Promoters: Consider Time When Picking Your Events
I’ve been running Strongman competitions for almost 5 years now, usually with 2-3 competitions each year. I’ve now competed in more than I can count and volunteered in almost as many. I love the sport of Strongman and I want to see it grow, so I want to give back to the community by sharing what I’ve learned over the years.
Athletes hate it when a contest drags on forever, and one of the main reasons that I think this happens is promoters don’t consider just how long an event is going to take, or they fail to implement time-saving strategies that could potentially make the event go by quicker.
In this article I want to get the future promoter thinking about a few things as they design their competition, and maybe help them to avoid a situation where the clock is turning on 6Pm and the show isn’t finished yet.
At the end of the post, you can get access to a video that will walk you through one of the trickier processes that I describe to help save time during your competition.
Fair is Good Enough
I want to add this section to offer a little bit of a foundational philosophy to the rest of the post that you might agree/disagree with. The concept is important because it allows us to be flexible and make changes in the middle of the competition without ruining the experience for the athletes.
A strongman competition has to be fair, but that is all that it has to be. When the competition is all over and we’re looking at athletes on the podium, those names should answer the question, “Who was the strongest person at this competition.”
For the competition to be fair to each athlete, you have to keep things consistent within the division. You can’t make changes to an event in the middle of the lightweight division because some athletes lightweights will have competed under one set of conditions while the rest competed under a separate set of conditions.
You have to keep the judge the same, and ideally their judging will stay consistent through the whole event. You have to offer them the chance to compete against each other using the same equipment, and offer them the same amount of time to complete the event.
If you can keep things consistent from athlete to athlete within a division then you’re running a fair contest. That doesn’t mean that everything has to stay the same from one division to the next. If you’re running a competition and you realize there’s a problem halfway through the lightweights, then you need to keep that problem the same until the end of the lightweights if you can help it. That will keep it fair for those athletes. You can then, before the middleweights start, make the necessary change to solve the problem. You’ve changed the conditions of the event from one division to the next but since the middleweights aren’t competing against lightweights the competition is fair.
When you realize that there is a problem in the setup of your competition, you need to fix it asap while keeping the competition fair.
Max events
Max events are events where competitors are working up to a 1RM in a specific lift. Your most common max events are presses and deadlifts, but I’ve seen other lifts taken to a max in competitions before. These events definitely take a lot longer than most other events you can include in a contest like medleys or max reps events.
The main reason that these events take so long is because each athlete is taking multiple attempts in each event. In a carry event or load event, each athlete has one shot at performing the event. One start, one finish, and then they’re done.
With max events athletes are getting at least 3 shots at the event, some times more depending on the format. They’ll have a certain amount of time to report to the platform once its their turn, then they’ll have a set amount of time to try to achieve the weight. A lot of these athletes will take the full time on their last attempt as they struggle to set a personal best.
This also means that you’re changing the weights multiple times per division, waiting on athletes to pick their attempts, and inevitably solving problems that arise with attempt selection and loading. All in all the event is just inevitably going to take a long time. Here are some things that you can do to manage the time burden of a max event.
Recommendations
There are two basic formats for max events that you’ll see: Rising Bar and Flights.
Rising Bar is a format where the bar starts light and increases in weight in set increments, never to get lighter again. An athlete jumps in where they want to open, and takes attempts as the bar’s weight increases.
Flights is a format where you work through all of the athletes on each attempt separately. The bar starts light, and each athlete hits their first attempt, selecting their second attempt immediately after. From there, the bar resets and they start over with second attempts. Then one last time for the third attempts.
If you need to be careful with your time, then you need to be using a rising bar format. It is significantly faster than flights, and here’s why:
If all you need to worry about is fairness within divisions, then you can set up multiple max stations to allow for more athletes to compete simultaneously. I’ve been to a competition where the max log event was over in less than 40 minutes because they had 4 different logs out on the competition floor and split the roster into 4 different groups so they could all run simultaneously.
Considering the math, with 4 athletes competing simultaneously you can complete the event in 1/4 of the time. This is highly recommended.
I’ve seen competitions posted with multiple max events. If you’re going to try to promote a show like this then you must incorporate all of these nuggets to ensure that your competition moves at a reasonable pace. Taking two hours or more for each max event is just too long, and you’ll ruin the experience for your competitors.
Hold For Time Events
Max Holds for time have the potential to take forever, but they don’t have to. One of the reasons that they can take so long is that usually when there is a max hold built into a competition, the promoter is doing so because they have a unique piece of equipment to showcase. A cool hammer for a front hold, or a big new impelemtn they’re using for a Hercules Hold.
In either case, the fact remains that every athlete’s objective is literally to hold for as long as possible and take as much time as they can manage.
Before you program a Hold for Time into your competition, you really need to think about how long it is going to take. If you have 50 athletes show up and each one holds for a minute, that means 50 minutes of time that athletes are actually competing. That doesn’t include setup time, weight changes, or finding athletes when it’s their turn to do the event.
If this is just a simple front hold that’s one thing, but if it’s a hercules hold that requires a lot of reset between competitors you can be looking at 90-120 minutes to get through the event.
I’m also going to add something here that could be anecdotal, but I’ve seen it happen twice. Once when we had a hercules hold in our competitions, we had an athlete test the event a week before the competition and get around 40 seconds on the hold time at their competition weight. We figured that we were good with our weights.
When the competition rolled around, that same athlete got over 90 seconds in the show. Consider that a competition environment can bring out the best in athletes and their performances can sky rocket. From that competition on we always set our hold weights to be heavier than we think they need to be.
If you’re going to put a Hold for Time into your competition, then please consider the following recommendations:
Recommendations
Times that you see in testing are likely to be faster than you’ll see in the competition at the same weight. I highly recommend that if the numbers work in testing, you should make them quite a bit heavier for the competition.
Add weight to all divisions if one division is taking too long. Remember that you have to keep it the same for all athletes in a division, so you can’t change weights just because a single athlete hit a 90+ second time. As soon as that division is done, and before you move onto the next one, you should add 10% across the board and announce that to the athletes.
They might not like it, but at the end of the day as long as they weight is the same for all athletes within a division, then the event is fair.
I would recommend that you should to load this event such that winning times are in the 30-35 second range for events with a lot of set up between athletes, and 45-60 for the winners in events with a quick turnover. If the rule of thirds works for you, then 1/3 of your athletes will be at around this time, 1/3 will be at about half of that, then another 1/3 should barely complete the event. That means that your average time will be 20-25 seconds per athlete, about the same as any other strongman event you might see in a show.
Addressing Equipment Restrictions
Consider the time difference between running one lane versus two. If you run one lane, then each athlete needs their own time to run through the event. If the average time is 40 seconds and you have 60 athletes, then you have a total time competing of 40 minutes. If you have two lanes, then you can cut this in half. The same 40 second average and the same 60 athletes, but it takes 20 minutes of competing time.
This can be done with multiple pieces of equipment running simultaneously. The competition I mentioned before had 4 different logs running a max event at the same time, with different divisions assigned to each log. Another option is a head to head event where to athletes are competing in the same event from the same division. This comes with it’s own difficulties because to keep things fair you have to have matching equipment.
More equipment means more money, and this can be a major restriction to running two athletes at the same time. The way to get around this is to run two separate events at the same time. I do this with most of my competitions. I’ll run a max event to start the show with multiple lanes running simultaneously on different pieces of equipment, an then run events 2 & 3 simultaneously and 4 & 5 simultaneously.
The problem that you’re going to run into here is that logistically, this can be a struggle.
Logisitics of Simultaneous Events
If you’re going to run two events simultaneously, you’ll have to start by breaking up your roster into two separate groups. You’ll want these two groups to be about the same size, and you don’t want to be changing weights sporatically so you’ll want to keep the roster split at a single point with divisions above and below.
Start with your lightest division, and your heaviest division and work towards the middle adding the number of athletes in the division to each total. When I say lightest, I mean the weight in the event not bodyweight of the athletes. For example, it is not uncommon for middleweights and masters heavyweights to have the same weights in the competition. That means they should be ordered next to each other.
You want to get the total number of athletes in the two groups as close to the same as possible. If you have big divisions, then one group will have less divisions than the other. With small divisions, there may be a lot more divisions in one group than the other. That is okay, just so long as the total number of athletes in each group is about the same, or as close to the same as you can manage.
Once you have your two groups, you’ll start with the lightest division in each group on their respective event. When every athlete has completed that event, the two groups switch places.
If you have scores getting entered fast enough or you’re using a fixed order for your athletes, then you can roll athletes out of the slower event into the faster one.
For example let’s say you’re running a carry medley with a load for max reps at the same time. If the group you have working through the load for max reps finishes and carry medley is still going, you might be able to get the first division through the carry medley to start the load for max reps event and get the competition moving even faster.
In any case, running two events simultaneously should be a standard if you can’t run the same event with multiple sets of equipment. Especially if you’re running a competition with more than 25-30 athletes.
Keep the Athletes in the loop
One thing that really jams up a competition is chasing down atheletes when it’s their turn to compete. A lot of competitions are barely controlled chaos, and making sure that athletes know where they’re supposed to be and getting them there when the time comes can be a struggle.
You can make this a non-issue by simply giving the athlete a zero if they’re not in the right place at the right time, but if you do that and they didn’t have ample opportunity to be in the right place at the right time it is unfair and you’ve ruined their experience. You must be fair, and when it comes to holding them accountable being fair means lots of communication.
I’ve only been the promoter of small local shows. Reasonable communication for me means letting athletes know how much time there will be between events, and running to the warm up area in advance to let athletes know that their division is coming up. In the past we’ve hooked up televisions in the warm up area to show the what division was competing live. I’ve also had the MC calling out updates, calling names out over the speakers who is up, on deck, and in the hole.
I’ve volunteered at much bigger shows, where expediters were in charge of ensuring that athletes knew when they were coming up. Headsets on the people managing clipboards at the event that communicate with people in the warm up area so there is a person tracking down and cuing up athletes.
With these systems in place, it is reasonable to zero an athlete when they’re not ready to compete when their turn comes up. If you don’t have these systems in place, forcing the burden onto the athletes is unfair. That means you have to spend time looking for them, and that will prolong your show if it happens too much.
One last thought for this section is that you need an extra layer of communication when you run two different events simultaneously. If you do that then you need to ensure that athletes know what group their in, and what event each group is hitting at what time. That way they can warm up appropriately and have a positive experience in each event.
Considerations for Your Rules
In this section, i want to cover some rules that might help you to avoid big slow downs in your competitions. Communicating them ahead of time is the best way to have the athletes prepared when the time comes. I recommend putting them into the Iron Podium description for your event to avoid questions or frustrating confrontations with athletes on the day of the competition.
I recommend giving athletes a set amount of time to arrive once their name has been called to an event, and a set amount of time for the attempt. If you’re concerned about time at your event, make all steps of the event have to happen on the athlete’s time. If you’re running a max deadlift event, make the athlete strap up on their time or you risk the athlete taking a full minute to strap into the bar.
I recommend limiting attempt times to the time it takes to reasonably make one attempt when its appropriate. Having 60 seconds for a max event allows for an athlete incapable of lifting a weight to spend a minute tugging on it just to be able to say they didn’t give up on it. The effort is admirable, but 30 seconds is more than enough time to complete a rep.
Limit drops and errors in events where relevant. Allowing a for drops in a carry event essentially gives the athlete their fully allotted time to stay on the competition floor regardless of their ability to complete the event. If you’re worried that this is too harsh, you can at least limit the reps, or allow 1-2 drops for the novice divisions only. Keeping a limit to the number of drops will force a cap on the performance time of each run and keep the contest moving.
Last man standing syle loading events shouldn’t be happening at the novice level, and it’s risky in women’s divisions. The reason for this is that there can be a massive margin in strength levels between competitors in these divisions that can make picking a weight for those divisions unreasonable. My example is the Sunday Paper Classic (sorry Ryan) that happened back in 2022. In a last man standing stone over bar event, the novice men had some athletes zero the event while the winner had to get 22 to win. That means that a large portion of the division hit 10 or more reps before bowing out.
When there is a risk of a very wide distribution of strength levels, then last man standing loading events can become a rep fest that draws your show out too long. For events where this is a possibility, the event should be changed to a max reps in a minute or similar event.For medleys and other events that might require the performance of multiple movements within a single event, consider putting time limits on each movement within the event. For example, if you have a Farmer’s Carry to Yoke Walk event with a 60 second limit, put a qualifying timer limit of 25 seconds for the Farmer’s Carry. If they don’t have the Farmer’s Carry finished in 25 seconds, their run ends there. This is another creative way to keep athletes from struggling against an immovable implement just to prove their determination, and drawing out your competition.
Conclusion
When I send out surveys after my competitions asking athletes what they thought about the show, they’re very sensitive to the overall length of the competition. When things are drawn out too long, they are quick to complain about it and that tells me that having a quick and efficient show is a key element to the positive experience of these athletes.
I highly recommend that any promoter designing a show consider this when they design their competition. Try to limit the number of long events in your competition like max events or max holds, and wherever possible implement strategies to limit how long they’ll take.
When you can, have multiple athletes on the floor competing simultaneously to cut down the overall competing time of the athletes overall. Running multiple lanes with different pieces of equipment, running head to head events, or running separate events simultaneously are all viable strategies you can use to make the overall length of the competition shorter.
Make sure that you maintain communication with your athletes throughout the competition in order to fairly hold them accountable to your timeline, and communicate in your rules all of the different ways that you intend to keep the competition moving well. Keeping all of these things in mind is going to go along way towards ensuring that you and your athletes have a positive experience at your competition.