Nemacolin teen has dreams of being Olympic power lifter
Standing with his muscles tensed, eyes focused forward, Derek Baker Jr. inhales deeply and raises his veined arms above his head. He poses for a split second, then lunges downward quickly and grabs the barbell with his powdered hands. His muscles contract as he explodes upward, exhaling deeply and yanking the 500-pound weight from the floor. With his lips pursed and his face flushed, he poses again, just a second, as the barbell reaches his waist in a perfectly executed dead lift. He releases the bar from his grasp, and the weights clang violently against the padded floor. In 30 seconds he will repeat the lift. His training requires it.
At 19, Derek, better known as D.J., is only 5 feet 7 inches tall, but he has been power lifting since his sophomore year at Carmichaels Area High School. During his last competition at the American Open Power Lifting Championship, he broke the American record of 639 pounds for the dead lift in his age and weight class with a lift of 642 pounds. When he broke the record, D.J. said, he couldn’t even feel the weight on the bar or the weight of the moment.
“I actually didn’t feel anything,” he said. “The adrenaline was too much to feel it.”
While breaking the record was a great accomplishment, he and his father, Derek Baker Sr., have their eyes on a bigger goal: the 2008 Olympics.
“Right now it is in the trial stage,” Baker said. “They have Olympic weightlifting, but power lifting is not there right now. We heard that possibly it will be included in 2008.”
Baker, a native of Hawaii, said his son began weightlifting when he was 14 years old. The Nemacolin resident said it was during his son’s sophomore year in high school that D.J. really began to excel at lifting, and the two decided to enter a competition just for fun.
“I was just training for football, but I went to a meet in Ohio and I did well, and that was when I got real interested,” D.J. said.
At the Battle of the Great Lakes competition in Ohio, D.J., just 16 years old, won his weight and age class with a dead lift of 405 pounds, a squat of 450 pounds and a bench press of 215 pounds. It was then that the Bakers decided to focus on lifting, a decision that D.J. admits was hard at first because it meant giving up playing football.
“I just excelled more at power lifting,” he said. He has never regretted the decision.
With his father, who has been involved in weight training more than 25 years and who also competed in power lifting, as his coach, D.J. has broken into the power lifting world with the explosiveness of one of his lifts. He holds various records in the World Natural Power Lifting Federation and in the USA Power Lifters Association. He is training for the state competition in March and for the Teen Nationals in Louisiana at the end of May. Derek Sr. said that D.J. competes in about four contests a year, in events that have taken them across the country and overseas.
“We have traveled all over: Texas, Maryland, Ohio, Missouri, South Carolina, Taiwan,” D.J. said.
Right now he is focused on his next goal: to be the first teen-ager to dead lift 700 pounds. His father thinks he has the determination to reach that mark.
“He is real determined to reach his goals,” Baker said. “I am very proud of him and give him a lot of credit. He has sacrificed a lot.”
Weekly, both Bakers sacrifice a lot for the sport that has now consumed their life and, at one time, Baker’s youngest son Shane’s. The 17-year-old now is devoted to another hobby, skateboarding. The Bakers’ basement has become a training center for power lifting and is full of innovative equipment. D.J. trains six days a week, with four days of heavier lifting and two days of recovery training. Each workout lasts about an hour-and-a-half.
“I was his guinea pig,” Baker Sr. said. “It is a lot of trial and error.”
Power lifting, which is much more popular in other states, is a weightlifting competition that focuses on three types of lifts: the squat, the bench press and the dead lift. Competitors perform each lift three times, with the judges closely monitoring each lift for form and technique as well as weight. The best lifts in each class are added together to determine the competition’s overall winner.
D.J. competes in the 18- and 19-year-old category in the 198-pound weight class. Next year, he will move into the junior class and remain there until he turns 23, when he will reach the open age division.
Baker said D.J. trains with methods perfected by Louis Simmons, a former power lifting champion and now the owner of the West Side Barbell Club in Columbus, Ohio. Simmons, who has trained more than 25 national and world champions and is the only power lifter over 50 years old to squat 920 pounds, recently invited the Bakers to his training complex in Columbus to talk to them about D.J.’s future. D.J. said it was an experience he will never forget and one that taught them a lot about training for power lifting.
Baker said D.J. now employs two methods of training – dynamic and maximum effort – and incorporates equipment like shoes with built-up heels for balance, recommended by Simmons. The training includes everything from the basic bench press to such odd lifts as the suspended good mornings, which incorporate 100-pound logging chains.
While Baker, who won Mr. Pittsburgh for two consecutive years in the early 1990s, admits that this type of training is not for everyone, he thinks that the disciplined lifestyle and the goal oriented nature of the sport has done great things for him and for his son.
“When I started working out, I was just getting tired of getting picked on at school, and one day I saw my future brother-in-law, Earl Chun, working out,” Baker Sr. said. “That was the first time I picked up weights, and I just fell in love with it. I really thank God for putting Earl in my life. If it weren’t for him my boy would not be where he is today. When D.J. first started working out, he was barely passing his freshman year of high school, but ever since, he went from that to graduating with high honors with a 3.5 grade point average.”
D.J. admits that lifting has bolstered his confidence and given him something on which to focus his attention.
“Right now I’m just concentrating on training,” he said. “It is something I love to do.”
D.J.’s mother, Angela, said she has seen the benefits that D.J. has gotten from power lifting.
“It has helped him to discipline himself and has given him confidence,” she said. “It has helped him in many, many ways.”
While she admits she worries about her son, she recognizes the benefits and thinks they outweigh the risks.
D.J.’s father agrees.
“A lot of people have fear. If you have fear and stuff holding you back, it will get you hurt all the time. You can’t let it hold you back,” he said.
The weight training and risks aside, D.J. also feels the burn of power lifting through his strict diet regimen, which includes five meals a day totaling 3,000 to 5,000 calories. He eats a lot of brown rice, yams, chicken breast and salads and also takes supplements to help support his rigorous physical activity. On Saturdays he gets to cheat, and Chinese food usually is on the menu.
D.J. said he also takes Creatine, a muscle-enhancing supplement, six weeks before each competition, but it is not a banned substance and is considered as mainstream. The Bakers admit that drugs are a problem with their sport, but they are committed to remain drug free.
“A lot of stuff that is sold in GNC and health food stores are illegal substances,” Baker Sr. said. ‘People take them for temporary gains, and they have a lot of health problems when they come off them. D.J. is drug free. He has never touched a steroid in his life. I want him to be an example for others.”
While D.J. said he has not won any money from competing, he is considering entering competitions for monetary prizes in the future, but he added that most money tournaments do not perform drug testing on participants. He said that for now he is content to train for his goals of dead lifting 700 pounds and then go from there. He plans to attend Penn State Fayette Campus in the fall to major in business.
Now, D.J. is just determined to achieve his goals.
Standing with the barbell on his shoulders, he squats down, his massive thighs bulging under the 500 pounds. He reaches the floor and crouches like a cat, his expression intense, his neck taught. He hesitates, then surges upward, sending the clattering sound of the weights reverberating through the room as he exhales. Watching him, his father smiles and dares to dream.
“We just give all the glory to God, because all this is possible through him. We do this for his glory, and if (D.J.) did get to compete in the Olympics some day, no words would describe it. It would be a dream come true.”