Muscle Fitness Muscle & Fitness UK - April 2018 | Page 122

S P O RT S
PERFORMANCE
However, now there are often more
than twenty competitors and the
standard is rising all the time. “Total
scores that used to guarantee you an
Olympic qualifying place now won’t be
enough to qualify for a European
event. I was fortunate enough to
establish myself in the sport very early
and I got a bit of an easy ride because
there wasn’t much competition. But
success breeds success and as so many
new people enter the sport and are all
getting such good results it just pushes
me to work even harder” says the
soon-to-be two-time Commonwealth
Games athlete. “If it was as hard then
as it is now then I might not have done
so well early in my career and might
not have been in the position I am in
now…but then again, I am a bit of a
weirdo and won’t do something if I
can’t be the best at it, so it might not
have made a difference”.
Jack explains that when he first
lifted a bar resources like YouTube and
all of the social media channels barely
existed, so it was almost impossible to
have any exposure to weightlifting. In
fact, even the way he got started in the
first place was a bit of a fluke. “When I
was 13 me and my friend decided we
wanted to do a back flip. We thought
that landing on our faces would hurt a
lot less if we landed in a big pile of
opened a Weightlifting club in an
foam rather than on the floor, so we
empty broom cupboard within the
went down to the local Gymnastics
Gymnastics club and suggested I give
club. A few months later someone
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MUSCLE & FITNESS / APRIL 2018
it a try. Weightlifting was practically
unheard of then, but now even your
local Xercise4Less has a lifting
platform and things like CrossFit and
social media have made the sport so
much more accessible”.
What followed was one of the
shortest journeys to the top of any
sport imaginable. “The day after my
14th birthday was the first time I ever
lifted a bar and I loved it. Pretty soon
I was lifting 6 days a week” says Jack,
“and within 18 months I entered my
first International competition. Just
over three years after that I
represented Team England at the
Commonwealth Games in Delhi”.
Now approaching his third
Commonwealth Games Jack credits
this spectacular rise to the diversity of
his athletic background as a child.