I had heard about Femsport a few years ago, when I was working with some fitness professionals who were fans of the owner who created the competition. Femsport is a female version of the famous Strong Man competitions. There are 6 possible events over the course of an afternoon, and one’s total score at the end is the sum of the speed and accuracy it takes to complete each of the events.

The 6 events which comprise the competition include:

• an obstacle course (including some agility & balance components, and pushing a car at the end!)
• a tire drag (a weighted tire about 120 lbs)
• a kettlebell carry (5 kettlebells which get lifted and placed on a podium of decreasing heights as the weights get heavier)
• box jumps (50 jumps have to be completed in 3 minutes, and the plyometric box is 18″ high)
• a tire flip (gets flipped 6 times, and the tire is 260-290 lbs)
• inverted rows (using Lebert Equalizer bars)

Not having heard about it recently, I crossed paths with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and she told me how she got “roped” into doing the Femsport competition and recruited for a team, but her team mates never registered for the event. She sounded apprehensive about completing it and not really looking forward to doing it. If I were to register, then I would be given the opportunity to compete AND get a chance to support my friend. I had already been running and weight training, so I figured I was reasonably prepared to give it a try.

I did a 2-hour training workshop with the Femsport owner and a few other women, a week before the competition. I spent my gym workouts that week training my box jumps, expecting that this would be my weakest event. I had spent the whole week thinking about how I wanted to make sure I didn’t get any “penalties” added to my time in each of the events and that I would complete each one to the best of my ability. Looking at how I placed with the other competitors in the end however, I could have done it twice as fast and accumulated several penalties, and I would have finished better than doing it in perfect form but slowly. Since I teach exercise for a living though, you could say I was biased to having proper form. 😉 Plus, no one likes injuries.

Once competition day arrived, I had a blast with all the obstacles! My least favourite being the box jumps and the inverted rows. I was most surprised that I managed to complete 50 box jumps in 3 minutes. During the week of training before the event for it, I hadn’t completed more than 13 jumps before stopping. I would get a little lightheaded and nauseous. Certainly, the stress of the competition helped; there are also 2 people holding the plyo box down, one is counting your jumps and one is counting the time. The time keeper counts backward from 10 because you can’t stop more than 10 seconds between jumps. When there is a crowd behind you yelling and the time keeper yells out “5!”, you jump because you have to or you get disqualified for that event. No way would I let that happen!

Definitely tire flipping was my most favourite event. In fact, if I could do that on a weekly basis, I would be happy as a clam!! There is something so satisfying about slamming that tire down!

I can’t wait for next year, and my friend had way more fun than she anticipated. So we all won that day! 😀