Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 24 May 2025
When I was competing in weightlifting I learned a thing or two how to prepare for a competition. Like when in the time leading up to the completion I could go heavy and when I needed to dial things back. Dialling back is good, but you also need to know how much. Too much and you also loose the edge. Some people could take the whole week before the competition off, I had to keep the training going or I didn’t feel “connected” and sharp on the competition day.
What I don’t know is what I should and need to do to be at my best at a fly casting competition. Probably somethings are a bit less important since fly casting isn’t as physically demanding as weightlifting. But there are a lot of things shared since both sports are highly technical. You need to be smooth and powerful at the right moments in both sports. Both are very dependent on mental state. You need to have your central nervous system in a good state. You want your body to feel supple and flexible. Feeling a bit stiff and sore has huge impact on performance, it will push the body into new and erroneous movement patterns.
I recently felt the impact of a tired nervous system when I went out for a training session with the fly rod directly after visiting the gym. I had done deadlifts in that session which can be very taxing on everything. I was a bit tired after the workout but still felt good. Casting was decent but it felt impossible to make small adjustments to the technique, timing was a bit off. So now I know that heavy deadlifts are out in the period where I want to perform at a fly casting competition. For weightlifting I knew this. There I know that heavy deadlifts were out of question most time of the training period. Then they were only used a little bit in the offseason. Though variants of the deadlift was used a lot, or more correctly pulls. The weightlifter sets up the start from the floor differently than the powerlifter. The powerlifter only lifts the bar to the hip, the weightlifter must have the highest bar speed when the bar reaches the hip.
How to translate some of these things to fly casting? That is something I’ll need to figure out. I’m a rank beginner when it comes to contest prep here. Ideas I have at the moment is to alter carry practice. Focus here will be on getting to the carry I want for delivery as efficiently as possible. Working on the delivery. Adjust things in the gym, find an on season routine. Might just need to dial back on the deadlifts to not do sets that leaves me sucking for air for minutes after.
Cheers, Rickard
PoD: Contest prep with Paul.