Introduction
Step 1: You love weightlifting and competing and want to become a coach to help others
Step 2: You get your certifications and feel ready to take on the world
Step 3: You take your athletes to their first competition and realize you have no idea what you’re doing
Sound familiar?
For how important understanding how to coach at a competition is, there’s very little information covered on how to do that in a lot of certifications.
Up until recently, it’s either been wing it and learn each time, or have someone teach you.
Enter War Games. War Games is an Olympic Weightlifting competition simulator developed from the Staff Calls of Power & Grace Performance. War Games was developed to allow both beginner and advanced coaches to practice counting attempts without the stress of a true competition environment.
How Do Weightlifting Competitions Run?
Before we get into War Games itself, how do competitions actually work? For a full breakdown of all the rules, check out the IWF rulebook, but here’s a synopsis.
The bar only goes up in weight. So lightest weights go first and ends with the heaviest, then repeat for clean and jerk. The order of lists is not just dependent on weight, but attempt and lot number as well.
Beyond that, everyone has a 1 minute clock, unless you’re following yourself then you get 2 minutes.
You also get a certain amount of declarations and changes you can make. You can make two changes to your chosen weight for the first attempt. Then a declaration and two changes for the other two attempts.
I could keep going, but you get the picture. There’s a lot that goes into coaching a competition and there’s not a lot to prepare you for that. Most coaches, myself included, just had to figure it out on the fly and hope for the best. That’s why I’ve developed War Games to help get coaches as prepared as they can be before their next meet.
How to Use War Games to Improve Your Competition Coaching
War Games takes every rule for how a weightlifting competition runs and throws it on a website. This means you can practice coaching a session from your coach without any of the stress of the real thing. War Games has two game modes, to help you practice how you learn best.
Speed Run
This mode moves fast. There is no timer, declarations or changes. All weights are randomly increased based on weight class, including the users. This mode focuses on getting a large amount of chances to check your count in a short period of time. In this mode, since all the weights are already chosen, you can get hundreds of chances to check your count in a very short period of time. This is best for someone who understands the rules, but needs practice counting attempts to warm up their athlete.
Competition Mode
This mode runs exactly like a true competition. Athletes have a timer, declarations, and changes. Everything you could want to experience in a real-life competition without the stress. This mode focuses on mimicking the reality of a competition as closely as possible. This mode is best for someone who has very little knowledge of how a competition works. This mode will mimic exactly how a competition runs so you can be ready for exactly what is coming.
In both modes, users have the ability to choose how many athletes are in their session and the weight class. This means you’ll be ready for how quick a packed session moves and how slow a full session moves.
On top of that, each mode has a full lift history at the bottom of the screen. That means you can check your count versus exactly what happened, so you can reassess and be exact when it matters.
At the end of the day, people are the most important thing in this sport. We know how hard our athletes are working, and they deserve the best chance to show that on the platform. They can’t show that if we are ill prepared for the competition coaching environment. War Games was built not only to help coaches be better coaches, but to help coaches give their athletes the best chance of success. I hope you love it, you can check the site out at www.wl-wargames.com