Powerlifting has given these women a boost
EVERETT -- Two-and-a-half years ago, a 25-foot stroll left Melissa LaGrant wheezing. The 5-foot-6-inch securities attorney, who weighed 375 pounds, had high blood pressure. She was borderline diabetic. When she traveled on business trips, she couldn't squeeze into her airplane seat.
Two Saturdays ago, LaGrant, now 200 pounds slimmer, spent her day in the parking lot of Wonderland Greyhound Park, charging through, among other activities, an event whose designation defines its difficulty: the death medley.
The 32-year-old LaGrant, competing in her first Massachusetts State Strongman/Strongwoman Championships, flipped a 350-pound tire three times, walked with a 165-pound bar in each hand, then lugged a 185-pound granite slab -- appropriately shaped like a tombstone -- for 25 feet, dropping the stone in triumph after completing the three-stage event. In what she considered her first sporting event ever, LaGrant took first place in the women's heavyweight division (140 pounds and above), qualifying for next year's national tournament.
''She's by far my biggest success story," said Dave Memont, LaGrant's trainer at
LaGrant is one of several women training at the gym whose backgrounds and professions belie their Hulk-like abilities. Jane Stabile is a 52-year-old enrolled agent from Wayland. Thirty-six-year-old Diann Smothers is a librarian at Northeastern University. Stabile, a powerlifter, set master's world records (45 and older) last Saturday at the American World Powerlifting Congress championships by squatting 314.5 pounds and dead-lifting 331.5 pounds. On the same day, Smothers took fifth place and set two personal records at the North American Strongman Nationals, dead-lifting 245 pounds and lifting a 90-pound log four times in the log clean and press event.
They credit their newly discovered pastimes -- all three started their Strongwoman and powerlifting careers within the past three years -- for giving them a fun, alternative way of increasing strength and fitness. For LaGrant, her training, combined with gastric bypass surgery she underwent in 2002 at Medford's Lawrence Memorial Hospital, most likely saved her life.
House of pain
The Everett gym could be mistaken for a garage. The edge of the driveway is littered with tires, Atlas stones, and rusty chains. The entrance is a sliding door, rising to reveal a cramped 900-square-foot space that looks like a storage shed instead of the chrome-and-carpet gyms where all three women once worked out. There are no Stairmasters, treadmills, or elliptical machines.
''The cardio equipment is outside," said owner C.J. Murphy, a 300-pound Strongman competitor with a close-cropped haircut and a long, curly goatee. ''There's a sidewalk. Go jog. The sidewalk's free."
Total Performance Sports has equipment that would puzzle members of traditional health clubs. Piles of chains lie on the floor. Evil-looking devices like ''the bomb" and the ''rolling thunder handle" hang on hooks on the wall. A ''bench shirt," which resembles a straitjacket but allows a bench-presser to lift more weight safely, is hooked on a hanger. In the late afternoon, when most clients work out, the room throbs with death metal music that pulses from the Criterion speakers on the wall.
It was this room, which shares space with a martial arts studio, that LaGrant entered in early 2004. The gastric bypass surgery -- a last-gasp alternative after failures with Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, and liquid diets -- had trimmed off weight initially, but she had hit a plateau. The procedure alone, Memont told her, wasn't enough. She had to exercise.
LaGrant, whose body fat was at 37 percent, labored during her first workouts, struggling to lift 5-pound dumbbells while she trained among the sweat-and-snort animals, as Murphy calls his beefy regulars. She lifted alongside fitter members such as Smothers, a Somerville resident who bought a car specifically so she could commute to the Everett gym and train for Strongwoman events.
The culture seemed intimidating at first, but as LaGrant befriended her fellow members, she learned they were just as interested in helping her lose weight as they were in bulking up their own bodies. As LaGrant's workouts intensified, other members encouraged and spotted her, assisting her when the plates became too heavy.
''It's exciting to see people who are struggling get the weight up," Smothers said.
After several months of fitness workouts, LaGrant asked Memont if she could try the hijinks taking place in the gym's driveway: stone-chucking, tire-flipping, and lifting of every heavy object imaginable. LaGrant had no experience with Strongwoman competition, but Memont thought she could learn the basics -- where all competitors must start.
Function follows form
The philosophy at Total Performance Sports is a hybrid of the Westside method, which breaks a week into four sessions: Two maximum-effort workouts and two dynamic-effort days. Twice a week, members lift heavy weights, and the other two days are focused on building speed and explosive power. Workouts vary depending on the members' goals and capabilities.
The foundation, according to Memont and Murphy, is form and technique; some athletes become too concerned with lifting the heaviest weights.
''If your form isn't on, you're going to get hurt very quick," Memont said.
Murphy noticed this with Stabile, who had previously attended a traditional gym in Natick but wanted to try powerlifting and its three components: squat, bench press, dead lift. Stabile was strong, but her technique was all wrong. When she squatted, her knees angled inward and she sat back. On the bench, Stabile lifted with her elbows pointed out at 90-degree angles. Murphy, who admitted shaking his head when the gray-haired Stabile first visited the gym, altered her form and introduced her to equipment she had never seen before.
Murphy put Stabile on the glute-ham machine, an apparatus that strengthens what professionals call the posterior chain: the line of muscles starting from the calves to the lower back. She did ''Good Mornings," a lift where she gripped a bar, leaned forward, and raised herself up again to strengthen her back and her legs. Stabile benched with a four-board stack of wood on her chest, taking off a board after each set so the bar would descend lower. The exercise helped her overcome the ''hole" -- what lifters call the bottom of a lift (for a bench press, the area closest to the chest). She squatted with heavy-duty rubber bands tied around the bar, which added resistance and forced her to accelerate through the lift.
The gym culture is one the 5-foot-4-inch, 140-pound Smothers, who is also a personal trainer, has known her entire life. She grew up in South Carolina, helping her father haul wood and move heavy appliances around the house. In high school, when she did martial arts, she worked out with the boys, lifting and cursing with the football players who gave her high-fives but also reminded her to put away her weights.
Last year, when she first arrived at Total Performance Sports, she saw tire-flipping and stone-throwing up close for the first time, not just the odd-houred replays of international events on ESPN. After learning the fundamentals, Smothers, like a wind-up toy, took off. She flung 120-pound stones onto a box. She did squats, straining to ignore the burn in her quads.
''This is home," Smothers recalled thinking. ''This is great. I love this place."
Hard work pays off
Today, Smothers credits her workouts and Strongwoman competitions for giving her greater independence. Stabile, who confesses a puberty-to-menopause life of inactivity, is lifting weights that Murphy calls ''unbelievable" for a 52-year-old woman.
''I've had to work really hard to call myself an athlete," said Stabile. ''I never was one before. For someone to refer to me as one is still surprising."
LaGrant is just happy to be alive and healthy. Several weeks ago, when she struggled through the funk that can plague every lifter, she voiced her frustration to Memont. He went to the office and returned with a notebook that detailed LaGrant's first workouts, when she couldn't lift 5-pound weights twice.
Now, thanks to her six-day-a-week workouts, she can flip a tire that weighs as much as she once did. For cardiovascular exercise, she sprints 125 feet with a 400-pound sled tied to her body. She's obtained her personal trainer's certificate.
''This taught me to believe in myself," said LaGrant, whose body fat is now at 27 percent. ''You may not get it on the first or even the fifth try. But if you continue at it, eventually you'll get it."
