What is a recommended minimum amount of time between powerlifting meets?
Especially for first time competitors who are aged 45?
It completely depends on the competitor’s goals, how serious the competitor is about each meet, and/or how much they are looking to improve between competitions, and/or what their medium-term programming is like. There are reasons why someone might want to undertake a specific meet (e.g. putting up a qualification total against a national comp), or a person might just want to accumulate experience on the platform without particularly caring about their total.
I’m 41, and doing my first sanctioned meet in a week. I did a novice meet 13 weeks ago to set a benchmark, and in the interim have run a 4-week hypertrophy block, 8 weeks of strength development, and a couple of weeks to peak. After the one next week, I’m considering doing another 11 weeks after that. My current goal is just to improve my total during each event, so I need to leave at least a few months between each one. A novice might be able to compete every other weekend and still improve. If I was aiming to compete at a national level then I might take into consideration events happening next year or even later. I understand that Olympic-level weightlifters plan out the entire four-year period between Olympics, including competitions.
So: it really depends on you and your goals.