Thursday I went to Judo class with Gant and got to see my buddy Devin again. I started training Devin to get stronger when he was 12 years old, 6 feet tall, and weighed 200 pounds. Now he’s 14, is 6’4″, and weighs 220 pounds. I worked with him during last night’s class and we threw each other around for a couple of hours. It’s very humbling to have a 14-year-old man-handle you. Here’s a video we recorded a little over a year ago. Devin is 12 here (updated videos will come soon).
Of course I regret not getting involved with Judo more when I lived in Wichita Falls. I’ve always been very interested in using the physical attributes built in the gym into athletic endeavors. Personally, I haven’t been involved in a sport that requires athleticism, reaction, and finesse in quite a while. Learning new things is a humbling experience, and it’s something I encourage you all to do.
Lifting may be a new activity to you, yet I hope it’s your gateway to other things as well. I grew up loving weight training, but it was a means to an end regarding football preparation. I’ve been involved with competing in weightlifting (including Senior Nationals) and coaching powerlifting (including USAPL Raw Nationals twice), but sports and activities that require more are very interesting. In lifting, the same motions are repeated over and over, and there isn’t an exceptional amount of athletic ability inherent in it. This, of course, isn’t a knock on lifting. I love lifting and will always include it in my training, but using the strength and power developed through lifting into another sport is just as rewarding (if not more) as competing in the barbell sports alone.
Some of you are merely strength training enthusiasts. Others of you aim to remain more capable than the average person and want to preserve your health. Some of you may have picked and fully committed to powerlifting and weightlifting. Objectively, only a small percentage of you will be competitive at a high level that would require long-term specialization. In the same way that I encourage you to enter your first lifting meet, I encourage you to try a new sport or activity and even compete in it.
I can’t imagine anything more vulnerable than agreeing to do a Judo tournament in two months from now. I’ve had one session of getting my ass kicked by a young international competitor, and the thought of doing it live against an opponent who has their shit together is intimidating. But that’s the point. Competition isn’t supposed to make you feel nice; for the majority of us it’s going to be a character building experience.
Trying a martial art like Judo can be rewarding in many ways. You will improve your coordination, agility, and body awareness while improving your ability to throw someone through a table when necessary (it often is). Gant once rhetorically asked me, “What’s the point of being strong if you can’t throw someone across the room?” If you can find a place where you can also get some quality striking/sparring and actual real world self defense, then you’re automatically more useful. Being strong doesn’t make you more useful — conditioning your body to utilize that strength is what makes you useful.
Happy PR Friday — Post your training updates and PRs to the comments. Ask questions about or discuss some other sports to get involved with. If you have questions on Judo (including where to go and how to get started), put them in the comments and I can get some resources to you from Gant.
I just wanted to give some shout outs to some guys that were at the meet this last weekend. For those of you who don’t know, this year’s USAPL Raw Nationals drew an impressive crowd because the top lifters from this meet would be selected for the Raw World Championships next year in Sweden.
Mike Tuchscherer
I wouldn’t think that you guys haven’t heard of Mike by now, but we’ve always watched his videos at 70’s Big. He runs Reactive Training Systems, is an officer in the Air Force, and is a really nice guy. We briefly met him, but I didn’t really want to bother him with the meet going on. He did very well in the 125kg/275lbs weight class weighing in at 120.2kg (120 is the new weight class with “super heavies” being 120+, so he wanted to get experience there). You can read his meet recap here, and this video is what he did one week out:
I’m sure there is plenty to learn from him.
Matt Nolan
Matt has been posting as “NolanPower” on the site for quite a while, and is a friggin’ awesomely strong 100kg/220lbs lifter. I’m not the most experienced powerlifting coach/handler, and it was Matt who encouraged me to use the “last warm-up on the platform” method that I implement at meets. More importantly, he was in a tight race all day in the 100kg class. After squatting 573 (his first PR since some time in 2010) and benching 380, the competition was TIGHT going into the deadlift. This of course didn’t stop him from talking to Brent and I about RTS games (not Mike T’s website, but real time strategy games) in between sessions. Anyway, it all came down to his third and final pull; it was either hit it and win, or miss it and walk away with second place. Honestly, this was the most entertaining lift I’ve ever seen — maybe it’s because Matt posts on the site, maybe because he’s just a real nice guy, and maybe it had something to do with the do or die situation. Here is some footage I took of the lift and seeing him immediately after the pull. Nice job, Matt.
It also looks like Matt will be keeping a training log on RTS here.
Ettore Ewen
There isn’t any footage of this fella on YouTube…under this name. He is also known as Big E. Langston in the WWE stable in Florida. I can’t explain to you guys how big this former Iowa football player is. He’s about as tall as me, but 135kg/297lbs of fucking yoke. He is absolutely massive. When he walked in the room, Chris just stared and said quietly, “That guy is JACKED.” He won the super heavy class and benched an easy 240kg/529lbs. I watched the second attempt at 512…he fucking killed it like it was me doing 225. I’ve never seen anyone that big in person before. He looked bigger than he does in this video: Edit: I posted the wrong video (he got one hit in and lost the match). Here is the other one I watched that shows more of his strength):
He also had a shirt that said, “I got 99 problems, but my bench ain’t one of them.” He was pretty badass.
There were lots of other good folk, like the girls from Pretty Powerlifting and some other guys that hung out on Saturday night, so it was good fun. Nationals meets can be long, tiring, sometimes boring, but there were really good people and excellent lifters.
Remember when we talked about the upcoming book, FIT by Dr. Lon Kilgore, Dr. Michael Hartman, and myself? Well that book is now available.
I already gave you the the overview of the information in FIT in the last post, so instead we’ll talk about plainly today. This book is legit. I’m not just saying that because my name is on the cover, but I’ll point out that if the book sucked, then I wouldn’t want my name on the cover. This book is what the fitness industry needs. I hope that over time we can help influence effective training in the fitness realm in the same way as the strength/conditioning realm. That basically means tweaking the fundamentals of strength and conditioning and applying it to general fitness — and that’s what this book does.
A person with any level of advancement can pick this book up and benefit from it. Personally, I benefited from the strength, endurance, and mobility chapters (written by the other two fellas with PhDs). As most of you know, I have a keen interest in programming, and when we started this project in late 2010, this book enhanced my horizon on programming. It also made me develop the lessons that I’ve learned over time into simple, direct methods and progressions to implement.
This book can help the way you think about training, about programming, about applying stress, and improving ability regardless of what your true intentions are. And it does so without breaking down your body and causing injury. Whether you’re a combat veteran, aiming to get strong, or a sedentary person looking to start a new path to fitness, this book is for you. I sincerely give it all the support in the world and know it won’t let you down.
Fitness – What it is
Fitness Adaptation – How we become fit
Strength
Endurance
Mobility
Multi-Element Fitness
Strength Exercises
Endurance Exercises
Mobility Exercises
Getting Ready to Train
Physics, Physiology & Food
Exercise Performance Standards
We all flew into DFW last night, and everyone but Brent rode up to Wichita falls and got in bed close to 4 AM (hence the late post). This year only Chris, Mike, and Alex competed at nationals. Brent pulled his hamstring a week out (yet still attended) and AC didn’t get his application sent in on time. If you’ve followed the site or the training logs, you know this is an…interesting experience when we are all in the same place. See Brent’s post for some specifics. Here’s the cut and dry performance with what each guy needs to work on in in their program.
Brent
[spoiler]Brent went 0/0 and scored really high on the “leave it, rather than take it” scale. He is still yet to beat the SC2 campaign, and allegedly has officially retired from competition…mostly because he hates traveling and sleeping on the floor in a room with Mike and Chris. We actually got our own room on Sunday night so we didn’t kill ourselves. We also sat together on the first flight leaving Scranton. Here’s a pic that I texted Chris followed by his response:
Chris was crammed in a seat that was by itself on one side of the plane. From the back of the plane (where Brent and I were) you could see his back hanging out into the aisle. It’s fine.
[/spoiler]
Brent wanted a pic of his Misc shirt
Alex
[spoiler]Alex is Mike’s brother and played football for four years at Plymouth State. He has very good structure and potential. He competed at 110kg/242lbs and was about 248 the day before. We had to use some cutting techniques to get him down, and he weighed in about a pound under. Right now Alex is a stronger squatter than deadlifter, and he went 3/3 and hit an excellent 584 on his third attempt. At that point, I think he was third in the weight class. Alex is a pretty good bencher given his limited experience in powerlifting — recently he hit a touch-and-go 405 — yet he needs work on the pause. He hit a pretty simple 369 on the second attempt, but missed 380 when the bar shifted down (towards his waist) off the chest. I probably should have gave him a 2.5 kilo jump to 375 lbs, but his goal was 380. Lastly, on deadlift, he hit a smooth 534 on his third attempt for an overall 20 pound PR (he pulled a real shitty looking 520 a month ago or so). Overall, Alex did really well in only his second meet going 8/9 and getting two big PRs on squat and deadlift (with a meet PR on bench). Not to mention that most of his training occurred while he went through and graduated from a fire fighter academy these last few months.
Alex mainly will be developing his deadlift (which looked really solid at the meet, better than in training) as well as getting more experience with the paused bench.[/spoiler] 675 kg/1485 lbs total
Mike Edit: Here is Mike’s recap. He references the ideas I had the other day for his programming based on our breakdown after the meet.
[spoiler]Mike historically has pretty good meets where we have a solid, meticulous plan and execute it. We normally go at least 8/9 and PR on pretty much everything, yet this meet had some more downs than ups. This is mostly due to the fact that every six months he has to cut weight to get his waist circumference within regs for his PT test, and having a short, thick torso doesn’t help. In the last month mike gained about…30 pounds since his PT test (he competed in the 125kg/275lbs class). We opened with 540 on squat, which Mike hit, but looked slow in and out of the bottom. That worried me, so I emphasized bouncing the shit out of his second attempt at 556, a weight that was lower than what we originally planned. Mike was much sharper and made this meet PR look much better than the opener, although he didn’t crush it. Then I made a 7.5 kg jump to 573 (our high-end plan was going to be closer to 584). Mike descended slow despite me emphasizing needing to bounce the fuck out of it (he said it felt heavy), and had a slow in-and-out of the hole just like on the opener. However, he ground the fucker out and made the rep. After racking it, he was 2-1 red lights: no lift because of depth. We don’t have good video of this lift, yet the middle judge gave a red light for depth, which I thought was very odd. Mike has a weird shaped body with long, thick femurs and a big ass, so it would be easy to perceive him high. I saw his right side (the red lighted side) and he looked deep to me, but the judges don’t overturn lifts red-lighted because of depth.
We took an opener at 303 on bench — a meet PR that has alluded Mike for some time, including Military Nationals earlier this year (our method of programming has worked well for him) — and he smoked it. But wait, it was a mis-load and only 297. I decided to re-take the lift at the end of the round at the weight we actually called for instead of accepting it as our opener. Mike then hit 303 plainly after asking “We good?” to the loaders (his opening bench was mis-loaded last year at nationals too), but had to follow himself because his second attempt was the lowest in his flight (he hates this, so don’t mention it). He had a 4 minute clock after the bar was loaded, and hit an easy 314 on a second attempt that I stepped in to side spot since the loaders went to get a snack during the 4 minute clock. We then made a small jump for 319 on the third and he went 3/3 on bench for the first time in a while.
We took Mike’s last warm-up on the platform for deadlift at 545 which was obviously easy. Then we hit the intermediary jump at 595 on his second (about 10 pounds below his meet PR) which, like always, came off the floor fast, but then was locked out a bit slow (remember the long femurs?). I would have given him something like 617 for his third, yet we needed 628 to get a 1500 total. I put the pressure on Mike to make the lift, and it came off the floor fast and then…pretty much stalled at his lower thigh. It was too much to lock out that day.
We’ll be aiming to continue developing Mike’s bench (his weakest lift) with some more frequency throughout the week and we’ll be working on his lumbar/hamstring integrity with heavy pulls by using rack pulls more efficiently. I’m also going to shift him into using speed squats along with heavy squatting in the programming (more on this soon). [/spoiler] 667.5 kg /1468 lbs total
Chris
[spoiler]
Chris’ meet was mixed — it could have been better, but it could have been much worse. He weighed in close to 300 pounds (his heaviest yet) and competed as a super heavy. We had to warm up kinda fast on squat, and he was sweating his ass off and huffing and puffing in the warm-up room. It wasn’t like he had to hit several attempts within a short span, but it was faster than he needed to. I thought he’d be ready, but his opener at 622 was slow — which is very strange for Chris who is a strong squatter. I should have called for a lighter second attempt, but I figured that with more rest before the second attempt and emphasizing bouncing the rep that he’d be able to stick to the plan on squat and called for 644 — something he hit in his last meet on a third attempt. Chris missed 644 — it was just too heavy. I blame myself: I think I tapered him a little to early, warmed up a little too fast, and most importantly we had to travel to get to this meet (including a 12 hour delay at the Newark airport on Friday for Chris). We decided to wave the third because Chris said, “In training, if I don’t have it that day, I just don’t have it.” We conserved energy for the rest of the meet. This is a tight spot for a coach, especially with an anxious lifter like Chris. I had to get his attention, and pretty much say, “I know you’re pissed and upset about squat, but we still have the rest of the meet. It’s time to step up and be a competitor — we can worry about squat later, but let’s put all our focus into getting good reps on the bench and deadlift. Go take a walk and let it go on the walk. When you come back, let’s fucking have fun and compete.” To Chris’ credit, that’s exactly what he did, went on a two minute walk, and came back as the fun loving, Rated R kinda guy he is.
However he mis-heard me when I said “work up to 275 on bench and I’ll be right back” — I had Mike and Chris lifting on two different platforms and was managing both of them. When Chris was about 4 out, I went back and saw that he had only done 225 a second ago. He normally would go 275, 315, and 330 before opening at 352, but we only had time for the 275 and 315, and had to go straight to the comp platform after 315. Again, this is my fault. I made sure to use up as much as the clock as possible and sent him to the bench with about 25 seconds left. You’re supposed to get the “start” command before time runs out, and he was fucking around with his set up and got the “start” command with literally one second left — I was so close to shitting my pants. Chris isn’t a great bencher because of a shoulder injury he got while weightlifting; it had been bothering him in the past few weeks. We wanted to hit around 380, which he’s done in training, but I was more concerned with building his confidence after the squat fiasco. We took a simple 363 on the second to tie a meet PR, and then a hard 374 on the third attempt to set a meet PR. 3/3 and feeling good, as evidenced by him flexing his pecs and yelling “COME ON, DO IT NOW, KILL ME” when warming up for deadlift.
We took the last warm-up of 584 on the platform, which was easy. Then we took the intermediate jump of 628 on the second; it wasn’t slow, but it wasn’t as fast as I wanted. Our high-end plan was to hit 675 or 680 on deadlift (he hit a pretty simple 665 about 5 weeks ago), yet after seeing the second, I decided to lower it a bit to give him more of a chance on getting it (also, a few minutes prior, Mike had missed his third deadlift on the other platform and I didn’t want Chris to miss his). I gave him 666 — the devil’s number and told him to summon the demons. I just got goose bumps thinking about this pull — it was a battle the whole way but he never even thought to give up on it. He had to grind through every inch of the lift past his knees, up his thighs, and to the lockout, but locked it out while everyone in the area yelled at the top of their lungs. Chris is nothing if not a fighter. Then he walked in the back and said to Brent, “Double overhand? Nah, I’m good.” since he pulls with a double overhand hook grip. Chris placed 4th overall behind some big mother fuckers.
We’ve been joking around that Chris has been SPF (a fed that has a 308 weight class) since he was over 300 the other day. He’s always told me he’s wanted to be a 275 lifter, and we’re gonna put him on a program and gradual diet plan to drop some body fat off and maintain strength for a couple months. I’m also going to emphasize mobbing his dinged up shoulder, tweak his bench programming, and probably transition him into a more advanced type of program by the end of the year, although it’ll depend on his body fat/weight.[/spoiler] 755 kg/1661 lbs total
In the time that I’ve had this website, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of great people through the internet or in person. Some of you have become my good friends like Al, Tom, Hom, Jacob, Briskin, Ben, and Saul and Becky. I’ve also met a lot of awesome people doing the workshops:
Chicago – Ellee, Cori, Doogie, Cory, and Jay Canada – My bicepped studs Paul and Chris (with their better halves), Rowan, and Mark Monterey – Gabe, Nate, Mariah, Bill, Elliott, Harj, and Robin Australia – Pete (top fucking bloke), Shannon (another top bloke), Harvey (awesome dude — see the trend?), Shane (both of them), Stuart — and all of you other fuckers. You guys were all great.
And that’s just from the past few months. There’s all kinds of great people like Ruth and Sean (power couple), Marcus, and Avelyn from CF Intrepid; Lisa in Santa Monica; Ryan Huseman and the Coffman’s at CF Amarillo; Ian and Allison at CF Centurion. And of course I’ve got homeys like Jacob Cloud, Kittensmash, and Brian who I actually need to meet to prove you aren’t just mouth breathers on the computer (like Tom is). Then there’s a lot of you I interact with in the comments and in the chat room — you all are too numerous to name.
Gabe shirt: You can run but you can't hide. Brent shirt: Unrequited love is for chumps
