Woman heads to lifting contest 57-year-old mom can heft 3 times her own weight

At 57, Jo Ann Clough is a loving mother and wife who can dead lift nearly three times her own weight. The petite, 110-pound woman can lift 290 pounds. She benches 115 and squats 215. For the last eight weeks, she has been training to get ready for the 2005 USAPL Women’s National Power-lifting Championships, which take place Feb. 4-6.

Clough already holds the bench press record in Maine for her age group and is in the top 20 in the nation for powerlifting. As someone over 40, she’s in the Masters Class.

“It’s not just a young person’s sport,” she said. Strength is something you build over time and can increase as you get older, she explained.

“I’d like to win in my age group, get the gold. If I can do the numbers I’ve done in the gym, I will do very well. If I can just keep my cool and do that,” Clough said. Winning means being able to lift the most weight without making any mistakes. And there are a lot of potential mistakes to be made.

“There are all kinds of rules,” said Clough. “What you can wear, what you can’t wear. They do random urine testing.” Then there are rules about procedure. For the bench press, there is a specific way they hand the bar off to you, then, in this association, you have to bring it down, pause, and bring it back up, said Clough. You can’t go back down at all or pause in lifting the bar back up once you’ve started.

“I’m starting to get to be a nervous wreck,” she said. Clough worries that with all the excitement and bustle of the competition she’ll forget about one of the rules or one of the things she’s supposed to do, such as pressing her shoulder blades together when she’s doing her bench press.

“Everything moves along fast. You don’t have time to contemplate what’s going on,” she said.

You get three tries for each lift.

“If you miss a lift, you can’t go back down [in weight],” she said. You try to give yourself an opener you know you can get before adding more weight on. For each lift, there are three judges – one in front and one on either side. They watch for any mistakes.

Clough also is worried about her bag being lost on the flight to St. Louis, where the meet will take place. She has a lot of specialized equipment that she couldn’t do without. For each event she has a special super-tight suit that’s designed to support that particular movement and a different pair of shoes. She has a belt to support her back that she wears for all three moves, wrist wraps, knee wraps, and of course her tunes.

Clough listens to Motley Crue, a heavy metal band, to get herself pumped up.

But this meet she’s going to try a trick learned from one of her fellow competitors – soothing music first to calm her nerves, then the heavy stuff to get going.

Clough raves about the atmosphere at the meets and her fellow powerlifters.

“At meets, everybody cheers. You don’t want to see someone fail … [you want to] see them complete the lift.” She’s looking forward to meeting the women at this meet. It’s the largest women’s meet ever, with 165 women registered. Clough will be competing against nine women in her category, the Masters 114-pound weight class.

She’s traveling with her husband, Robert; Louis Morrison, her trainer; and Morrison’s wife, Amy. Clough showers gratitude on Morrison.

“I want Louis to get credit. He’s fantastic. He himself won the Junior Nationals,” she said.

Clough started powerlifting three years ago. She said she always lifted weights, but thanks Valerie Kitchen for realizing Clough wanted more out of it. She started lifting more weight, and the team at her gym, Union Street Athletics, was looking for women.

Now she lifts three days a week with Morrison – legs one day, chest and triceps another and back and biceps on the third. For a big meet such as this, she trains specifically for eight weeks, right up until the week before. She eats a lot of protein and generally tries to eat well. Morrison trains the other women on the team as well.

All totaled, there are 15 men and three women officially on the USA powerlifting team. Other women, said Clough, are training, but haven’t competed at a meet yet.

“It’s great we’re getting more women on the team,” she said.

“I’d like to see older people lift weights. I feel much more stable [skiing and wading streams, fly fishing]. It’s never too late to start … you get better and better.”

Clough said women are scared they’re going to get bulky. With her petite frame, she is living proof that they don’t. “It just doesn’t happen. We don’t have the testosterone,” she said.