Mike interviews Stephen Manuel, the silver medalist from the IPF Raw World Championship in 2013.

Mike: Tell us about yourself. How old are you, where are you from, how long have you been powerlifting, competition history, etc.?

Stephen: Hey Mike, thanks for the support. It’s always nice to know you have fans from various places and stuff so thanks for giving me another platform to communicate. I’m 25, from South Shields, England (near Newcastle in the North East of England), I’ve been Powerlifting for 8 or 9 years and started out Raw for a year, started equipped at age 18 till my final Junior year (23) and then switched back to Raw from then until present day.
I had a lot of success as an equipped lifter Nationally and a little success Internationally. I have won around 6 British Equipped Titles at Junior and Open level, finished 9th in the world as a Junior and then 4th in Europe as a Junior (I also got a gold medal for Deadlift here with a 320kg pull – that meant a lot to me because it was close to my hometown so my friends and family all got to see it).
I started Equipped lifting mainly because there was no World Championships in Raw in the IPF, but once they introduced the Classic rules I decided to switch back over as this made training for me much easier since I generally train alone and prefer to lift Raw. Since switching back to Raw lifting I have won one British title, set multiple British records and finished 2nd in the IPF World Raw Championships last year so it was a good decision to switch.

Mike: What are your best competition lifts? Any other personal bests you’d like to mention?

Stephen: My best competition lifts are a 280kg squat, 190kg bench press and a 315kg deadlift – all Raw.

Mike: You have a very unique approach to programming your training, especially your accessory work; please explain what your training template is.

Stephen: I don’t really follow much of a template really. I plan my main lifts and try to get as much volume in as possible whilst working at sub-maximal intensities of no heavier than 90%. I’ll hit the Squat and Bench Press 4 times per week and the Deadlift 1-2 times per week mainly to keep my movement patterns solid. When it comes to my accessory work, I wouldn’t go as far to say I spontaneously decide what to do but I largely listen to my body and pick what exercise I’m going to get the best out of on that particular day. For example, if my lower body is pretty beat up after squatting rather than doing a heavy loading exercise such as a Stiff Leg Deadlift, I’ll opt for a KB Swing or a BB Hip Thruster with a light load for speed or vice versa, if I’m feeling strong I’ll load up on the assistance. I started doing this around two years ago because I found that planning every final detail in my training was causing me to fall out of love with the lifting and when that happens it’s game over. So now I plan the important stuff and have fun with the other stuff. The circuit stuff I do at the end is mainly to hit areas I won’t hit through general weights stuff and also a fun way to get my weight down instead of just running at low intensities to increase my fat oxidation.

Mike: How did you develop your training philosophy?

Stephen: This is a pretty tough one to answer. It kind of feels like it just happened, mainly through trial and error. The gym I work at Underground Training Station (www.theuts.co.uk – check us out) specializes in high intensity, metabolic circuit training and teaching the average person they can train like athletes and reap the benefits of being more powerful and loading their bodies up etc. I mention on a video blog I’m currently uploading on my YouTube channel (screamermanuel) that I see myself as an athlete who decided to do Powerlifting rather than a Powerlifter who Powerlifts. You look at athletes in other sports such as sprinting, weightlifting, American Football etc. and one thing that is common between those sports and the movements they produce is they are all explosive and very powerful, and they all squat and bench like absolute beasts. So I think too much emphasis is placed on the main lifts in the typical Powerlifter and we get deep into a very “Max Strength” oriented type of training and as a result a lot of max lifts are grinded out. Now people will argue it doesn’t matter whether it takes half a second, 1 second, 5 seconds to get that squat from the hole to standing but if you ask me I’d rather get that lift done as quickly as possible!

Mike: Do you coach other lifters as well? Are they primarily powerlifters?

Stephen: I coach people from all walks of life. I do have a few people who are just getting started out in Powerlifting and have some potential to do well. I’m currently developing a few strategies and also getting some confidence to have a go at coaching people online because I’ve had a lot of positive feedback from the videos I’m putting out there so look out for that in the future.

Mike: How do you program training for other lifters? Do they focus on the squat, bench, and deadlift followed by certain accessory lifts?

Stephen: It all depends on where they’re at really. I have a lot of people who are just starting out so for me, they need to focus on the actual Powerlifts less than the accessory stuff. They need to develop the muscle mass, required to lift heavy in the powerlifts and do the main lifts purely for technical purposes, developing their connective tissues to be able to cope with the forces when the load increases and getting those motor patterns down. Then once they start hitting plateaus in the main lifts I can flip that attention on its head and get them utilizing that perfected Powerlift technique under more volume, intensity, creating more stress and developing improvements from that.

Mike: In one of your videos you analyzed an individual’s deadlift, and told him to work on his hamstring and t-spine mobility, what is your philosophy about mobility? Do you spend time working on your own, or only if you feel you have a mobility issue that has to be corrected?

Stephen: I think with mobility and Powerlifting you need to be as mobile as you need, no more no less. You don’t want to be so tight that when you’re loading up on bar weight your body is forcing you to come out of position but you also don’t want to be so flexible that you lose power, particularly at the bottom of the lifts. The amount of time I spend on mobility is usually directly related to the increase or decrease in training volume, if I train more I spend more time doing mobility work and will include it in any rest days as an active rest session. I’d like to say I spend a good 20-30 minutes daily doing it but I’d be lying! I always do 10-20 minutes before training and because I’ve been carrying an injury or two at the minute I have been doing 30 minutes after work but that is not commonplace for me. If an area needs more mobility work I will typically work overtime on that but my mobility is pretty good right now.

Mike: I see that your current goal is to win IPF Raw Worlds. Do you have any world records you also want to break? You third attempt Deadlift at Worlds last year was a World Record attempt, right?

Stephen: Yeah, I’m after that World Title for sure mate, I’ve put too much time and sacrificed too much into this to not be chasing the ultimate accolade! Last year I was only 15kg off the World Record Standard for the Squat (currently 295kg) so I hope I can achieve that but that is obviously secondary to the goal of winning the World Championships. Also, whoever wins this year is pretty much going to have to do a World Record Total because the standard of Raw lifting is only increasing since it’s largely in it’s infancy in the IPF so that would be cool to come away with two World records and a World Title!

Mike: How did you get the nickname Screamer?

Stephen: I get asked that a lot or rather “Why is your Facebook name Stephen Screamer Manuel” so I’ll tell you what I tell them…just watch one of my YouTube videos! Haha!
Feel free to add me on Instagram/Twitter/Youtube – all screamermanuel and any questions you may have for me will gladly be answered either with a video or a direct message.

I left my job, long time girlfriend, family, and friends to live in poverty and train with the best lifters and coaches in the country. Is that strange?
–Sean

This was a response to Mike on FB when he asked “What was the strangest thing you’ve done to pursue your strength goals?” Mike felt compelled to find out more about Sean. Sean was kind enough to respond with his story. It’s heartfelt and motivating.

In late 2010, I was a college dropout English major, rugby player, and on the verge of tumbling into full blown alcoholism but thanks to outpatient rehab Indianapolis who retrieved my life back. I was able to function rather well considering and I didn’t drop out of school because I was doing poorly. In fact between a full load of courses, rugby practice, and two part time jobs I suppose I was a high functioning alcoholic. I dropped out half for monetary reasons and half for lack of purpose. Drinking had always helped writing and it’s an institution within rugby culture, but without any purpose in my life I began to allow it to take over more than anyone should. Fortunately, this did not last very long and I don’t intend to fool you into thinking I’m a sob story who overcame substance abuse or some bullshit like that.

What changed is that I found training. With only rugby left in life I decided to improve my strength and conditioning. I wanted to play at higher levels and one of the things that separated me from the next level was a lack of an off the field training program. A friend referred me to three things that were instrumental in setting me on the path.

I developed my lifting career and philosophy through these three components:
1.) CrossFit, the burgeoning fitness craze.
2.) Starting Strength, Rippetoe and Kilgore’s famous book on basic barbell training.
3.) A blog called 70s Big.

I started by trying out CrossFit workouts. I’ve always been a bigger guy, but I was athletic in my youth. Ten years of hockey taught me nothing about training except to skate more, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Football taught me how bench shitty, squat shitty, and power clean shitty. I did not stay there long because I honestly found the game to be incredibly boring from a positional standpoint. My ADD despises running. Aside from being generally silly, running is in no way cerebrally stimulating. So CrossFit’s general lack of running, attention sustaining intensity, and endless possibility of movements was at least interesting. That was great for dropping a few pounds and keeping the lungs strong, but rugby requires an immense amount of power and physical strength. Let me tell you, you don’t want to be a soft corpse on the other side of a full stride Samoan.

This need led me to Starting Strength. I decided I should put as much effort into getting as strong as I could as fast with rugby season quickly approaching. The lungs would come back with some hours on the field. The instructions from the book were all right there. I didn’t worry about shin angles, varus vs. valgus, or am I producing torque. I showed up to the gym three days a week. I put my ass to ankles in the squat, I benched and pressed in a full range of motion, and picked shit up off the ground until I was completely erect (Get your mind out of the gutter). I drank 1-2 quarts of milk per training day. I ate meat and vegetables. I gained a significant amount of lean mass. In three months I squatted 500lbs. That’s not particularly impressive, but I do think it is a tribute to simplicity and consistency.

During this period of training, the third object of influence started to take full effect on my life. I followed and read 70s Big regularly. I found Justin’s writing entertaining, informative, and comforting (all the homo). There were so many articles I found interesting and useful and it’s been so long since I’ve read them that is hard to remember them all. The one thing that stuck with me and really changed my life was Justin’s encouragement of his readers to educate themselves. I followed suit and sought out as much knowledge as I could. I absorbed anything I could get my hands on: Zatsiorsky, Verkhoshanksy, Siff, Kilgore, Medvedyev, Roman, Yessis, Bondarchuk, Stone, Garhammer, Poliquin. Even some stuff from Simmons, Wendler, Boyle, and Cressey. Soviet Sport Manuals were my favorite and still remain a dominant part of my library.

I could take concepts I was learning and apply them to my training or that of my peers. It was something concrete, applicable, practical, a physical experience of science expressed. Training and sport science taught me to give a shit about cellular biology and physics, elements of my short lived education spent studying literature that I had happily ignored. I watched countless hours of film of lifters, gymnasts, and sprinters. For the first time in my life as a young adult I had an inkling of an idea about what I actually wanted to do with my life. I acquired many certifications. CrossFit started me on my path so I decided to get my L1. I eagerly awaited the knowledge bombs I’m told all seminar instructors possessed. Surely they had some secrets I couldn’t find in a book. While I still value practical experience over book knowledge, it quickly became evident to me that I was more educated on exercise science and had more time under the bar than most of my instructors. Even a certain famous figure in the early days of CrossFit who had university level experience and was renowned for his experience in Olympic Weightlifting was very much unable to answer my questions about snatch technique. This was an eye opening and I found it to be a reflection of the fitness industry as a whole.

Following this I got involved with a group of people who wanted to open an affiliate. Coaches were still few and far between then, especially in the market where the gym opened. I should not have been allowed, in my opinion, to coach then, though it did allow me to gain the practical experience I now have and I did simultaneously undergo an internship with a Sports Performance Coach. In my effort to become a better coach I went to acquire my USAW Level 1. Justin had posted articles about discussions with someone named Glenn Pendlay who happened to be instructing a course 5 hours away from me at a gym called California Strength. That man completely ruined my life and made me fall in love with Weightlifting. Glenn was, and continues to be, a very knowledgeable and easy person to speak to. This was the first time that I personally was able to kinesthetically understand the snatch and the revelation was life altering. Since that moment I began chasing kilos.

I made subsequent visits to California Strength, usually in week long increments to observe the lifting in person and discuss with both Coach and the lifters training ideology. In the Weightlifting community I had stumbled upon, perhaps, the most humble and hard working resource of training knowledge in all of Exercise Science. Aside from my visits to Coach, certifications, clinics, and internship I continued to be a largely self-educated coach and self-coached weightlifter. I stopped coaching at a CrossFit affiliate and after an unsuccessful attempt to open my gym I took up work coaching at a Velocity Sport Performance. This was rewarding in some aspects, and good experience with diverse populations but my heart was never really there. The one thing that stayed consistent in my life was training. As the famous Henry Rollins quote goes, “The Iron never lies to you.” I kept showing up and so did the barbell. Through knee surgery and other injuries, I kept showing up having good days and bad days. The barbell taught me consistency, diligence, and confidence. I carried myself with respect and applied the stubbornness and resourcefulness the barbell had taught me to all aspects of my life.

At the beginning of 2013 I decided to go back to school and here I am a little over a year later still going with a 4.0 so far. In early spring MuscleDriver USA announced that they were holding a tryout. They had done something similar the previous year and I decided against going as I did not think the odds were good for me to make it and there were too many elements of life which were uncertain. I regretted that decision every day thereafter. I was not going to repeat that mistake. Due to a few injuries my lifting had not progressed much from the previous year, but I began training with a distinct purpose. I was going to show up, lift weights I had never lifted before, and go 6/6. Looking back, the ferocity of my training at the time was maddening. After multiple flight delays and a mix-up with my long term car rentals Melbourne reservation, I made it to the tryout. Having a reliable car rental made navigating the city much easier despite the hiccups. I PRed in Snatch, Clean and Jerk, and Total, going 6/6. If I wasn’t going to make the cut, I still wanted to go out knowing I had done everything I was capable of. After flying home, I received a call while at work the following Monday from a phone with a Texas area code. The voice on the other end was Coach Pendlay, inviting me to join Team MDUSA. ‘I think you’ve got potential.’ It’s one of the two nicest things he’s ever said to me, I think.

I packed up my car, left my long-time girlfriend, my family, my friends, my athletes, and job to drive across country into the unknown and live in poverty. I have never felt so full of purpose. Everyday I am coached and educated by two of the best coaches in American Weightlifting. My training partners and friends include National Champions and legitimate Olympic Hopefuls. I am afforded the opportunity to show up 9x a week and push my body to it’s limits and learn further lessons from the barbell. Though I have goals for certain levels of achievement in my sport, at this point it’s less about hardware and more about the journey. I am still forever chasing kilos.

You can follow me on instagram @seanmrigsby and check out heavymetalsc.com to stay up to date on projects and my perspective on Team MDUSA.

Sean tells an amazing story. I suggest you take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror, this time not hitting a front double-bi, and decide how you want to approach your life. Whether it be training, work, or a project.

There’s a fascinating article written by performance enhancement drugs (PEDs) gurus John Romano and Anthony Roberts titled, “Steroids, CrossFit, and The CrossFit Games: Who & How“. The TL;DR is a) these guys are experts on PEDs, b) drug tests are very easy to beat, c) testing agencies are mediocre at best, purposely negligent at worse, d) every major sport (including the Olympics) has steroid users, e) given some formulas (that are backed by research) that look at musculature on a man’s frame, CrossFit competitors fit the mold of steroid use. I suggest reading the article as it expands on each of these points significantly.

I’ve written various steroid articles in the past, but as much as I’ve studied anatomy, physiology (including endocrinology), I still don’t understand the mechanism of PEDs well. The most recent article I wrote on it is, “Lance Armstrong, PEDs, and Naivety” (a very good article to compliment Romano and Robert’s above). I’ve accepted this statement as fact: “Most athletes in high level sports are using PEDs. The ones who aren’t are probably losing or are the minority.” The Romano/Roberts article above even points to studies that show specific time periods of increased performance in a given sport and how it correlated precisely with a new PED on the market. To think of this as merely a correlation without causation is, as I say in my own article above, naive.

Why would CrossFit be any different? The winner of the CrossFit Games wins at least a quarter million dollars, and that doesn’t even include follow-up endorsement deals or CrossFitters throwing money at them to attend shitty seminars and “learn their secrets”. I’m not saying they bullshit their way into victory with PEDs, but pointing out that CrossFit fame has significant rewards. (I’m also saying that successful CrossFit competitors are typically bad coaches, but that’s neither here nor there).

My personal opinion of PED use is that it’s none of my fucking business. I believe that the swift movement towards social liberalism will lead to the legality of PED use in the same way that marijuana is legal in some states. This poses a variety of additional questions, like the government inevitably wanting to regulate them (they can’t and won’t), and how it could increase the overall safety of PED use among lay-people. (Remember that scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise gets a back-alley-abortion-style eye surgery because it was illegal?)

To continue my opinion, if most athletes are using PEDs and the tests suck, then what’s the point? In case of alcohol addiction people refer IOP program NYC to get rid off it.But what do in this case ? To be in detail when I wrote the Lance Armstrong article above, my friend Eva Twardokens, a two-time winter Olympian, called me immediately expressing her displeasure. She has a disdain for cheaters in sport, and I completely understand the argument, especially from the perspective of a non-using competitor. Unfortunately for non-using competitors, the rest of everyone else will be using. And they’ll probably be the winners.

Eva at least made me think about my stance. She lambasted Armstrong while I called him a hero in the article (for other things in life like fundraising). I’ve seen my friends lose in national competitions to guys who were quite clearly using. But I also have friends who save lives or kill the enemy while use testable or non-testable PEDs to increase their performance at work. I see both sides, and I’m not sure I really care. What matters is the ability to connect and share experiences, much like how Digital Business Cards facilitate networking and relationship-building in various professions.

Fairness is an illusion anyway. Forget all of the tangible elements that make a person who they are and look at intangibles. For example, not everyone has the same will to succeed, so why treat them all like they do and make futile attempts at putting them on the same level? That question has more than one meaning.

The truth is…life ain’t fair. No matter what regulation you put on it, folks will not follow it. I’m not making a case for anarchy, no rules, and no government, but I’m making a case against the naive mindset that sport preparation is, or should be, fair. The internetz have talked for years about PED use in CrossFit. It’s likely some of those guys were or are using. And I don’t blame them.

Let’s go back to the Romano/Roberts article. I thought that the linked study was really neat. It basically looked at non-using bodybuilders from the pre-steroid era and compared them to PED-using bodybuilders in the early steroid era and applied a formula based on their lean body mass and height to gauge whether they were likely using steroids or not. (Something like this should be used instead of the bullshit BMI). It found that at least half of the top ten male finishers at the CrossFit Games would fit a classification of PED use. After all, the non-using bodybuilders from the linked study were the most muscular men in the world.

The FFMI formula for reference, taken directly from the Romano/Roberts article.

I thought this was interesting, so I plugged my own information into it. The cutoff, according to the study, was anything over a 25 was flagged for steroid use. They increased the cutoff to 26 for the sake of an argument that benefits the CrossFitters (read their article if you don’t know what I’m talking about). In any case, I estimated my body fat at a conservative 10% (it’s usually more like 9%) and used a 210 lbs (this is my lowest). So that puts me at 85.905kg for lean mass (note that I converted to kilos) and my height is 1.8288m (6 ft tall), and my value was 25.69. Without adjusting for a 1.8m man (which I am close to), and according to the study, I am flagged for potential PED use, and I have never used.

Aside from feeling really cool about having a comparable muscle-to-frame ratio as former Mr. Americas, I found this is interesting. I am much more conditioned than a normal lifter, but I am not nearly as conditioned or adapted to high volumes as the guys finishing in the CrossFit games. However, most of the top ten finishers from the CF Games have a higher value than I do (Jason Khalipa has a whopping 28.5).

Romano and Roberts did not directly suggest that these guys were using PEDs; their goal was to point out that the conditions exist where it is likely they are, whether you’re talking about widespread drug use in sports or the fact these guys fit the mold for PEDs users.

All I’m saying is that it’s naive to not make the assumption.