Taylor Atwood's Success Story (2024)

2018

Worlds in Calgary | TSG’s Hometown

Taylor, Ben, and our entire team arrived in Calgary with confidence levels sky-high. Despite sustaining another muscular strain during the final weeks of preparation, we knew that Taylor had a strong chance of winning his first World Championship. Taylor posted a World Record-setting Total of 758 kg, and we finally had our first World Championship. We had the best time celebrating it with the entire team and my family, and we agreed that even if he had won in Killeen or Minsk during previous years, the feeling wouldn’t have been as great as it was.

Taylor won his 5th National Championship at the 2018 Raw Nationals in Spokane. We set our sights on a rematch against Kjell Bakkelund, the record-setting Norwegian lifter who beat us at the 2017 World Championship in Belarus. Now a World Champion, Taylor was completely healthy for the entire year. He had a strong training cycle, and the injuries he had sustained in the past were a far-gone memory. So, we arrived in Helsingborg, Sweden, with confidence levels as high as they’ve ever been.Taylor set the pace for the meet with a 276.5 kg world record on his 2nd attempt and furthered his world record with 283 kg on his 3rd attempt. He set a new PR on the bench press at 195 kg and finished the day 9/9 with a PR of 312.5 kg on the deadlift. Taylor won his second world championship with a 790.5 kg total, shattering his previous world record of 758 kg. This performance earned him the prestigious Best Men’s Open Lifter of the 2019 World Championship award.

Following a well-deserved break after a challenging eight-month training period preparing for his win and Best Lifter winning performance at the World Championship, we began training for 2019 Raw Nationals on short notice. Coming off of a dominant win just a few months earlier, we pushed Taylor hard on a new three-day-per-week training split due to his time restrictions. Unfortunately, he ended up sustaining the second major injury of his career, this time a groin issue, less than a month before the meet. He was hurt, but he was stronger than we’d ever seen him too.At the 2019 Raw Nationals in Lombard, Illinois, we decided on a conservative game plan for squat. In part, this was a tactic to avoid an injury flare-up during the competition, and it was also a glaring oversight by me. I didn’t scout the competition before that meet, and it took me off guard when the competition matched or exceeded Taylor’s lifts on each lift. Although Taylor won the meet and Best Lifter with margin, it was clear that the new wave of competitors was closing in. With the inaugural 2020 SBD Sheffield Invitational coming up five months later, we knew that we had to overcome this injury and continue to make progress to retain Taylor’s status as the Best Lifter from the 2019 World Championship.

We had a frustrating prep for the 2020 SBD Sheffield Invitational. The groin issue ended up being worse than we initially thought, and it hindered Squat training throughout the entire prep. However, the world was changing fast during the early months of 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic beginning to spiral out of control. We didn’t know what to make of this at the time, so we kept preparing, and then two weeks before we were going to fly to Sheffield to compete at this prestigious event, we learned that the meet was canceled. The cancellation of the Sheffield gave us the extra time that we needed to fully overcome the groin issue that plagued our preparations as we focused on our next goal: becoming the first 74 kg lifter to total 800 kg.

Taylor next took the platform in October of 2020. With a healthy three-month period of preparations under his belt, he felt stronger than ever on each of his lifts heading into the meet. He started the meet by hitting a 293 kg squat to take the national record with ease on his third attempt and then made a limit lift at 199 kg on bench press to take the national record as well. Heading into the meet, we knew that Taylor was strong on the deadlift, but we didn’t have a true idea of how much strength gains he had made. He secured the first-ever 800 kg total by a 74 kg lifter by lifting 310 kg on his second attempt, and then he easily lifted 320 kg on his third attempt, a weight that we thought would represent the limit of his strength. Something about the training set-up had produced another inflection point for Taylor, and this time it was the deadlift that was rapidly increasing.After this competition, we were amazed at what we had achieved. The sight of Taylor totaling more than 800 kg reminded me of an old IPF Magazine issue with Brett Gibbs on the cover, and the title was “The Quest for 800” [as an 83 kg competitor]. In four years, this total had gone from an 83 kg milestone to a 74 kg milestone, and what’s more, Taylor’s chief competitor Austin Perkins became the second 74 kg lifter to total 800 kg one month later.How far the competition standards had risen since we started was quite unbelievable, and we knew that we’d be in for a battle at the next USAPL Raw Nationals.

2021

Achieving the #1 All-Time Points Ranking at 2021 Raw Nationals

We prepared harder than ever before, leading into 2021 Raw Nationals. The venue was the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, the same venue as where Taylor had won his first Weightlifting meet a decade ago. With his family in attendance and fatherhood around the corner, we knew that we had a great opportunity to achieve a personal best performance. Acknowledging the growing strength of the competition, we thought we’d need a personal best performance to win his 7th national championship as well.The condition that Taylor was in during the final month of competition prep was something we’d never seen before. Each session, he was like a rubber band stretched to its limit, lots of potential energy that was ready to become kinetic, but also ready to snap. We were training on the razor’s edge of fatigue and fitness, yet he’d exceed previous velocity personal bests during each grueling four-hour training session. His condition in the final month of prep was a testament to the hypothesis we formed after the 2017 World Championship in Belarus, that the best powerlifters are the ones who can adapt to performing more work over time, and we knew that if he could make it to the platform in one piece, we could have a shot at achieving a historical total.As soon as Taylor weighed in, I calculated what he’d need to total to achieve the #1 points ranking by the GL, DOTS, IPF, and Wilks (old and new). He needed to total 835.5 kg that day as a 74 kg lifter to set the new mark to beat, and it was within our strategy for the day. Our first objective was to win the competition, and if we could secure the win, we planned to push his attempts to the limit to achieve the milestone. With the win secured, Taylor and his meet day coach, Matt Gary, decided to load 340.5 kg/750 lbs on his third attempt. He stood up with the weight, and for a moment in time, he held the all time world record for an 83 kg lifter too.It was an unbelievable achievement for us. In six years, we had transformed from being a bumbling duo featuring a talented and hard-working athlete and a young and inexperienced coach, to achieving the #1 all-time ranking.Our story is still in progress. Taylor’s next competition will be Powerlifting America Nationals on April 1st. Stay tuned. #BlueTakeover