World Champion: Coach Zac Chavez
From Coach Zac:
I wanted to give you all a little run down of my weightlifting journey to becoming a world champion.
First though, a quick primer on the sport of weightlifting. Weightlifting, one word, is an international sport with various local, regional and world competitions that culminate in the Summer Olympics every 4 years. Weightlifting consists of 3 attempts to complete the heaviest weight possible in a snatch and then 3 attempts at a clean & jerk. The total of your heaviest successful lifts between those two movements will determine who wins. There are weight classes, so you compete against similar size athletes and age divisions as well.
I did my first weightlifting meet in 2018. Oddly enough, I only did it because my wife Ashley asked if I would do it for her. I think she had a 6th sense that it would be something I could do well in. I competed at in the 73 kilogram weight class (161 pounds) and snatched 185 pounds and clean and jerked 245 pounds in my first meet. After that Ashley kept asking me if I would do meets with her and of course I said yes lol. At this point I really was not a weightlifter. I didn’t have specific training that focused on increasing my snatch or clean & jerk. I was just a guy doing CrossFit and trying to list my best at meets but I began to fall in love with the sport of weightlifting. Then in 2019 I tore my pec muscle. I endured daily physical therapy to help rehab and after 6 months I began training again in earnest.
In early 2020 I competed at my first national meet in Columbus, Ohio where I promptly bombed out in the snatch, which means that I didn’t make a successful lift out of ay of my 3 attempts. In the clean & jerk I took third place by successfully lifting 125 kilograms (276 pounds). After that COVID hit so I trained a lot in my garage where I was able to compete in an online meet in 2022 which qualified me for Senior Nationals in Las Vegas, Nevada. There I would be competing with the best lifters my age in the country. At that meet I snatched 101 kilograms (225 pounds) and clean & jerked 132 kilograms (291 pounds).
So in 2023 I began to set my eyes on a bigger prize, the grand slam. The grand slam consists of winning Nationals, Pan Americans, Worlds and a second Nationals in the fall. 4 meets in total for a grand slam, something completed only by 68 other people in the history of weightlifting across all weight classes. So in the early spring I began by winning Masters Nationals, followed by the Pan Americans in the late spring, and then Worlds in Poland in August. I have one more National meet coming up this year to complete the grand slam. In all of these meets I am competing in the masters division for men aged 35-39 in the 67 kilogram (148 pound) weight class division. In that weight class I currently hold the American and Pan American records for the clean & jerk.
As far as training, when I began to take weightlifting more seriously I started using an online coach but soon found out that it did not work well for me. It was difficult to get feedback on my lifts hours and sometimes days after I had completed them after sending my coach videos of my lifts. I needed more immediate feedback in the moment. So I began coaching myself a bit and having my wife Ashley help as well. This year, with my 4 meets I have followed Denver Barbells meet prep program. The program focused on heavy percentage work of my snatch and clean & jerk, often attempting to hit 95-101% of my best lifts. I also wrote some of my own programming based on that program. That added in a lot of squats and working percentages in the 80-85% range.
My training in normally 2.5 hours a day split into two. I will snatch and clean & jerk in the mornings and then do squats and other accessory work in the evening. I typically train 6 days per week switching between power and full squat variations of the lifts. After my final National meet this coming November I want to work towards breaking the American snatch record of 107 killograms (236 pounds) so I would then hold both the American snatch and clean & jerk records. I also want to train to break the world record clean and jerk of 147 killograms (324 pounds). This would be a humongous goal for me to accomplish at my bodyweight.
So, more records to break, more lifts to hit and more strength classes to help you all get to be better lifters too!
Thanks for listening to my story!
- Coach Zac