At the start of this semester, sophomore Sophie Pfaff and junior Kevin Rybka co-founded the Powerlifting Club.
The club meets four days a week and includes three different skill levels. The officers said they hope members with various levels of experience can improve their health and confidence.
“If you’re brand new, it’s a pretty simple program,” Rybka said. “It takes you through the three main lifts, which are squat, bench, and deadlift. We basically do those solely until you become proficient, and then you can work up to the intermediate.”
Pfaff and Rybka said they come from different levels of experience. Pfaff was a dancer for 11 years before she began powerlifting last January. Rybka has been weight training for multiple years but didn’t compete until this summer.
“We’re definitely not the most advanced. I started lifting less than a year ago,” Pfaff said. “Being a dancer, I had practically no upper body strength.”
Assistant Professor of Classics Carl Young serves as the club’s adviser and made the program outline. Young served as the head coach of a powerlifting gym and was a state champion in North Carolina.
“We had talked to Christie Whalen about how there used to be a powerlifting club on campus,” Rybka said. “We were like, ‘Oh! There used to be one? There’s precedent. Maybe we should do it.’ So we started it about a week before school ended last year.”
Club secretary and sophomore John Woracheck said it’s important to distinguish between powerlifting and other types of weight training.
“Many people have misconceptions about our sport, particularly in regard to how hard we train,” Worachek said. “There has been a joke going around that powerlifters lift for maybe 5% of their workout and sit around the other 95%, but that is simply not true.”
Worachek and his teammates average four to five hours per week in the gym, alongside additional hours researching, recovering and dieting to ensure their greatest chance at success.
“Powerlifting is about progressive overload for squat, bench and deadlift. Basically, how much you can lift in one rep,” Rybka said. “You could put down on pen and paper, a graph, a spreadsheet of progress. It makes for much more incremental growth over long periods of time.”
The club officers said powerlifting is a sport open to anyone.
“You don’t have to look like Dean Pete or Dr. Young to lift a lot of weight,” Rybka said.
While competing over the summer, the club members found a variety of body types– some lifting twice their weight, Pfaff said.
“These really skinny guys are squatting 500 pounds, and it’s insane,” Pfaff said. “Their body composition does not match what they’re actually physically capable of. Your body is so much more capable than you actually think it is.”
For interested students, there is flexibility when to exercise.
“The majority of our club will work out at 7 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in the JAM Weight Room because the plans are for four days a week,” Pfaff said. “The workouts take an hour, or an hour and a half. You could do it with a four hour time commitment. That’s not bad.”
Anyone interested in the club can email Pfaff or Rybka for workout plans and complete them independently in the JAM Weight Room or Founders Gym. For personal instruction, students can attend the meetings with the club.
“Socrates once said, ‘No man has the right to be an amateur in the matters of physical training,’” Worachek said. “I think our club considers this quote seriously and strives diligently to improve our bodies and minds. Powerlifting is as much mental as it is physical. It requires putting insane pressure on one’s body and mentally overcoming the pain to achieve success and in the end, self-mastery.”
