A simplified guide showing you what to worry about and the most common mistake first time powerlifters make when warming up (that increases their injury risk)
You’ve trained for months. Your opener is dialed in. You finally hear your name called… and then it happens — you forget to wait for the squat command. Three red lights. All that work, wasted by a simple mistake you didn’t even know about.
That’s the reality for many first-time powerlifters. Not because they weren’t strong enough, but because no one told them the unwritten rules — the meet etiquette that separates the lifters who look like pros from the ones who look lost.
This guide (and podcast episode) will walk you through the key do’s and don’ts of meet day, so you can focus on hitting PRs and enjoying the experience instead of worrying about messing up
For simplicity, we have split this mega-article into the 3 critical parts involved in succeeding at a powerlifting meet. This is part 3, but all are linked below:
Part 1: Meet day lifting (equipment, warmups and timing)
Part 3: Meet day, before lifting (performance nutrition and hydration)
Each period carries significant importance and is built on the foundation of a solid training program designed to not just test your 1RMs, but to peak them beyond what you would otherwise be capable of in the gym.
Equipment check is done.
Weigh ins are done.
You’ve eaten, you’re hydrated.
Now it’s time to get through warmups.
Many lifters struggle to know how early/late to warm up, much less how many warmup sets to take so that they are optimally set up for their opener. That’s why I built the 10% PR Booster Tool. It’s a free resource where you can enter your competition time and 1RM. It will not only automatically calculate your warmup weights, but also time them out for you so that you don’t risk warming up too early and getting cold before your opener, nor risk going too late and needing to rush things.
If you’re a lifter who performs well with a top set and backdowns, a conventional warmup structure will work well here. On the other hand, if you perform best with ascending sets (increasing weight with smaller jumps until your last set is your heaviest), you should consider taking more, lower rep sets leading in to your opener.
The latter is a strategy I used at the 2025 BC Powerlifting Provincial Championship with Emily as one component to how she not only won 1st place in her category, but also best lifter on the day.
– – – – – – – – – –
In training, Emily normally takes 5-6 sets of 3 before reaching her top set on squats as her final set. Instead of the typical 50-65-80-90-95% approach for warmups at the meet, we took many smaller sets with lower reps, doing sets of 1-3 reps @ 30-50-60-70-75-80-85-90-95% in order to reach a new all time PR on her 3rd attempt of 347lbs.
With many lifters, this can be as simple as re taking that last warmup set 1-2 more times if needed to build more confidence with the weight before going up.
If nothing else, you should work backwards from when your “flight” starts and plan your warmup sets with more time than you think you need so that you can rest longer if needed or take more sets. There are few things worse for your performance than needing to rush your warmups.
Additional Insights for Warmups
At a powerlifting meet, they use calibrated plates and they are color coded. You must know that the red plate is 25kg/55lbs, the blue is 20kg/44lbs, yellow is 15kg/33lbs and green is 10kg/22lbs.
Don’t be the guy who loads a couple of reds on a warmup and wonders why he got stapled to the bench with “2 plates” before realising that was 264 lbs!
On the topic of equipment, many Novice/Open meets are held at big powerlifting gyms and so in the warmup room, you might not have exclusively powerlifting bars on the racks. There can be some deadlift, squat or other specialty bars mixed in the fray.
This can lead to some weights (especially as you get >300 lbs on the bar) feeling funky and breaking up your groove. So making sure that you’re using the appropriate bar is a key to things feeling the same in the warmup room as they do on the platform. If you check the end caps on the bar, they will say what kind of bar it is. At most meets with a 2-hour weigh in (drug tested), you’re looking for a “power bar”.
If you’re not well versed with loading kilo plates, there are apps like BarIsLoaded which will do the math for you.
Coach Zack was at a national level meet in a smaller federation very recently handling a lifter. Because of the federation size, you didn’t need to be as competitive to reach that level of competition. At the meet, there was a guy who was handling a couple of lifters who clearly had never stepped foot in a powerlifting gym before. His lifters were having a really hard time with all their openers.
As Zack was warming hsi lifter up for deadlifts alongside this coach’s lifters, this poor girl was a petite 47 kilo female. She had two reds on the bar and couldn’t break the ground with it. So he went over and checked to see… that her opening deadlift was 230lbs. When Zack told the other coach that she had 275 lbs on the bar (264+collars), he dismissed him quickly stating he knew what he was doing.
That coach’s lifters missed all their thirds.
Why are you messing around with things that could potentially increase risk of injury on game day? Prepare and know the details. Learn the equipment you’re working with and understand the difference between specific bars and plates that you’re working with. It can literally be the difference between a successful meet and an injury that takes months to heal.
Getting back into the timing of the warmups: if there’s three flights in the meet you’re competing in and you’re in the second flight, you probably don’t even want to touch the bar until that first flight is near the end of their first attempts.
Likewise, you don’t want to be the guy who’s in the third flight who’s taking his second last warmup set when the first flight’s just starting – you’re looking at almost an hour until you’re doing your opener at that stage.
The planning is definitely one side of things. But the other part is, especially at open meets, you’re going to have people who are getting handled by professional coaches, you’re going to have people who’s significant other is handling them and then you’re going to have people who are self-handling.
And on the coach side of things, maybe their coach has every idea what’s going on or maybe they think two plates is not what two plates is. But you’re going to have a range of people who are very confident in what they’re doing and they’re very assertive in how they handle themselves in the warmup room with when they need the equipment that you’ll all be sharing.
How they’re going to communicate to you is going to be very assertive.
On the flip side, you’re going to have people who don’t know what they’re doing and they are this little “agent of chaos” that only serves to make you nervous right when you’re about to go for a warm up. You’ll look over at them and they will look like they like they kind of want to go right then but are too soft spoken to ask.
The best thing you can do here is be confident in your plan and aim to communicate as clearly as possible with everyone else who is warming up on the same rack as you about who is going when.
At 2021 CPU Westerns, there were 2 very strong equipped lifters who took one rack each and left 2 warmup racks for 11 other lifters on the day. In that moment, my job as a coach (even though I was only handling one lifter in that flight) was to coordinate the 5 other lifters on the rack I was working in on to properly streamline and organize everyone.
If you’ve ever worked in the restaurant industry and seen an expeditor at work, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Communicating clearly about who was going next, how many minutes I was waiting to take the next warmup with my lifter and how much weight we would need on the bar at 3:27 pm, etc.
When you have a clear plan like that, managing the chaos that happens becomes so much easier than needing to synthesize these details on the spot.
Even if you’re not an extrovert, super gregarious, crazy confident kind of person [raises hand], you at least have a plan and it’s written down and you don’t have to panic. If somebody asks you what your next weight will be, you at least have an answer.
That answer and planning will reduce the total amount of stress in the room and at the same time reduce the amount of stress for yourself because it’s planned and it’s written.
Equipment
The last thing to consider in the warmup room is equipment.
We’ve already talked about bar selection earlier on but there’s also the rack to consider.
Odds are, if you’re showing up to your first powerlifting meet, this will be your first time using a combo rack and calibrated plates.
One of the best things you can do at the start of the day before weigh ins is taking five or 10 minutes to learn how to use the combo rack (this can be done while measuring your rack heights). This allows you to use and adjust the rack heights and plates more rapidly in the warmup period of the day which makes things less stressful on everyone else too.
The second thing you must understand with competition equipment is: even if this is your first time lifting on comp equipment, that’s not going to be the thing that makes it or breaks it on competition day.
I’ve been to meets where we’ve had all combo racks.
I’ve been to meets where we’ve had 4 different racks in the warmup area and some were super dingy.
At a certain point, you’re either ready for the weight you’re loading for your attempts or you’re not.
The type of rack that you’re using is not going to be the thing that makes or breaks it for you.
Powerlifters who’ve been in the sport for a while are the biggest divas about this.
In the warmup room, while there might be some preferences it’s more important to keep the distribution of lifters as a priority above favorite hunks of metal. If there’s 12 lifters in a flight, 3 racks available and you already have 4 lifters on your rack there is no good reason for someone to be trying to get in on the rack you’re on.
I’ve butted heads with coaches at meets and I said, “no, you need to take your 4 people over there. We have this rack and there are four of us here already”.
It’s easy to get in your own head about good vs bad equipment, tough judging, etc. Ultimately, if there’s a hypothetical disadvantage or handicap that’s present on the day, everyone else is dealing with it on meet day too.
If the platform is squishy or it’s hot in the room and everyone’s hands are sweaty… everyone’s dealing with it. Heck, even inconsistent judging is something that affects everyone on the day.
Go be strong enough that it doesn’t matter – 8 months of bad training into the meet and never properly pausing any of your heavy bench presses won’t be fixed by the judge giving you a better press command.
I work with a lifter named Chad Nabe. He’s 12 years into competing now and just recently hit another lifetime squat PR. In fact, he got 3 white lights on all 3 of his attempts that day. One of our biggest focuses in his training over the last year has been on hitting depth beyond a reasonable doubt. Even if the judges are being “picky” he squats deep enough now that he gets white lights. We could argue all day about how his build makes it look like he’s squatting higher than he really is, etc but at the end of the day if you can just focus on the lifting and not walking a tight rope of “acceptable”, that’s again one less thing to worry about.
Making your training as strict and brutal as possible so that competition day feels like a breeze is one of the simplest (not easiest) things you can do to have a good time when it’s time to step on the platform.
Success at your first meet isn’t about luck — it’s about preparation and execution. If you’ve studied the rulebook, built consistent routines, fueled properly, and managed the warm-up room with confidence, you’ve already eliminated the majority of mistakes that ruin first-time lifters. Powerlifting rewards discipline, not shortcuts. And if you’d rather not leave those details to chance, working with a coach who’s guided lifters through the process can accelerate your learning curve and remove the guesswork. Treat your debut as the foundation for every meet that follows, and you’ll step onto the platform looking like a competitor — not a rookie.
PS – here’s how I can help you prepare for your first powerlifting meet:
Apply to join my “Platform-Ready Blueprint” and become a case study. We’ll work with you 1-on-1 to show you how to add up to 200 lbs to your total and compete in a powerlifting meet with less than 5 hours per week in the gym.
It takes less than 60 seconds to apply HERE in order to find out more information and see if you’d be a good fit.