Sophomore Bruno Giglotti deadlifts 500 pounds: Caroline Kurt | Collegian
He chalks his hands, makes the sign of the cross, and steps up to the barbell. The goal? Make lifting 500 pounds look easy.
The Hillsdale College Powerlifting Club held its annual on-campus meet Oct. 18, bringing together students and faculty for a low-pressure, high-strength competition.
For the second year in a row, sophomore and club treasurer Bruno Gigliotti took first in deadlift and squat, lifting 500 and 425 pounds respectively. Sophomore Michael Golczynski beat Gigliotti by 5 pounds on the bench press, benching 255 pounds and coming in second overall. Junior Matthew Tolbert took third.
“You get a huge adrenaline rush when you know you’re about to compete,” Gigliotti said. “Then your brain clears when you’re in there and there’s only one thing on your mind.”
The club uses Dynamic Objective Team Scoring to mathematically represent a lifter’s relative strength given their sex and bodyweight. Final rankings are determined by adding together a lifter’s total DOTS score from all three lifts. With a 1,175 pound total across all three lifts, Gigliotti came in first with a DOTS score of 384.38.
“I’ve been dealing with a glute injury for almost the last year, so it’s been kind of up and down, which is why only my bench was better than last year,” Gigliotti said. “I’m getting close to the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Junior Joshua Marting, the club president, ran the meet.
“The goal of powerlifting is to increase your strength,” Marting said. “It’s so much more healthy and holistic than bodybuilding.”
According to Marting, the club draws both seasoned powerlifters and students who are totally new to the gym.
“It is really hard, with the lifestyle here, to make time to lift regularly,” Marting said. “A part we’ve added to the mission statement is to make training and developing strength as easy and straightforward as possible.”
In addition to their on-campus meet, Marting said club members regularly connect to lift together. One of the club’s goals this year is to send a small group to an official off-campus powerlifting meet, as the club has done in the past.
“There are enough guys who have expressed interest,” Marting said. “So we are looking into that.”
According to Marting, the club isn’t just for students: this year, Charles Yost, assistant professor of medieval history, lifted the second heaviest in deadlift, with a weight of 405 pounds.
“The club is co-ed, and all students, faculty, and even alumni are welcome,” Marting said.
Ian Church, assistant professor of philosophy, serves as the club’s adviser and judged this year’s competition. When he came to Hillsdale in 2016, Church said, there wasn’t as much of a weightlifting culture present. Since then, the college has introduced Man Up events and built gyms inside all of the campus dorms.
“The college has been able to speak to that more basic, human view of health and thriving with pushing strength training and sports more generally,” Church said. “We are not just brains on a stick, but embodied creatures, and our mental health and cognitive health is closely tied to our physical health.”
Though he had been lifting weights since high school, Church said he began taking it more seriously around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’d struggled with anxiety for a long, long time,” Church said. “During COVID, I started getting into the gym a lot just because it was so helpful just to get out of the house and push some plates.”
Gigliotti said he also appreciates the mental health boost powerlifting gives him.
“If I have a lot of homework, boring classes, or a hard week, then I just get in the Splex or Founders and go crazy,” Gigliotti said. “I always have a blast, and it makes my day way better.”
Gigliotti and Marting spoke about the desire to bring more newcomers into their sport.
“Plato said you need to have a strong body as well as a strong mind,” Gigliotti said. “We need to get more people lifting rather than cooped up reading Aristotle.”
