With more people coming into the sport, I feel we need to look at this subject again.
The oxford English dictionary defines a novice as;
A person new to and inexperienced in a job or situation:
For armwrestling, this means someone that has never pulled on a regulation table before and should have a time frame for when someone ceases to be a novice and becomes an amateur.
In my mind this is roughly 6 months of consistent training and table time with a club or team (longer if they only train once or twice a month). During this time, for the safety of the puller, the novice should not be allowed to compete as their tendons, joints and bones are not yet seasoned enough for the stresses that competitive armwrestling places on them. It therefore follows that novice classes should not be organised in competitions, rather an amateur class should be run instead. This would be for pullers that can prove they have a minimum 6 months training with a team or for people returning to the sport after a long lay off (come on, they're not really novice). And i don't care if you've got someone that's trained for a month who thinks they're ready, the cold hard reality is, in the vast majority of cases, they aren't, and as a coach you need to be strict on this for their safety and your liability.
If so desired, a puller could remain amateur for the rest of their career in the sport or step up to pull the open class.
This would effectively cut out the glory hunting 10 year novices that never step up for fear they will not win a trophy or they feel they aren't strong enough for the open class (although how you're supposed to get stronger by only ever pulling weaker opponents is a mystery to me!)
As armwrestling is a contact, combat sport, we need to treat it as such, particularly promoters whose responsibility is the safety of the people that enter their events. If we allow people to rock up having never armwrestled, they will have a negative experience, at best they will leave thinking we are all cheats because they have no clue about technique, at worst it will be a break that requires surgery to fix. Either way, they'll never come back to the sport, and will tell everyone they know, not to try armwrestling. I am of course talking about the 99% of people that try the sport, not the exceptionally rare 1% that are naturally gifted from the start.
