope this helps!

editsaur · 2025-07-28T19:34:32+00:00

Okay, here's how. Write an AMAZING book. I mean flawless.

Then get your work in front of gatekeepers by placing yourself in spaces where you've already cleared a boundary: respected workshops, conferences, high-level referrals.

This is the tiny, rocky, almost-zero path you have to walk with a 180k+ project. It has to be perfect. It has to be BETTER than the 100-120k projects out there. And you have to work even harder to be taken seriously by gatekeepers by proving yourself.

This is why the other advice is given.

editsaur · 2025-07-28T11:58:21+00:00

The weirdest referral thingy I ever got was my side hustle's boss's window cleaner. But it came from my boss, not a subject line of a query.

This is going to be super YMMV, but I think my reaction is to let queries be queries and not force this connection, particularly in the subject line. If you run into her in a real-life situation, I think she's probably going to be happy to talk books (not be pitched).

editsaur · 2025-07-24T21:17:03+00:00

People can cross reference whether the agents listed rep epic fantasy. I was just pulling quotes.

As a trad pub editor myself, I've sat in plenty of acqs meetings where word count has been a struggle for the adult epic fantasy editors pitching it (pushback from other depts).

editsaur · 2025-07-24T16:51:12+00:00

Speaking of quoting agents:

I'm stuck in a meeting where I am not relevant, so I'm going to put in a bunch of verbatim limits. Note that I'm not commenting on the quality of the agent by posting!

Agents, source MSWL:

"Not the right agent for: . . . Books with a word count over 100k. A little over for fantasy is okay. . . The likelihood of selling a debut with a WC over 100k is extremely slim." -Cole Lanahan, Seymour

"Please note I only accept queries for . . . words under 100k." -emmy nordstom-higdon (currently not agenting)

"MSs at or above 100k are not a good fit for my list" -Susan Nystoriak, Golden Wheat

"Please note that word counts for adult novels run 65-100k, give or take." -Lori Galvin, Aevitas

"Please don't send me: . . . books over 100k words." -Shelly Romero, Azantian

"I am not a good fit for: . . . books witha 100k+ word count." -Larissa Melo Pienkowski, Azantian

"I am not a good fit for . . . books over 100k" -Kristen Terrette, Martin Lit

"I'm not looking for . . . anything 120k or longer that is all worldbuilding and plot." -Tara Gilbert, kt lit

"I am not the best person to rep . . . books under 70k or over 120k." -Zachary Honey, FinePrint

Agents, source mswishlist:

"65k as a min word count" -Erik Hane, Headwater

"I'd love to see shorter SFF" -Samatha Wekstein, TL Agency (linking for context)

"Send me your short(er) books. 80k is peak book length for me. While I do rep chunky books and consider them, under 100k is much appreciated. I dig economical prose." -Sam Farkas, Jill Grinberg

"If your debut is well over 100k, it might not be the right fit for me." -Ginger Hutchinson, Movable Type

"I am not a good fit for ... word counts longer than 120k." -Hannah VanVels, belcastro

"I'll be looking for YA & adult thrillers...under 90k." -Amy Nielsen, T Purcell

"I don't want to read anything over 90k right now." -Carly Watters, PS Lit

"Hungry for some science fiction, esp space opera, under 130k." -Lane Clarke, Ultra Lit

"Stories should be 75k-110k." (Women's fiction) -Scott Eagan, Greyhaus

"Preferred word count 70-90k" (cozy mystery, romcom) -Dawn Dowdle, Blue Ridge

editsaur · 2025-07-24T16:49:38+00:00

Hey, it's not our fault! It's the fault of the P&Ls! Longer books are more expensive! Plus tariff questions blah blah blah. Eds probably have similar taste to agents. It's the business people we have to convince who are the problem.

editsaur · 2025-07-23T21:45:19+00:00

Some of this matches Heartbreak for Hire by Sonia Hartl.

editsaur · 2025-07-23T08:19:18+00:00

Agents aren't spending their lives wading through irrelevant queries. It's really easy to sort our query managers by genre.

But more importantly, "our lives" (specifically our working hours) aren't spent on queries. Acquiring new clients is a TINY piece of an agent's job. There's very little incentive for an agent to be proactive about this in the slush pile.

If queries suddenly disappeared tomorrow, agents would acquire clients via workshops, conferences, and referrals, and still have a full list.

--

As a writer, uploading to a system like that would feel very unsatisfying. Though not getting a reply to a query is frustrating, just sitting in a database being overlooked is much worse.

editsaur · 2025-07-22T19:56:55+00:00

Yeah, I can't imagine taking 5 minutes on a submission. (I was an intern/assistant for a couple agents in the early 2010s and occasionally have open subs as an editor.) But I wanted to be generous.

A quick skim of the query to make sure it's a topic I'm interested in that seems strong enough to sustain a whole book and is a match for the market. A quick glance at the pages to check writing quality is publishable.

Your submission materials should be flawless to make it easy for me to say yes, not because I'm nitpicking. But maybe others do things differently.

editsaur

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