The Student Recreation and Wellness Center hosted the first leg of its annual powerlifting competition Wednesday evening at the Main Gym.
“What we tried to create here was a fun competition for people that love the weight room,” Interim Assistant Director Maureen MacRae said. “It’s just a way to promote being healthy in a fun atmosphere and people really enjoyed it.”
Normal powerlifting competitions hold bench press, deadlift, and squats in a single day, Dimapilis said, but our campus does it over a course of a month and a half.
Senior studio arts major and SRWC fitness staff member Alain Dimapilis said that the goal of the competition is to see who can lift the most weight within a division, in comparison to other people competing. Each division is determined by weight for both men and women, according to the CSULB Bench Press Contest rule sheet.
“Usually people bench double their body weight, if they’re good at benching,” Dimapilis said.
At Wednesday’s bench press competition, there were five women and 27 men competing.
Mechanical engineering freshman Gina Gionta, who weighed into the competition at 118 pounds, won the women’s division by lifting a max 100 pounds before failing to push up 120 pounds.
“I could have done 110 (pounds), but I just didn’t plan it out because I haven’t benched in a while,” Gionta said.
As a first semester student, Gionta said that she was ready to show CSULB what she was made of as she has competed in contests before.
“I have done competitions that involves push-up, sit-ups, pull-ups and running,” Gionta said. “It’s more reps for those types of contests, but we lifted a lot.”
Despite not working out as much as she used to, Gionta said that she wanted to still give her all.
“I figured I wanted to try to see how much I could lift now,” Gionta said.
Business Administration junior Samuel Kim said that many participants inspired him to bench-pressing 175 pounds at the competition. While that does not seem like a lot of weight to most people, Kim achieved this feat standing just a mere 4-foot-1-inches tall and weighing 89 pounds.
“[Working out] pushes me to be the best that I could be,” Kim said. “It gives me a standard to weigh upon myself.”
Winners gets a trophy for each deadlift, bench and squat competition. The overall pound-for-pound winner across all three gets a big statue trophy at the end of the entire powerlifting competition.
The next leg of the competition is the deadlift on Oct. 23 at the SRWC.