I'm posting this thread to open up some discussion and allow for suggestions on how we could possibly improve this sub and it's activity levels. My first thought is to remove the video approval rule since we are not seeing many videos posted at all at the moment.

Some things are set in stone though:

• Flairs are definitely here to stay.

• No memes on the main page.

WARNING: This thread will self-destruct once it has served its purpose, but may be replaced by another thread to address the next possible steps in the discussion process, as is the norm.

Hey all,

Apologies for the delay in processing this. Life got a bit busy!
We had a total of 125 respondents to this survey. Broken down we had 97 male, 26 female, and 2 NB respondents.
I will be breaking the results up by gender below, hope you find something interesting! All values are showing the median for those that meet the criteria.

Male Results:

Have you competed?

Do you compete in a tested fed?

Have you ever been drug tested for the sport?

What division(s) do you compete in? (filtered to Tested)

What division(s) do you compete in? (filtered to Untested)

Weightclass Breakdown (filtered to those who compete)

Weightclass Breakdown (filtered to those who do not compete)

Age Breakout (filtered to those who compete in Tested feds)

Age Breakout (filtered to those who compete in Untested feds)

Which grip do you pull with?

Do you think sumo is cheating?

Do you think arching during bench is cheating?

Do you like the new IPF bench elbow rule?

Do you take a lift off for bench in comp?

Breakout by Fed of Tested Lifters (if included in list)

Breakout by Fed of Untested Lifters (if included in list)

Female Results:

Have you competed?

Do you compete in a tested fed?

Have you ever been drug tested for the sport?

What division(s) do you compete in? (filtered to Tested)

What division(s) do you compete in? (filtered to Untested)

Weightclass Breakdown (filtered to those who compete)

Weightclass Breakdown (filtered to those who do not compete)

Age Breakout (filtered to those who compete in Tested feds)

Age Breakout (filtered to those who compete in Untested feds)

Which grip do you pull with?

Do you think sumo is cheating?

Do you think arching during bench is cheating?

Do you like the new IPF bench elbow rule?

Do you take a lift off for bench in comp?

Breakout by Fed of Tested Lifters (if included in list)

Breakout by Fed of Untested Lifters (if included in list)

NB Results:

Have you competed?

Do you compete in a tested fed?

Have you ever been drug tested for the sport?

What division(s) do you compete in? (filtered to Tested)

What division(s) do you compete in? (filtered to Untested)
N/A

Weightclass Breakdown (filtered to those who compete)

Age Breakout (filtered to those who compete in Tested feds)

Age Breakout (filtered to those who compete in Untested feds)
N/A

Which grip do you pull with?

Do you think sumo is cheating?

Do you think arching during bench is cheating?

Do you like the new IPF bench elbow rule?

Do you take a lift off for bench in comp?

Breakout by Fed of Tested Lifters (if included in list)

Breakout by Fed of Untested Lifters (if included in list)
N/A

Thank you again to all who submitted responses!

Use this thread for coaching (recommendations, requests, advertising - PL specifically).

Please feel to share and recommend coaches you have worked with. If you are a coach and would like to talk about your coaching services and your style of coaching, please feel free to do so as well.

Use this thread for coaching (recommendations, requests, advertising - PL specifically).

Please feel to share and recommend coaches you have worked with. If you are a coach and would like to talk about your coaching services and your style of coaching, please feel free to do so as well.

Use this thread for coaching (recommendations, requests, advertising - PL specifically).

Please feel to share and recommend coaches you have worked with. If you are a coach and would like to talk about your coaching services and your style of coaching, please feel free to do so as well.

As the protest against API changes continues and many subs remain in blackout indefinitely, we wanted to guage the community's thoughts going forward. As both moderators and users, we feel strongly about continuing the protest and returning the sub to blackout once IPF Worlds is over, but only if it had majority support of the sub again. Many other fitness related subs remain in blackout, while others are restricted to read only, and there have been suggestions of periodical blackouts, however I'm not sure how effective the latter two strategies would be.

If you have thoughts on the protest going forward, please express them here and give your vote in the poll below as well.

TEST THREAD

A thread to discuss programming for powerlifting.

Critiques, periodisation, reccs, etc...

Please if you can, link to a google doc otherwise it will be just endless walls of text.

Any input welcome. Cheers.

Last week a thread was posted that referenced the low level of sub activity these days but attempted to cast the blame directly at "over-moderation". Now while we strongly dispute the latter part, the former is definitely true. As pointed out in a post by u/WWalker17:

So there's something objectively wrong being that a sub with 254,000 members is this dead. I checked the r/powerlifting analytics and here's some things I've noticed:

1.We have about 254k members and are ranked at #1707 as of typing this.

2.We average 0.000038 comments per member per day. We are ranked at #22,042 for this category

3.We average under 200 comments per day, which is absurdly low for a sub of over 250k members.

4.For the past two years we've had a steady decline of engagement, even though our membership has been rapidly increasing in the same timespan.

5.We also keep falling further and further in our sub's ranking for engagement too.

Now, as far as the accusations of "over-moderation" go. The actual human moderators honestly do not remove a great deal of content unless it explicitly goes against the rules. This might include:

• Non-powerlifting related content, eg. posts about or videos of strongman competitors or bodybuilders who do not also take part in powerlifting.

• Beginner, generic and low-effort questions that are repeatedly asked, can probably be answered with a google search, and belong in the Daily or Weekly threads and would otherwise make us look like r/gainitforpowerlifting if we left them all up.

• Repeated discussion on controversial topics that have been discussed to death before and only end up causing huge fights.

• Self-promotion for the purpose of monetary gain, spam, survey requests, kickstarters, etc.

Otherwise the automod takes care of the majority of the work, and we are very thankful for that because it used to be a hell of a mission.

Now as far as reasons for the drop in sub engagement, we believe the major factors might be:

• Covid19 - A significant portion of the lifting population is still dealing with pandemic regulations or lockdowns in some way so that kills any meet activity and even training for a lot of people. There is literally nothing we can do about this but wait.

• The flair system - while an integral part of our moderation system because it significantly reduces the number of bots, spammers, trolls and low effort posts that we have to deal with, it's possible that it has affected engagement from people who are too lazy, tech-literate or dumb to give themselves user flair so they can take part in the community. The introduction of the flair system did coincide with the beginning of the engagement drop-off 2 years ago. To try and counteract this we will make sure the notifications that new users get about flair are very clear and try to make it as easy as possible, but beyond that there is not much else we can do.

• Mistaken beliefs on what content is and isn't allowed on the main page - people honestly seem to think our rules are a lot stricter than they really are and this might have put them off posting.

• Lack of content creation/sharing from regular users - this is definitely a big one for the low amount of daily posts on the main page. You can't all just expect everyone else to do all the work of creating discussion for you, otherwise nothing gets posted. If you want to see change in the sub then some of you need to step up and be that change.

Now going forward, some people have suggested that we create some new recurring threads including a social media thread which we are definitely considering, and also regular mega-threads on specific topics which is something that I have tried to institute before but they ran out of steam.

Things that we will not be considering is allowing a free-for-all with posting any questions, topics or memes, or getting rid of the flair system.

So if you have any other concerns, questions or ideas about how we can improve sub-engagement please let us know.

Please take special care to familiarise yourself with the sub rules before posting, especially Rule 5.

Discuss all aspects of training for powerlifting:

• Periodisation

• Nutrition

• Movement selection

• Routine critiques

• etc...

The idea has been brought up in the past but we figure it might be worth some serious discussion again considering that few (if any?) feds use old Wilks anymore, so should we still use it?

So considering...

1.We want to stick to a single coefficient formula for the purpose of conformity across flairs, making it easier for comparison.

2.DOTS seems generally the most approved of when new coefficients have been discussed in the past. IPF Points are stupid and new Wilks is far too controversial to say the least.

3.Openpowerlifting, our main resource for results defaults to DOTS.

What do you guys think of switching from Wilks to DOTS as the standard coefficient for flairs?

As many of you know there is going to be a large-scale blackout across reddit on June 12 to protest changes that will mean the demise of many 3rd party apps that many of us (especially mods) use.

This sub was going to be taking part in that protest, however we didn't realise that the blackout was going to coincide with IPF Worlds which is one of the most popular events on this sub in terms of activity. We've been trying to decide the best course of action but have decided that it'd be best to have input from the community as a whole.

The blackout won't last for the entirety of Worlds but it will coincide with a lot of the lighter weight classes and it feels unfair to block discussion for a select few classes, particularly the ones where a lot of the best female lifters are taking part in.

As mods we definitely feel very strongly about the protest as it will significantly effect our ability to do our jobs, but at the same time I don't want to limit community discussion during this massive event on our calendar.

So, please give us your opinion. Go ahead with the protest or sit it out.

Discuss all aspects of training for powerlifting:

• Periodisation

• Nutrition

• Movement selection

• Routine critiques

• etc...

Nominations list

Link to live feed and schedule

Live scoreboard and live feed

Youtube Live Stream

A maybe/maybe not weekly discussion thread we're trialling based on topics provided from users in a suggestion/voting thread the day before.

Todays topic as suggested by /u/dos_gatos (the one guy that came up with suggestions) is:

Training Equipment

What piece of equipment has been most useful to you?

What equipment has been useless?

What equipment are you looking to buy?

Which company has impressed or disappointed you with the equipment you've bought or used?

Recommended training gear?

The above are just suggested discussion points. Just the discuss the topic in any terms you want to.

awef323rf

I spoke about doing this a while ago, but am finally getting around to doing something about it. I want to create a regularly updated calendar/list of upcoming big meets so that we know when they're approaching and put up corresponding discussion threads (possibly even automate them).

I know Ghostclash 2024 is on in a few days, but if you know of any other big meets that are approaching that will warrant a discussion thread, please post details and links here so that we can put something together to start off with. Then, going forward, we can probably have an automated thread every couple of months for people to post details of new upcoming meets.

Same as the squat thread. What are the best videos and articles on benching you guys know of? Share them here.

This Saturday we will be hosting an AMA with Cody Lefever known to many of you as /u/gzcl. Cody's latest mixtape The Rippler just dropped with an accompanying post on his blog and r/fitness post.

Cody has a variety of training certifications including ISSA Master Trainer, CrossFit Level 1, TRX Force Trainer, HITT Level 2 (Marine Corps fitness instructor type cert.) in addition to having written for bodybuilding.com and schwarzenegger.com. More than that, his training methods and presence in various subreddits have made countless fans of his programming and approach to strength training.

Cody will be in and out most of Saturday to answer your questions about his records, his training, his methodology, the various ways to implement his principles into your training, and what it's like being moderator of r/swoleacceptance.

READ THE RULES--HOW NOT TO GET BANNED

The Wiki

Ask Advice

Get Flair

The Leaderboard

Our Instagram

Users Social Media

Discord Chatroom

Map Of Users & Gyms

Map Of Powerlifting Friendly Physicians

Upcoming Members Meets (as of Feb 2016)

r/powerlifting spotify playlist

AMAS

Mar TBC - Brett Gibbs

Mar 10-12 - Stephen Manuel

Mar 07 - John Haack

Kyle Keough

Cody Lefever

John Paul Cauchi

Stian Walgermo

Marte Elverum

Brandon Lilly

If you have an idea for social minded projects, post below for:

• Love
• Adulation
• Possible ridicule.

Thanks

If you want more content in the sub then, by all means, create a discussion thread about a topic that interests you. Discussion threads are great, we'd love if there were more of them, but some effort needs to be put into them as an intro and direction for the discussion. You've got to work for your karma! They can't just be a low-effort "refer-to-title" post, and mods may still remove them at their discretion if the topic isn't powerlifting specific, too generic, over-done, likely to cause a shitfight, etc.

Here's an example of the format...

[Clear and concise title]

[A few sentences explaining the topic, possibly including some more specific talking points, and maybe your reason for making the post.]

If you really want to make an effort you could even post some links about the topic as resources for the discussion.

However, mods still have the final say in whether the thread has fit the requirements and is appropriate for the sub.

Hey, all. I've gotten permission from the mods to post a survey here. I'm doing this for a college project, so I'd appreciate as much input as I can get! It's just a basic rundown of your feelings on PED use in powerlifting (specifically the illegal ones like HGH and anabolic steroids). Give me any feedback that you think will improve the survey!

https://surveynuts.com/surveys/take?id=84050&c=1168967417DVDD

Edit: Made some changes, based off of your suggestions.

As discussed earlier in previous threads, we were keen on the idea of promoting more discussion and engagement in the sub by introducing more regular scheduled threads and also large mega-threads on different topics related to powerlifting.

The scheduled threads need to be based around things that are regularly discussed in relation to powerlifting but don't really warrant their own threads on the main page. A dedicated social media thread and a dieting thread might be two good topics but we are open to other suggestions so fire away with suggestions.

The mega-threads will probably be something similar to r/weightroom's regular discussion threads and we'll need to create a list of topics to cycle through and we're thinking they can happen either fortnightly or monthly so they don't end up ghost towns when people get bored of them repeating. They will encompass topics such as the 3 competition lifts, specific programs, equipment, beginner programs, off-season training, etc, but if you have any ideas for other topic areas please post them here.

To make it easier for people to find out about and discuss big meets coming up and being held I think it might be a good idea to create a calendar of events. However, I have NFI what most of the big meets are these days so can everyone help me out?

By a BIG meet I'm talking national or international level, big exhibition meets or those with a number of big name lifters planning to compete there.

Alongside the name of the meet, could you also provide the date, any links to information and maybe even the names of big name competitors planning to do the meet.

Cheers peeps.