Strong isn’t just about numbers. It isn’t about records or medals. It isn’t about stacking plate after plate onto a bar. It isn’t about impressing the average gym goer. It isn’t about being asked how many sets you’ve got left and replying with, “Oh, I’m just warming up right now.”

Strong is about stepping to the bar every week. It’s warming the cold steel throughout the workout. It’s gritty. It’s daring. When your body says, “Quit…just quit…make the pain stop,” you say, “It’d be too easy to quit.”

Strong is the build-up. It’s chalk slowly floating through the air, a haze through the sunlight. It’s about the panicky anticipation of struggle. It’s the uncomfortable unknown. It’s the adrenal release, the goose bumps. It’s the decision to attack instead of flee.

Strong is focusing rage into steel. Strong is the deafening moment occurring during a maximal strain, an all-out effort. It’s the audacity to keep pushing when gravity says no. It’s ignoring the world closing on your senses. It’s the commitment to finish.

Strong is elation. It’s the release. It’s victory. It’s the feeling of staggering away from the bar, knowing that you gave everything. It’s the panting breath and the self-assurance. It’s knowing that you tried and never once thought about failing.

Strong is doing this every week, every month, every year.

Strong is 70’s Big.

Here are two videos. The first is a quick vid I shot last night that talks about three very good stretches for a lifter who doesn’t stretch at all. Keeping your structures pliable and loose will be important for preventing injury as well as being able to do non-lifting things (use your imagination). For more mobility work, see Kelly Starrett’s Mobility WOD series on YouTube (two of the stretches are referenced a lot by Kelly).



The second video is from my friends Jacob and Hom in California. Jacob sports a gnarly-ass beard while they eat a gigantic, 70’s Big burrito. California may be weird, but damn they have good food.



Question of the Day
What do you eat for breakfast every day?

Australian Story
I meet all kinds of people through this website. I hesitate to accept lots of Facebook friend requests (it’s getting harder to tell a creeper from his profile picture), but I’m glad I accepted Tom’s. Tom is an Australian, ginger version of Brent Kim. Except Tom is taller. And is nothing like Brent except for his internet trolling ability.

In any case, he told a compelling story on his Facebook status the other day. I deemed it good enough to share. Behold…

February 10 at 2:00am:
I got to the gym today and as I was walking to the door I saw a hawk fly across my path. I walked over to where he’d been and saw what was left of the rooster that used to reside in a pen next to the gym (R.I.P. Blacky). I walked in to the gym and started warming up.

February 10 at 2:03am:
Later on, I went to put some water in my shaker for my PWO Shake (2 scoops waxy maize, 1.5 scoops WPC) and noticed there was a little frog in the sink drain. I undid the u-bend and Australia’s strongest powerlifter took him from me and placed him in the little garden beside the entry. I went back in to finish my chins.

February 10 at 2:04am:
Finally, as I was getting ready to leave I was notified by another mate that a goanna had arrived and decided that Blacky’s remains looked to be a delicious meal. We all stood around for 5-10 minutes and watched a goanna eat his dinner. After this, I went and collected my gear and drove home.

The tone of this story makes me think of this video. Later in the comments, some guy (presumably Australian) said that it sounded like a Pokemon episode. Australia sounds interesting, no?

St. Patrick’s Day Sale
The 70’s Big Store is celebrating St. Patrick’s Day by offering a 17% discount on orders $35 or more. Make sure to use the coupon codes:



Additionally, the “original logo” is now available on a green shirt so that you can look excessively manly while you get excessively drunk on March 17th. Win-win. Australians also celebrate St. Patty’s Day.

Question of the Day
Do you have any sweet lifting stories from a country not in north America?

I’m working on those “other projects”, and this post seemed extremely relevant. Courtney is 5’2″, 125 lbs, is from Reston, VA, and can deadlifted 332lbs. As they say around the interwebz, that’s “mega hawt”. Her goals for this year are to deadlift 350 and squat 275.

Here’s a video of her doing a 290 pound sled drag. She had 135 lbs. in bumpers on there, but it wasn’t heavy enough so her friend jumped on to make it 290. No big deal.



What we have here is a cute girl who deadlifts over 300 pounds, and wants to deadlift and squat more. Courtney said in her e-mail,

I hope you will share this on your site as I work to show women just how much fun strength training can be! Hopefully I will be making those lift goals in no time :)

Yes it’s true; stronger women are the best.

What have I got to say to those of you who aren’t significantly stronger than this girl? Step up your game, son.

I bet you perverts thought the title of this post was going to refer to something else. Typical.

You’re squatting your last set of five on your linear progression. You find yourself getting bent over a bit at the bottom of each rep; it happens regularly with hard or heavy sets. You hit rep number three and something tinkers in your back. Instantly the muscles seize around your lumbar spine and you dump the weight (on the pins, not your friend). What. The. Fuck. Happened?

I’ll tell you what happened; The Final Stroke.

If you’re like me, you wear flannel (Editor’s Note: If you’re like me, you pick your girlfriend up wearing flannel.). Flannel is perfect for cold weather, and it’s even more perfect for chopping wood. Chopping wood requires a tree that isn’t attached to the ground. The man-method of removing a tree from the ground is by chopping it. If you’ve read “Where the Red Fern Grows”, you can imagine what happens next: you chop the base of the tree with an axe until it falls. If you’re smart, you’ll get a good rhythm going; most of your strokes will be pretty equal to one another. The base of the tree will be chopped away, and eventually one of your even tempered strokes will fell the tree. It may take a thousand strokes, but it’s the final stroke — a stroke that isn’t any more significant than the other 999 — that brings the tree down.

This is the same thing that happens to your grandmother’s hip. She gets osteoporosis because she doesn’t regularly apply force to her bones, thus they don’t adapt to being stronger (ask Jack LaLanne if he ever fucking got osteoporosis). Grandma gets achy and has brittle bones. Eventually, she’ll step off the curb walking in the super market parking lot and will break her fucking hip. It’s not like stepping off the curb was a significantly higher stress than anything else she experiences on a regular basis. It’s that her bone was getting chopped at because it was so brittle, and the 1000th stroke finally landed. The Final Stroke is hardly ever more significant than the 999 before it, yet it’s the one that causes the biggest trauma.

To understand The Final Stroke, you need to look at the hundreds that occurred before. The Final Stroke is a regular event made irregular by inadequate preparation or by doing the wrong thing. The dude in the first paragraph didn’t screw up his third rep on his last set; he’s had some weird little form fault — in this case the “leaning over” thing — that has chopped away at some structures until finally, the structures gave away. This happens all the time. All the fucking time. Most training related injuries or mishaps occur because something wrong has been occurring for weeks, even months. The debilitating effects of a little form fault may not be felt until The Final Stroke.

Take notice of your knees coming in on the squat or shoving your head through when you lockout a press. Take notice of how you jerk the deadlift off the floor or how your pelvis shifts to the left in the squat descent. You don’t have to go out and McCarthy every exercise (half of you are now thinking, “Jesus Christ, is my pelvis even when I squat?”). I’m just saying, address those little form faults before increasing the weight. If you keep hacking away at them, you might have to eventually deal with The Final Stroke.