Jenna Petri stands over the bar like a woman possessed.
Staring back is 342 pounds of cold, hard metal. In a room full of people, she is alone. Nothing but her, the weight and Eminem lyrics running through her head.
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And then – boom.
Petri grabs the bar and slowly starts to remove it from the floor, straightening her legs and back as she goes, making sure everything is methodical to the point of near perfection. Within seconds she is standing straight up with the weight in her hands freed from the floor and the gravity it was clinging to just seconds earlier.
For Petri, powerlifting is personal. A victory after a defeat. Another step in the process of her life.
She is wife and mother of two who went from being what she would describe as overweight to a competitive athlete. A powerlifter. Although 36 years old, Petri said her life really started three years ago.
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A three-sport athlete in high school, Petri went to college and like it does with most freshmen, the weight gain started gradually. In her first year of college, she went from 160 pounds to 180. By her senior year she was 200 pounds. When she graduated from Edinboro University in Western Pennsylvania, the weight started to come off, but once she got married and then became pregnant with her first child, it returned.
Petri had her first child and within a couple of years, her a second. Again her weight crept up during pregnancy and this time dropping it afterward didn’t come so easily.
“When I weighed 235 (pounds), I felt awful,” she said. “I didn’t want to feel like that anymore. When I was overweight, I had all these excuses. I was putting everything else first, but now I don’t do that anymore. I have all these goals. I would love to set the state record in deadlift at my next meet” on March 19.
Nearly two years after her second child, Petri dropped 86 pounds through diet and exercise. By the summer of 2012, however, she was back up to around 200 pounds. After a friend of hers was killed in a domestic violence incident, Petri started training to compete in a Tough Mudder competition in 2013, inspired by the memory of her friend.
“Jamie really wanted to run a Tough Mudder that November,” she said.
“I wasn’t ready, but trained the entire year. I loved how it felt to do something I had never done before. To be able to run 12 miles and complete 30 obstacles was amazing. When Jamie died, I vowed to take on the mission of ‘give more, want less.’ To give more to others and want less from people. This changed my entire personality, my entire world, who my friends are and how I thought.”
Last year, Petri dedicated herself to getting the body she had always wanted and committed herself to training for a bodybuilding show.
“In college I was a personal trainer and aerobics instructor,” she said. “I conditioned collegiate athletes in the summer – but I was never in the shape I am today. I used to lift weights then and was always training with mostly male athletes. I knew I was strong, so I thought this would be a good fit.”
Petri trained for months, but didn’t get a chance to compete in the bodybuilding show due to surgery.
“I had six weeks off to think about what I wanted to do,” she said. “I decided to take a year and add muscle to my physique. I started to bulk because I knew I didn’t have enough muscle mass to compete in the physique (segment of the competition). So because I bulked I got stronger.”
The head trainer at the Baxter YMCA, John Adams, suggested she start powerlifting, and her passion was born.
“I fell in love with my training,” she said. “I fell in love with being able to lift hard and heavy. At the same time I had been working with a nonprofit for sex-trafficked women, Redeeming Joy. I took a step back in a world where so much focus is spent on how we look – and it’s so apparent that it doesn’t make us feel better. Getting abs doesn’t make you pretty, the hard work it takes to get abs is where you become humbled and you realize what you’re made of, that hard work builds the character that makes you feel better. These women that I work with don’t have amazing bodies. They also are very insecure, very broken children of God. If I can just show them how empowering it is to be strong, I know they will be inspired.”
Petri explains some of the differences of training for bodybuilding, versus powerlifting.
“It’s one thing to get on stage in a bikini, but that isn’t really helping the mission that I want to support,” she said.
“Powerlifting is more about making your body a well-oiled machine. When I come to the gym, I totally zone everything out and I got to a place where it’s just me and the weights and it’s therapeutic. When you see the results you become inspired by your own work. But until you see results it’s a hard mental game. It’s a lot harder to eat to gain muscle, because you have to eat a lot of food. It’s not like doughnuts and pizza. You still have to eat nutrient-dense foods like rice, broccoli and chicken. At the height of my bulk, I was over 3,000 calories a day and not gaining weight. You train your body to burn calories. It takes a lot of patience and trial and error. It’s hard.”
Petri dedicated herself to training for roughly eight months for her first powerlifting competition earlier this month. She even picked up sponsorships in supplement company, All Natural Assets. Although she didn’t win, she said she accomplished a lot more. Six people told her after the competition that they were going to give it a try come March.
Among those she inspired were her own children.
“All children should see people breakdown and have to rebuild themselves,” she said. “My daughter has seen me succeed after I failed. It’s not about what you put up, it’s about continuing to progress.”
Petri said she wants to continue to be a role model for not just her children, but others as well.
“I want to become a part of this revolution of strong females that changes the way society looks at our body,” she said.
“With social media strangling our lives, all of these little girls on Instagram are like 10, 11, 12 years old and all they care about are ‘likes’ on a page. What they should care about are what they can accomplish, their character and their spirit. Not whether they have the longest eyelashes or the prettiest hair or the skinniest face. I hate the word ‘fat.’ There is nothing nice you can say about it. It is one of the most awful, vulgar connotation words that are out there. It isn’t just talking about overweight people – any type of body shaming. It’s being called skinny or rail-thin.
“There are people out there that can’t gain weight to save their lives. And people assume that they have eating disorders. I don’t think those adjectives should be used about our bodies. Our bodies are no one else’s business but ours. I want to continue with powerlifting and do a Strongman competition next year. I think it’s the missing ingredient in giving hope to domestic violence and confidence to any type of female adolescence. Give more, want less.”
Courtesy of: The Herald