The students got a positive response from the DMU campus community when they first promoted the event late last fall. They credit Joy Schiller, M.S., CHES, director of wellness, for being a “huge help” in organizing the event, but she praised the students for taking the lead.
Sarah Fowle crushed the women’s squat.
“Fiona and James did an outstanding job organizing, promoting and running this competition,” she says. “This event was just what we needed, especially this time of year when it’s so cold outside and winter seems like it’s never going to end.”
Despite the typically crammed schedules of medical/health sciences students, the competition drew 11 students who represented all three DMU colleges and one staff member, Katie Wahl, a certified medical assistant in the DMU Clinic’s osteopathic clinical medicine department. Competitors performed a squat, a dead lift and a bench press; the highest weights lifted were calculated as percentages of the lifters’ body weight in each category and then totaled overall.
Winning the women’s division was Sarah Fowle, a second-year student in DMU’s doctor of physical therapy (D.P.T.) program, who lifted weights in the three categories totaling an impressive 309.8 percent of her body weight. Troy Tigges, a third-year student in the D.P.T., program, hoisted weights equal to a remarkable 704.68 percent of his weight. Sarah began weightlifting about two years ago when she joined CrossFit Merle Hay in Des Moines. She entered the DMU competition to try something “fun and different.”
“I also thought it would be interesting to see how strong other students at DMU are – turns out they are really strong!” she says.
Troy says he got into weightlifting about 12 years ago thanks to his father. “He was a semi-pro/natural bodybuilder. I always looked up to him, and in seventh grade he showed me the ropes of proper weightlifting form and technique,” he says. “Ever since then, I continued weightlifting through sports and throughout college. To this day I do it for fun and stress relief.”
Original source can be found here.
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