Learn from the Pro: Leanna Carr Powerbuilding Seminar

Last Saturday, July 9, I attended Leanna Carr's Powerbuilding (Powerlifting X Aesthetics) Seminar at Kinetix Lab. I first found out about Leanna, who is half Filipina, coming home to visit the Philippines from her Instagram. As a huge fan (she's partly the main reason why I switched from conventional deadlift form to sumo), I couldn't wait for the opportunity to learn from the best.

photo source: jtsstrength.com

For those who don't know Leanna, she is an amazing powerlifter and bodybuilder, who is starting her own coaching empire aimed at females, Iron Woman. She's also a Bodybuilding.com and Juggernaut Training Systems sponsored athlete.

Leanna Carr:

USAPL/IPF -63kg Raw Powerlifter
NPC/WNBF Natural Pro Figure Competitor
Bodybuilding.com - Sponsored Athlete
Juggernaut Training Systems - Team Member

The Seminar

Topics include:
• Bridging the Gap between Strength and Aesthetics
• Stress Adaptations for the Evolving Athlete
• Principles of Programming: Designing your own 15-week Training Protocol (Workshop)

Kinetix Lab, a relatively new gym in UP Technohub, Commonwealth, hosted the event and served as a great venue for the day to come: the setup for the lecture, lunch, and the training equipment all worked in our favour and convenience.

The workshop started off with a lecture: on strength training, nutrition, and all other things powerbuilding related ("Bridging the Gap.."). It was a very informative lecture, which helped simplify aspects that we seem to tend to overcomplicate (such as nutrition being a macros/calories game rather than the whole "clean eating vs poptarts diet" game), and learn more on powerlifting/strength training jargon and metrics such as RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion). 

After the lecture, we were served a surprisingly huge lunch of a KFC Fully Loaded Meal, Happy Diet Delivery pasta, and a choice of tuna or chicken from Supplement Hub's newly launched SH Macro Meals. It was actually quite funny because of the amount of food served; since the different meals didn't weren't served in one go, we were shocked that more food just kept coming -- it was as if went in for a fitness seminar only to come out carbed-up and as if we hit bulking season in one go.

As lunchtime came to a close, Leanna commenced on teaching us how to set up our own training programs, tailored to be either strength dominant or hypertrophy dominant. The protocol was modelled after the template they use for Iron Woman training.

After a while, the crowd started to gather for pictures and Leanna was kind enough to accommodate all our requests.

We even got the unique opportunity to lift with and be trained by Leanna herself:

Here she is talking to Luis about squat form.

She demonstrated proper sumo deadlift form an technique, and even observed all of us and checked our forms for proper adjustments.

The workshop ended with tons of laughs, photos, and certificates from a day spent learning about something we love, strength and fitness, and getting to hang out with someone as iconic as Leanna Carr.