In response to this – and in order to make ourselves feel less fear – we create detailed plans, take meticulous notes, and spend an inordinate amount of time researching the “best” strategies for success. What we rarely do…is DO.

I would never presume to tell someone those responses are inherently bad. It would be even stranger for me to imply they don’t often work in your favor. After all, planning is good. Research is good. Thinking can certainly be good. But, in the case of making strength gains, those goal-setting-responses will just bog you down over time. At some point or another, you have to just go for it.

To make fast and consistent progress, you need to strip away the fat, get down to basics, and hammer the living bajezus out of them! I talked about this before in my Rule of Three article, so it should sound familiar. What is different about this approach is that it is especially designed for over-thinkers, the “processors”, who just can’t get past themselves. If that is you, you need to take a chill-pill.

This is your chill-pill routine.

I’m going to give you four options for workouts that each consist of only two exercises. You can pick one and do it exclusively for a few weeks then switch, or you can alternate through them throughout the week. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is when you hit the gym, you do only these two exercise and you do them hard.

Workout A

This workout is the most basic of them all, and if you could do nothing else, and you were simply looking for raw basic strength all over your body, it would serve you very well.

1. Squat (front or back)
2. Push Press

You can choose to do front or back squats depending on what you think you need the most work on (for most people that will be the front squat). The back squat is a great exercise, but it presents some problems for people lifting without a good coach – see my article about whether back squats are really necessary.

Either way, squat. Of all exercises it has the best cost/benefit ratio of gains to injury risk. You can lift heavier more often on the squat without worrying about hurting yourself than you can with any other lift in the gym.

The Push Press is the squat of the upper body. I really dislike strict pressing for most people. Some lifters can get away with it, but most will feel pain over time. That pain comes from the fact maximal impingement (ouchy-ness) occurs during the period when the bar is moving from the shoulder to about the middle of the face, or top of the head. The Push Press eliminates this part of the lift completely.

The other benefit of the push press over the strict press is you can use more weight. I don’t think I need to tell you that lifting more weight will get you stronger than lifting less weight.

Workout B

Depending upon your definition, the Clean and Jerk is either one exercise or two. For the purposes of this article (and because there’s a frelling “and” in it!) I’m going to treat them each as separate lifts.

Doing so allows us to have a whole workout that is nothing but Cleans and Jerks. Talk about simple!

1. Clean and …
2. Jerk

Some days you can clean and jerk every rep. Other days you can do all your cleans first, then jerk off blocks or squat stands. Or you can jerk first, clean second. Be creative. As long as you lift heavy weights, you’ll make gains.

The clean is both a pull AND a squat. It is an amazing exercise in that way. The more efficient you get at your technique the more amazing the lift becomes. Once you are able to clean 80% or more of your best front squat you’re getting somewhere. (Unless, of course, you are just a really bad front squatter! But, that’s a different article.)

The Jerk requires massive stabilization of the upper body and arms. Many Olympic lifters have arms and shoulders that look like gymnasts or natural bodybuilders and yet they never do any upper body work other than holding heavy jerks over their head. It’s easy at first to think you NEED to bench to get a strong upper body. That is a lie. Learn to jerk weights near your best front squat, and your upper body will look awesome.

Workout C

The third workout, like the first, pairs a heavy lower body exercise with the Push Press. You may wonder why I don’t change things up and have you bench press or do some other heavy pressing lift. The answer is the Push Press is better.

For the general athlete who is trying to go ultra minimal, the crossover benefits of the push press can’t be beat. In addition to its ability to add a ton of strength to your upper half, it requires powerful leg explosion and a coordinating of the entire body working in sequence. Anytime you can pick an exercise the utilizes both the upper and lower body muscles at the same time, you’re in good shape.

1. Deadlift
2. Push Press

The Deadlift messes up the cost/benefit ratio a bit. I think you get a touch more in the strength gains department than you do in a squat, but the risk of injury, burnout, and central nervous system fatigue is WAY higher. For this reason, I think you need to be in the “intermediate” category before you start pushing the deadlift in your training.

Also, if you deadlift, you should stick mostly to variations like the Romanian Deadlift (RDL) or snatch/clean pulls over the conventional deadlift most of the time. (For the RDL, do reps in the 3 to 5 range rather than always pushing for singles.) Powerlifters will disagree, but their sport involves the full deadlift and is a one-rep max sport, so their situation doesn’t quite match up with most other athletes. (The same is true for we Olympic lifters. Some things carry over, some don’t.)

Workout D:

Finally, we go back to a squat workout, but I’ll have you pair it with the chin up this time.

1. Squat
2. Chin Up

If the Push Press is the squat of the upper body, the chin up is the deadlift – but without all the negatives! That’s a huge win. I do think chins will tax you a bit more than a push press. (For some reason, fatiguing the lats really takes a toll on you.) But, the risk of injury is rather low if you are performing them well.

You can also load up a chin very heavy. The ability to add load is a serious consideration when picking your major working exercises. Don’t ever make a lift a major part of your arsenal if you can’t add a lot of weight to it safely.

Don’t worry if you can’t do a full chin up yet. In our modern world, there are numerous (cheap!) bands that can assist you. Seeing as how easy it is to find a way to do a chin up, you have little excuse.

Conclusion

As I said above, you have a lot of options about how to make a program out of these. (A workout does not a program make.) I could get complicated here, as the combinations and variations are endless. But, that would defeat the point!

Here are my three favorite varieties. Basic is the word:

1. Pick one workout, do it two or three times a week. Go hard for three weeks, then take a week light. Repeat.
2. Rotate through the workouts at each session. For instance, do workout A on Monday, workout B on Wednesday, and so on. Still only go hard for three weeks at a time, then take your back-off week. The order is irrelevant.
3. Just like 1., except after the light week, you switch to a different workout.

For those of you who get bored easily (my CrossFit friends, I’m looking at you!) option two makes the most sense. For everyone else, I prefer one and three. Consistency breeds progress.

What about sets and reps, man?!

Keep those simple, too. If you only workout two or three times a week, then at each session go up to ONE heavy set of three reps. If you workout more often, then work up to only one heavy set of one rep. (This counts for everything except Romanian deadlifts.)

If you are someone who sees a large goal – with all the work required to reach it – and is frozen stiff by such a prospect, do yourself a favor and take the simple road. Pick one of the options I’ve laid out for you, stick to it, don’t do anything else until you’ve made some mega-gains. Strength and power training doesn’t have to be complicated.

Think of this as your chill-pill routine.

The post The 2 Lift Workout: Your “Take a Chill-Pill” Routine appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

There’s propaganda floating around that the hang clean is so crazy-complicated that you probably shouldn’t bother with it at all. Many coaches will avoid teaching it, for this reason, leaving literally hundreds of thousands of athletes in this country underpowered as a result.

Don’t believe the hype. Hang cleans are hard, but they ain’t THAT hard. Anyone can learn to do a decent hang clean – anyone. And what’s better is that you only need to know three steps to do it! 

I used to have a lot of fun messing around with computer animation programs. In those programs, you can quickly create a moving image by only drawing two or three frames. In animation, they call these “key frames.” You tell the computer the most important positions you want your character to be in during your “movie” and the program will do the work of drawing all the intermediate steps for you.

Below, I’m going to give you the three “key-frames” of the hang clean – well, a hang power clean if we’re being technical – because the way to learn anything quickly, no matter how complicated, is to hone in on its key structural elements – its skeletal structure. Your body will fill in the rest without you having to think too hard about it.

If you can do that – learn the three keyframes of a proper hang clean – and then simply practice moving smoothly between them, you’ll be on your way to lifting more weight and building a stronger and more powerful body in the process. Conversely, if you DON’T hit these positions during your lift, you are leaving a lot of weight off the bar.

Step One: The Knee Position

You want to start the bar literally touching your knee-caps. Your weight is on your heels. And, you should have your hips up high enough so that your knee angle is very shallow. This is going to cause a lot of hamstring stretch! In fact, I like to tell people that if this position feels comfortable, you’re probably doing it wrong – or, you’re a yoga master.

Your shoulders will naturally be forward over the bar. That’s a good thing. However, this presents a problem: the bar will want to drift away from you and no longer touch the knee-caps. The way to solve this is to squeeze your lats as tight as you can. The lats act as an arm “depressor” – the pull the arms into your body. Use that to your advantage here. The lats need to be as tight as humanly possible.

Key Points to Remember:

1. Weight on your heels.
2. Hips high like a yoga master.
3. Lats tight – squeeze the bar into you.

Step Two: The Hip Position

The hip position is the most important position in weightlifting. If you can drill this spot and make it the most comfortable place in the world for you to be, then you will end up being very good at any variation of the Olympic lifts – including the hang clean. If not, you won’t. It’s that simple.

The bar should be touching your body as high up your thigh as possible. Again, your weight should be on your heels.

The shoulders will now be backward BEHIND the bar. That fact is important. You want to make sure that before you jump that bar above your head, your shoulders have gotten back behind the bar.

Why?

Because if you don’t, then the bar will have a more horizontal trajectory coming into the hip rather than the vertical trajectory that you want. That horizontal bar path will cause the bar to bounce off of your hip forward, then swing around you. With heavy weights, you’ll miss it.

Instead, get your shoulders back (mimic the photo), THEN jump the bar up.

Key Points to Remember:

1. Weight on the heels.
2. Shoulders back behind the bar.
3. Lats tight.

Step Three: The Catch

Now for the easy part. Catching a power clean is really not very complicated. All you do is catch it in the EXACT same position you’d be in if you were a quarter of the way down in a front squat.

Your heels should be taking most of your weight. Your elbows are high and in. (If you were looking at yourself in a mirror, your elbows would be pointing right at you.) And your legs and hips look just like they would look if you were doing a quarter squat (a quarter of the way down).

Key Points to Remember:

Weight on the heels.

Elbows high and IN,

Legs and hips in a quarter squat.

Putting It All Together

Obviously, there is more to doing a hang clean than just three steps. But, these are the three most important steps – the skeletal structure – that you MUST learn and make the hang clean totally subconscious.

The first mistake people make with the clean is that they try to move too fast too early. Be patient! The bar MUST move from the knee position to the hip position deliberately. If you DON’T end up at the hip position during your pull then you have wasted the lift.

The bar starts out slow and ends up fast. It is accelerating NOT exploding from the knee. Yes, you must end up going at maximum speed when the bar is at the hip. But, you should not start at maximum speed from the knee. I would err on the side of going slower than you are comfortable with to start out. Hitting the right spots is far more important in the beginning than going fast and using lots of weight with hideous form.

• Start at the knee,
• Accelerate to the hip (touch it!) and explode the bar up.
• Then all you have to do is catch it.

How simple is that?! Obviously, you’ll need to practice. But, now you know the only three things that you should focus on. Drill each of these positions, drill your ability to move from one to the other smoothly, and over time you’ll be able to add speed, and eventually weight to the bar.

Give that a try and then come back and leave your comments below telling me about how it went. I want to hear from you!

The post How To Hang Clean: The Only 3 Things You Need To Know appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I used to take a lot of drugs. I’m not talking about hippie drugs like weed, though I smoked that too. I’m talking about opium, cocaine, acid, and a lot of others that would give my mom a heart attack if I listed them out.

I used to drink so much it would literally kill most people. For instance, in one night, I took down half a bottle of Jack, half a bottle of tequila, over ten beers, and a ton of green. That’s not the crazy part, though. What was wild is that I only felt tipsy.

The first time I ever smoked weed I was only thirteen. I was fourteen the first time I took acid. I was sixteen when I tried cocaine for the first time. And I was smoking a lot of opium by the ripe old age of nineteen.

I wanted to pretend like this wasn’t a big deal. After all, I was also lifting a lot of weights then, and I looked and felt healthy (ah, the power of youth). But I wasn’t. I was massively depressed. Depression runs in my family, and I was a victim of my DNA. The drug use was a crutch that was preventing me from dealing with my depression head-on and finally taking control of my own life.

It had to go.

Life Is About Choices

There is one secret to success that gets passed over far too often: choice. We love to discuss the importance of follow through, hard work, and determination. But all of the blood, sweat, and tears in the world are meaningless without first making a choice you believe in with all of your heart.

I decided to stop taking drugs and stop drinking so much: so I did.

I decided I was tired of letting my depression control my life: so I made myself happy.

And while those were the hardest choices I’d ever had to stick with, I did stick with them precisely because when I made these decisions, I was serious about them. Own your choices in life, and you will reach all of your goals.

Want to lose weight? Then you need to decide that you are going to lose weight. Period. No going back. Want to gain muscle and get stronger? Then decide to do exactly that and mean it. Want to be awesome? Make the choice to buy a great pair of sunglasses. They make everything better.

You can’t fake this! No one else can make you. It has to be organic and real. But once it happens, your goals are as good as met.

Why Addiction Is a Myth

I’m an addict. That’s a fact. Like everyone else who has struggled with the mind-altering combo of drugs and depression, I know what it means to feel like I am not in control of myself. There were moments when I’d be having what could be seen as an out-of-body experience. I’d watch myself spiral down into the abyss, knowing that if I only did this one thing, made this one change, it would all turn out better and I could reverse the spiral and be okay.

But I didn’t do that. Instead I watched myself spiral out of control.

No, I let myself spiral out of control.

That’s the key, my friend. No matter how bad things got, I wasn’t actually being forced at gunpoint to take the drugs I took, or to let my depression ruin my days, my relationships, and my life. In those moments when things are hardest it can seem like you are not in control, that you have no choice, that you are a victim.

You are not a victim. You own your own body, your life, your hands that are grabbing at that beer, your voice that is saying, “I can’t do this,” your heart that believes everything is horrible and always will be.

We give addiction far too much credence. We make it out to be an impossible foe that we will never beat. That’s bullshit. If that was true, then no one would ever kick his or her drug habit, no one would ever lose weight, no one would ever overcome anything hard.

Addiction is the evil empire, and you are Luke Skywalker. It’s going to take some work, but you’re going to win.

Start Here: The Top 3 Ways to Fix Your Mind

I love hyperbole as much as the next blogger, but lets not be coy. Once you have made a serious, heartfelt choice you are going to face the hardest battle of your life. But you are worth it. I don’t care how cheesy that sounds; it’s true. Sometimes in life, you need to embrace your inner hippie.

Here are three things you can do now that will help you achieve any goal:

1. Stop saying negative things about yourself out loud. Never do it. Ever.
2. Start saying positive things about yourself out loud. Not, “I think I can,” but “I will” – Action words. Do this all day about everything.
3. Practice mindfulness. This simply means emptying your mind and letting yourself BE in the moment. I find doing this with a barbell in your hand works wonders.

The first thing is hands-down the most important. Constantly reinforcing how horrible you feel about everything will create a self-fulfilling prophecy: you will make your worst-case scenario come true.

The second is a way of creating a positive self-fulfilling prophecy, and is in heavy use by the world’s greatest athletes. Want to be more like Michael Jordan? Do this.

The last is the way that you will literally change the structure and chemistry of your brain. Your brain is much like your body. It can be altered through hard work. I am a huge proponent of daily meditation. But this does not have to be done sitting in a room filled with incense and love.

My favorite forms of meditation for those of us who read articles on Breaking Muscle is to put a barbell in your hand and try to turn off your brain. Focus on your breathing, on your hands gripping the bar, on your feet pushing into the floor – simple thoughts only.

There is a lot of research out there on how professional athletes compete with empty minds, whereas amateur athletes compete with minds full of random crap. This is something that took those professionals years to get good at. But it’s also a large key to their success.

Final Disclaimer

I know there are addictions that are so extreme that they will require medical intervention. But those are, in fact, the extreme cases. The real lesson here is that most of the goals we want to reach are within our grasp. And yet so many people fail to reach their goals precisely because they are constantly reinforcing their own victims-complex.

Stop whining. Start living. God bless hippies.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post How to Stop Sucking at Life and Win at Everything appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Nick Horton’s Weightlifting Is Fun Holiday Wish List

My theme this year? Weightlifting is supposed to be FUN!

1. Pink Weightlifting Belt – $78.00

Most belts for heavy lifting are BORING! Black, white, you might branch out and go for red. Hell, you might as well wear a polo shirt and khaki shorts, too, and complete the ensemble of drab. Now you don’t have to look like plumber when you train.

2. Purple Polka Dot Duct Tape – $10.22

Why coach beginners to snatch with “standard” white PVC pipe when you can cover it in awesome purple polka dot duct tape? Or zebra print? Or any of the sweet variations that are super easy to find if you know how to work your keyboard. Imagine how much faster people will learn when their pipe has this on it!

3. Bulgarian Flag – $13.00

Olympic weightlifting is like the martial arts in a number of ways. One of which is that there are “styles” of training that different clubs tend to subscribe to, just like there are in Kung Fu. My own club isn’t “monkey” style, and is only rarely “drunken” style, but it is “Bulgarian” style.

4. Go Greek: Leather Wraps – $29.75

Sometimes you need to channel the power of Xena: Warrior Princess to make a lift. That becomes much easier when you dress like she does. Wrist wraps that look like gauntlets? Yes, please!

5. Spinning Rainbow Light -$14.99

Lifting and romance are very much alike. The right music, the right partner, and the right lighting make all the difference.

6. PR Cowbell – $44.99

I ran a seminar at CrossFit Durham in North Carolina this year and every time a member made a PR (personal record) they had to run over and hit the “PR bell.” I thought this was brilliant.

7. Competition Glitter Nail Polish – $18.00

When you feel pretty, you feel stronger, and therefore you are. Make sure for your next contest you put on the right nail polish. It could be the difference between winning and losing.

8. Ninja Socks – $9.00

Cutting up your shins is something every weightlifter has to deal with. And it’s why we often like to wear knee-high socks. But if you are going to wear socks, why not wear ninja socks?! SockItToMe.com is a sock company based in Portland, only a few blocks from my gym.

9. Pink and Purple Custom Singlet – $105.00

Risto Sports has a really cool option where you can design your own custom colored singlet (the outfit worn by weightlifters in competition). Take a wild guess what mine would be? Oh wait, I already told you.

10. Canned Unicorn Meat – $12.99

Because protein works, and magic protein works better. Don’t give me your squeamishness. You are in this to win! I need you to train harder, more often, and eat the best possible source of protein in existence – unicorn protein!

Keep an eye out for our other holiday wish lists:

Sally’s MMA Holiday Wish List

Chris Duffin’s Powerlifting Holiday Wish List

Eric Stevens’s Holiday Wish List

Val Worthington’s Holiday Wish List

Becca’s Healthy Eating Holiday Wish List

Sally’s BJJ Holiday Wish List

Nicole’s Fit Mom Holiday Wish List

Hannah’s Holiday Wish List

Danette’s Athlete-Foodie-Mom Wish List

Andrew’s Hardstyle Holiday Wish List

Mindith’s Strong Mom Holiday Wish List

Greg Everett Needs Your Help Holiday Wish List

The post Nick Horton’s Weightlifting Is Fun Holiday Wish List appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

You have a young, handsome, and unusually lean coach who puts a PVC pipe into your hands and you are off on your first-ever coaching session on the Olympic lifts. Your coach gives you so many exciting things to work on. Who knew there was so much to think about?

For an entire hour he goes on and on about absolutely everything you are doing wrong. You can’t seem to do anything right. It is amazing how bad you are. At the end your coach says, “Good job,” which shocks you. You pay him. He smiles. You shake hands. You’re done.

You leave the gym after your session feeling totally defeated. “God. I knew it,” you say to yourself, “I really do suck!”

But did you really suck? Or did your coaching suck? If you walked out of your session with far too much information in your head and a defeated attitude about your ability to ever learn how to snatch well, your coach failed you.

Your Gold Medal Napkin, OR, Coaching While Drunk

My master’s degree advisor used to say, “If you can’t do binary arithmetic while drunk, you are not a mathematician.” Similarly, the following holds for coaches:

Gold Medal Napkin: You should be able to write down on a napkin, while drunk in a bar, the first five things you want a beginner to learn – in order.”

Last week I told you that coaching requires a lot of lying. And I confessed there were things I wasn’t telling my beginning lifters that were actually true. This week I’m here to tell you how to create you master plan, your lesson plan, the skeleton that will hold together the meat of your students learning. You can’t just blast them with everything all at once. And you certainly can’t harp on them for every little thing they do wrong.

Beginners need to be told ONE thing at a time. They need to practice that one thing until they get it right. Only then can you move on to the next thing.

The set of all technical points of the snatch is rather large – there are many elements in it, but not all of them are equally important. Some technical points are FAR more important than other technical points. For instance, the lockout is significantly more important than the start position.

You could teach each technical point in order of importance. Or, you could order them by how hard or easy a certain transition is to make. There are many combinations. But every good coach has an order in which they teach the technical skills of the snatch. And that order defines the rest of the learning process. This ordering, whatever it is, is your lesson plan, your method of taking a lifter from clueless to a “gold medal.” Without this, you are just fumbling in the dark.

Your plan should be simple enough to write down on a napkin at a bar while you are drunk. If you can’t do that, you don’t really have a plan. And your student is going to suffer. Teach them ONE thing at a time. Let them master that thing. Only then can you teach them the next thing on your napkin.

The Error Correction Principle

There is an obvious downside to this method of teaching. Almost everything the student does at first will be wrong. But you are only allowed to fix one thing at a time, so how do you deal with them screwing everything else up?

You bite your tongue – hard if you have to!

Let them figure out how to do the first thing on the napkin, fully accepting that they are going to really mess the rest of it up. Chill out, they will get there. Learning complex tasks is a process of error correction. Imagine a red sine wave oscillating up and down over a blue line running through its middle. Now imagine that sine wave is slowly shrinking down so eventually it becomes a straight line. At first, each time it shoots up and down it ends up way over the line. But since the sine wave is shrinking down over time, the “errors” of the highest ups and lowest downs are getting closer and closer to the line. Eventually, there is little (if any) error, or shooting over the line. So the red sine wave has become a red line laying itself right on top of the original blue line, joining it, and becoming a newer, more powerful purple line.

Taking a red sine wave and slowly turning it into a purple line is very similar to how you teach complex technical skills. You overshoot one way, pull back, and overshoot the other way, then again and again, each time overshooting less, until one day you got it.

Example: Your First Kiss (Day) with the Snatch

My own Gold Medal Napkin for teaching the snatch looks like this:

1. Lockout position
2. Hip position
3. Start/floor position
4. Knee position
5. Third pull (or dealing with the arms)

The first three take up the first day (or week, if we are going slow). We then drill this for about a month. Then I teach the fourth one, which can last another three or even six weeks. Then finally I teach the last one, which may take another three to six weeks.

All together it takes about twelve weeks on average to run through this progression. Clearly, there are drills and other things I have lifters do all along, but what is written above is the skeletal structure – the lesson plan – the gold medal napkin – that frames the entire learning process.

After this, it becomes very individual. I still have a napkin, but it is tailored to the lifter based on what I see. I don’t believe in being too ridged with your planning. But by the same token, I don’t want you coaching without a plan.

Conclusion

Every beginning coach makes the same mistakes. They over-coach, say too much, and overwhelm their students. The reason is always noble. They want to help you. They want to fix all of your flaws. And heaven knows, you have a lot of them!

Learn from their mistakes. Go to a bar, right now, start drinking, and create your own Gold Medal Napkin. Your athletes will thank you.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post The Gold Medal Napkin: How To Avoid Being A Clueless Coach appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Do you realize how often I have lied to you?

I stand there in the gym every single day and I lie through my teeth to everyone who walks through the door. I lie to them for months on end. I use what I call my “coaching voice” and I bark orders like a sea captain in battle. It is loud, it is aggressive, and I stand upon plyo boxes (the soap boxes of the fitness world) to give me the height of authority. I make proclamations that are half-truths at best, and I know it. But, I make them anyway. I justify this deceitful behavior by telling myself I am “doing it for your own good,” or that “I am helping you avoid the wrong path.”

But really, I know what it is: I am a liar.

To coach well is to lie well. To teach something complex is to deceive. To guide you to greatness requires me to keep you in the dark. So here, if only for tonight, I am going to confess my wickedness. I will tell you those things I should not tell you, or fear to tell you for what might happen.

#1 Don’t Use Your Arms

The first lie I often tell beginners is that they should never use their arms when snatching (or cleaning). “Think of your arms like ropes,” I say, “This is one hundred percent a leg exercise.” “I want you to jump, put momentum on the bar, and then catch it above your head,” is a common refrain.

But the truth is something altogether different. I do want you to use your arms. I want you to use them aggressively. I want you to pull hard on that bar and pull yourself down so fast that a high-speed camera wouldn’t see it.

The reason I lie is that if I tell you this – after the bar hits the hip, I want you to pull with your arms to pull your body down – you will over-pull with your arms, and pull that bar up past the hip with the arms without going down. Or you will start pulling with the arms so early that you “shock absorb” all of that kinetic energy you generated with your legs, dissipating it into nothingness.

So I lie, and you succeed.

#2 Ignoring the Knees

I used to teach people to get their knees back right away in my beginner progressions. You can see this in my original videos on the subject where I emphasized what might be called “The Knee Position.” I don’t do this anymore. Instead, I lie. I avoid talking about the knee with beginners. Instead I gloss right over it and move them from the floor to the hip directly.

The knee position is extremely important. It is the part of the lift that will result in a massive generation of power, basically a strong Romanian deadlift with a double knee bend that ends in an explosion. But in the beginning, that is too much information. Beginners overemphasize it and miss the hip altogether. Better to avoid such confusion, given that the hip position is far more important.

Unfortunately, this requires me to lie. Or rather, I lie by omission. Which is just as bad, or maybe worse. After all, anything less than the whole truth is an outright lie in my book. So by this definition, I am not being a good person.

#3 Missing Snatches: Three Strikes Rule

I tell beginners they should live by the “three strikes and you’re out” rule. If you miss three times, you are done. But that is a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of rule.

When I hit a 92kg snatch for the first time it took twenty-one attempts that Monday, about thirty the next day, and then I hit it the first try on the third day. The very next week I hit a 95kg snatch on the first try like it was nothing. I am convinced the excessive number of attempts at the high end were good for me.

But, I would never tell a beginner this story. They aren’t capable of repeating my success – not yet. To take as many misses as I did, you first need to have technique that is far more ingrained and a part of your subconscious, parasympathetic nervous system.

Until then, on every snatch you are unfortunately thinking the way you think when you’re speaking a foreign language that you didn’t learn until you were thirty-three years old. And that means you aren’t ready for this kind of training.

So I lie.

Coaching = Lying

Teaching anything complex requires that you break up the final form into its component parts and get your student to learn those details in a certain and highly specific order. “One thing at a time” is the mantra.

The goal for any coach, then, is to cultivate the ability to keep his/her big mouth shut and avoid the whole truth like the grizzly avoids winter. One must lie, cheat, discombobulate, omit, hide, and even steal from their student as much as they possibly can to ensure the student stays on the path of righteous learning at all cost.

There is no greater sign of a novice coach/teacher than a mouth that cannot keep itself shut. New coaches just love to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This habitual goodness results only in a confused mind within the student and a body that can’t snatch for its life.

In the end, here is the lesson: If you want to be a good coach, accept that you can’t be a good person. You will lie, you will omit, and you will shun the truth. If you don’t, your lifters will fail.

You are the sacrifice burning upon the altar of their success. You will go to Hell so they can taste of Heaven. You will lie so they can live the truth. Welcome to the life of a coach, my friend.

The post The 3 Most Horrifying Lies About the Snatch appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I was coerced to start stalking the websites of a number of CrossFit and other clubs around the country that post what their members are doing in their WODs (Workouts of the Day). Sometimes I was impressed, if for no other reason than the sheer amount of work these people do. (There is no doubt that CrossFitters like to kill themselves with work.)

But I was also dismayed.

How was it possible that grown-assed men who have been doing CrossFit for over three years were struggling to squat sets of five reps with a barbell loaded at only 155lbs? I’m not asking these guys to do what my lifter Brandon can do: seven reps at double bodyweight. That is not realistic for most of us. I also understand there are those folk out there who were blessed with the worst genes for strength. If people look at you and think, “Boy, that guy must be a mathematician,” then maybe a 155lb squat for five reps really is a true accomplishment, and I’ll be the first to congratulate you.

However, mathematician men like this are outliers. The average weight lifted after three years of barbell and free weight training should be far higher. There is simply no excuse for this level of weakness for most men. If you are working toward strength goals and you have gone years without getting significantly stronger, then there are only three possibilities:

1. You are an advanced lifter who is nearing genetic maximum.
2. Your life has been getting in the way of your workouts. (This is a reasonable excuse, it happens to the best of us.)
3. Your routine ain’t workin’.

I’m going to assume number three is the scenario for the purposes of this article.

It Isn’t Just CrossFit

I don’t want to pick on CrossFit too much – they are just the example. I could just as easily pick on nearly every dude and dudette in this country who is lifting weights on a regular basis. CrossFit is simply an easy target because they post everything on the Internet for me to see. They make for a good case study that proves lots of hard work isn’t enough. You need lots of the RIGHT hard work.

I have never met a CrossFitter who didn’t want to get stronger. So let’s stick with our example, accepting that there are plenty of CrossFit clubs and coaches getting their athletes very strong, and that there are even CrossFit members who could care less about being stronger.

Why Strength is Extremely Important for CrossFit

I have a new member of my gym, Nigel. He is a CrossFit competitor who is extremely athletic, has been doing CrossFit for a long time, and wants to take his game to the next level. We talked the other day about getting his deadlift up. He already can deadlift over 425lbs. But that simply isn’t good enough. At the recent competition he did, the workout involved 375lb deadlifts for REPS. Let’s do the math:

375/425 = 88% (ish)

That is, he had to lift 88% of his maximum deadlift for multiple reps. Let me tell you, that is hard. Now, imagine if he increased his 1RM (one rep max) deadlift to 600lbs:

375/600 = 62% (ish)

Now he is only pulling 62% of his maximum! Much, much easier to do for reps.

I’ve discussed in a previous article that CrossFit is a lot like the sport of strongman. It is just the endurance sport version. But don’t let that fool you into thinking strength isn’t highly important for the reason above. Sure, you aren’t pulling 800lbs for reps. But 375 is still a big number.

Strength Is a Skill

It is better to think of gaining strength as more similar to gaining some type of skill – like playing piano – than it is to gaining endurance. Imagine if you were trying to learn how to play piano, but the only time you practiced was as a part of your CrossFit WODs.

5 rounds for time:

20 Burpees

15 Pull Ups

10 Double Unders

5 Piano Drills

That sounds ridiculous to you, I know. Similarly, saying the only time you squat is during your WODs sounds just as ridiculous to me. You need to be rested and ready to be at your best for every “set” of piano practice. The same is true for every set of strength work.

You need a dedicated plan of attack to become a great piano player – one that is the opposite of random. The same is true for strength gaining. Planning, consistency in following the plan, and being in the right state (not exhausted) while going for your heavy sets are a few of the key concepts I teach to the CrossFit athletes I coach.

But there is one lesson that is far more important than all the rest.

The Ultimate Secret Of Strength Training Revealed!

I’m going to tell you the sneakiest of secrets to gaining strength, but I want to make sure you don’t tell anyone else. It’s a secret and it should stay that way. Can I trust you?

To get stronger, you must add weight to the bar.

Now that I’ve said it, I’m going to let you fawn over me and bask in the glory of my magnificence. How profound a thought, this notion of progressive resistance, progressively adding weight against which you resist. I made this up. I am going to copyright it and make millions.

All joking aside, it is amazing this basic fact, THE fact of weight lifting, of strength training of any kind, is completely lost in the clutter of most everyone’s workouts and workout programs. You must add weight to the bar. You must give your body something to adapt to. Without a reason, the body will never get stronger. It is up to you to provide the reason. And, of course, that reason should be heavy.

I feel as though I have fallen into a rant. For that I apologize, but if you learn only one thing let it be to add weight to the bar as often as humanly possible. If you learn a second lesson it is to find a good plan of attack, random ain’t gonna cut it. And if you can hold in your mind a third lesson, it is to be rested before every set – strength training is almost the opposite of conditioning training.

There are exceptions to these rules, but let us not get bogged down by them. Getting lost in superfluous details should be avoided. Implementation is key to everything, and sticking with the basics and working them hard really does work. Don’t let the simplicity fool you.

Now, go lift something heavier than you did yesterday.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Why Adding Weight to the Bar Is the Whole Damned Point appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Sure, you might go get yourself a degree in electrical engineering and make yourself a heck of a lot smarter in certain areas of life. But, sadly, that won’t carry over as much as you’d have liked it to other areas. We are all left totally clueless when it comes to most things. I have a degree in mathematics, I’m a weightlifting coach, and I’m a musician who plays multiple instruments, but I can’t fix your toilet or your car, I can’t work with wood, or really do anything that would be considered a “man skill.”

Fitness is one of those areas where otherwise very bright people can come across as remarkably lost. A person with a law degree can come into the gym and see nothing weird at all about never lifting weights, doing nothing but light jogging on a treadmill for thirty minutes twice a week, never altering their diet other than to add in a lunch time salad, and wondering why they don’t lose weight.

It isn’t their fault. They simply don’t know yet. There was a time we didn’t either. But, now, you and I have edged our way up into the fitness 1% and we can be rather arrogant about the difference between what we know versus the shear ignorance that persists out there among the 99%.

I would love to tell you that we shouldn’t sit around making fun of these people, but today is not that day. There are times in life that your only choice is to laugh: laugh at others.

Today’s case in point is a few moronic fitness devices and trends. Let the games begin.

#1: Treadmill Bike

Running is horrible. I hate it. I’m a weightlifter, I don’t believe in getting my heart rate up. But as much as I hate to run, there is likely only one thing I hate more: running on a treadmill.

At least normally when you run you get to be outside and SEE stuff. But when you run on a treadmill you are stuck watching Court TV, old episodes of General Hospital, or Oprah, because Lord knows that is all that is ever on the big screens at those kinds of gyms that still have treadmills. And the idea of living out the old U2 song Running to Stand Still doesn’t appeal to me.

Thankfully, someone came up with a solution to the boredom problem AND the running to stand still problem. Take the treadmill outside and let it roll, baby! Turn your treadmill into a bicycle and then you can take it on the road and get somewhere, too.

Because riding a bike doesn’t do either of those things, and neither does using your feet to run on the ground.

#2: Gladiatorial Combat

Humans didn’t just magically get dumb in the twentieth century. They have always been dumb. Case in point: gladiatorial combat. Sure, it wasn’t something the masses did to keep themselves in shape. But there is no denying that gladiators were serious athletes whose workouts would be in line with many of the best athletes alive today.

There was only one problem. Their sport required death.

On the upside, they were some of the first athletes in recorded history to do what we’d easily recognize as intense weight training. They did conditioning work that would make CrossFit Games competitors cry. And they had very real incentive to learn the most effective martial arts and self-defense skills.

Of course, the REASON they did all of this was to avoid dying! We humans are more than dumb; we are outright cruel and horrible and have been so often throughout history that it is hard to truly fathom the depths of that horror. Russell Crowe looking hot in a skirt aside, gladiators lived short lives that ended in agonizing deaths. And it was all for the sake of entertainment of the masses.

That was a fitness/sports trend I think we can do without. Unless it is Captain Kirk and Spock fighting to the death over Spock’s betrothed on the planet Vulcan. Then I get it.

#3: The Shake Weight

I really don’t have anything to say about the Shake Weight other than, “Um…” with a long pause and quixotic look on my face. How in the name of Zombie Jesus this device has anyone buying it I don’t know.

My problem with the Shake Weight is that it seems rather tame. Why not go all the way? Why not bring your barbell into an earthquake prone city and snatch while the world crumbles around you? THAT would be shakin’ with some weight!

I really have nothing else to say.

#4: Sanitized Tapeworms

Another blast from the past is the intentional use of tapeworms to help you lose weight. I mean, why bother eating less when you can simply have a little creature-helper in your tummy that steals away the calories for you?

It’s seems like a good idea once you get past the obvious Alien-style creep-out. I love my milkshakes, burgers, and alcohol. And I really have no plans of cutting them out of my diet. Which means if I want to stay lean, I am forced to either eat these tasty goodies less, or find a way of making the calories “not count.”

Tapeworms to the rescue!

Unfortunately, when you have a tapeworm, it doesn’t just steal calories. That little buddy in your belly is also stealing essential nutrients. We call these nutrients essential for what I would presume are obvious reasons.

#5: The Thigh Master

Admit it. We all want to look more like Beyonce – walkin’ on sexy muscular thighs that look as powerful as they are. So a device like the Thigh Master comes along with that blonde chick from Three’s Company squeezin’ and a-flexin’ on the edge of a bed in a headband and knee warmers and there isn’t any way on this earth we aren’t going to buy it.

Unfortunately, the Thigh Master turned out not to be a master of anything, and didn’t even come with a free headband.

The lack of progressive resistance was a rather large oversight on the part of the designers. Which is too bad given how awesome it would be to have the ability to squeeze five hundred pounds between your knees while watching reruns of Xena the Warrior Princess on Netflix, eating a large pizza, and washing it down with a martini in the full knowledge that your tapeworm would take care of it for you.

What was the point of all of that? Nothing! Sometimes you just gotta make fun of other people to feel better about yourself, and I am simply not in the mood to make apologies about that. So there.

The post The Top 5 Stupidest Fitness Ideas in the History of the Universe appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Given all the mass in the ass that he’s built up over his previous year of Olympic weightlifting training it was inevitable – if we’re being honest. The man is now 129 kilos at a height of 6’5”. I don’t know how he will ever safely go to the bathroom again. (Please, don’t tell him I said that, I don’t want to worry the poor guy.)

Weightlifting as an activity works wonders if you suffer from flat-butt syndrome. It builds muscle, speed, coordination, and zaps your metabolism into high gear. It’s darn near the perfect thing for whatever ails you. But weightlifting isn’t just an activity, or collection of exercises. Olympic weightlifting is a sport whose popularity has been skyrocketing over the last decade.

We are creeping up fast toward the Olympics, and whenever this happens the Internet explodes with arguments between the most hardcore fans about what we can do to make sure our athletes do better. The debates always center around the same topic: How do we win more medals? The issue with Olympic weightlifting in America is that we simply aren’t as competitive on the world stage as we’d like to be. In fact, we’re rather low on the totem pole. And we have been for half a century.

How do we change that? Well, that is where you come in. Weightlifting can make you strong enough to bust up your bathroom, but I’m going to argue that now it is your turn to give back to the sport that has given your body so much. Don’t worry. What I ask of you is fun and easy. Unlike your actual weightlifting workouts!

The Biggest Reasons American Weightlifters Aren’t Winning

Arguments on the Internet are almost always pointless. People talk past each other, quibble over meaningless semantic details, and never end up convincing their opponents of anything. I, for one, have little interest in Internet battles – life is complicated enough as it is. What I do care about is the sport of weightlifting and helping it grow and thrive, because it is fun, I think it makes you better person, and it looks damned cool.

As I see it there are only two arguments being put forward about why American’s aren’t kicking butt in weightlifting that are helpful, true on a large scale, and would make any serious difference if changed:

1. American Weightlifters are TOO clean. That is, they don’t use (or rarely use) steroids and other performance enhancing drugs the way their counterparts do in top performing countries.
2. Most Americans who are not weightlifters don’t even know the sport exists, let alone watch it.

All other arguments are subservient to, or subsets of the arguments above. American weightlifting either needs to allow steroids, dramatically increase the number of people who do the sport, or both. Without at least one of those being true, all other arguments lose their meaning.

Laid Back, Sippin’ on GH and Juice

It is a fact that the top lifters in the world are on steroids. It is a pipe dream to pretend we can dominate on the world stage with a “clean” team. We can’t. And we won’t. We might have outliers here and there, genetic freaks who are beyond freaky. But that will be rare, very rare.

We have to make a choice as a society. Do we turn a blind eye to steroid use (like we do in sports we are actually competitive in) so that we can see winners? Or do we aggressively stop lifters from using so we can make sure our lifters are playing by the rules – accepting that they will never (or very rarely) be the best of the best?

As of now, our choice has been the second one. No drugs, no medals. But, we get to take the moral high ground.

That is fine. But if we choose this, we have to be clear the only way we will ever get medals at the Olympics is by finding and cultivating the freakiest of the genetic freaks on the planet. Unfortunately these freaks are rare enough that you’ll need to increase participation in the sport immensely to have any chance at all of even finding them when they are young enough to have a chance.

The More the Merrier

I run an interview show called *Weightlifting Academy* – where I’ve interviewed both of our upcoming female Olympians in the sport, Holley Mangold and Sarah Robles. This show has the expressed goal of putting another 10,000 lifters on the platform by the end of this year. Sure, that’s totally hyperbolic and unrealistic. But I like big goals that force you to strive harder than if you had wimpy smaller goals that allowed you take it easy.

But as big a number as 10,000 is, it is small compared to what we’d actually need in order to find our special genetic freaks who would have a chance at a medal at the Olympics without steroids. We can argue all day about the importance of one training style over another, whether strength or technique is more important, if Russian is better than Bulgarian, or if low hips are better than high hips, but that stuff don’t mean jack if you don’t have enough athletes in the sport to begin with.

With enough drugs, you can get away with fewer total athletes. But if you won’t allow drugs, you need a ton of athletes to filter through to get your diamonds.

Stay Clueless: Lifting is like High School

Being popular is important. Even if all we mean by the word popular is “liked” or “trusted,” some form of popularity is imperative to your success in virtually all endeavors. The same is true for weightlifting.

I didn’t even know the sport of weightlifting existed when I was a kid. If you don’t even know a sport exists, how can you choose that sport? Weightlifting is like the wallflower hiding in the dark at the sports dance, scared to death of anyone noticing it, or worse asking it to shake its muscular hips on the dance floor.

Remember the movie Clueless? The main character Cher took it upon herself – as a challenge – to transform the nerdy girl in school into a popular girl. I see myself like Cher, trying to help bring weightlifting out of the dark and into the arms of a cute guy who wants to dance with it. 

This analogy is getting out of hand, but the point is that if weightlifting is going to ever find enough young athletes to weed through, then it needs to dramatically increase in popularity in some capacity. Given the strangeness of the sport, the best audience for it are always those people who do the snatch and clean and jerk themselves in a recreational way – maybe they don’t even compete, they just do the lifts as a part of their workouts.

In other words, the best audience members for the sport of Olympic weightlifting are people like you and me.

Ask What You Can Do For Weightlifting

It is my job to try and gather more people and bring them into the fold. It is your job to support weightlifters by showing up to their competitions and cheering them on. That’s it. It’s a fun and simple task I ask of you.

If you’d like to see American weightlifters be more dominant in the Olympics, a simple way you can help make that happen is to just show up at local meets in your area, bring your kids, your friends, whoever, and cheer loudly.

And if you need any help finding those meets, ask me. I am here for you.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Lifting In London: Ask Not What Olympic Weightlifting Can Do For You appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

“My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning.” – Pablo Neruda

I’ve been getting back into reading more poetry again. Part of the reason is because I’ve found that reading prose has become impossible, and at times unbearable, with the span of my attention ever shrinking. But the other reason is because I am at a point in my life where returning to basics has become an imperative, and great poetry, like weightlifting, has always been at the core of me, for better or ill.

Lately, the world has been clawing at my life, attempting to tear at its fragile flesh, and has for the most part been succeeding. I’m not unique here, we all face life in the same direction. And I know for every pound of flesh I lose I will regrow double that in its place. Until the day I fall into the void completely.

But I do want to point out the fact that when things get hard in a major way, it is not a bad idea to look deeper within yourself – at the flesh life can’t steal – and find there those things that have always been the best of who you are, still intact, patiently waiting for you to return to them.

For myself, among those things in the protected vault are a few great lines by a few great poets.

Why Poetry Sucks, Except When It’s Awesome

“Come, your answer in broken music; for thy voice is music and thy English broken; therefore, queen of all, Katharine, break thy mind to me in broken English; wilt thou have me?” – William Shakespeare, King Henry V

Poetry is like the wind. Most of the time, it just blows. But every once in a while it can be so powerful it lifts you up into the sky and then slams your ass back down onto the rock so hard that it kills you dead.

By this I mean that most poets are horrible, the worst kinds of writers writing the worst kinds of drivel. However, there is no writing on earth that compares to the best of what is written by the best poets. And this rare collection has always been remarkably important to me.

I am, after all, a true romantic. I believe in the power of the ephemeral, of love, of how words can steal your heart, and how a barbell can steal your soul. The unexplainable reality of intuition, probability, and love has never been in doubt. Sometimes you just get a feeling, one that is true and undeniable, and if you refuse it, you do so at your own peril.

Lamentations: My First Love Lost

“Now a soft kiss – Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.” – John Keats

Twenty-four years ago I wrote my first love letter to my first love – only she was not a woman, and I was certainly not a man. I was a ten-year-old boy, but I wrote with the ferocity of a grown man longing for his grown woman. Years later, she found me and read them aloud while crying, and my shock was not only that she had bothered to keep these letters, but that she was still able to weep over them.

Her tears didn’t fall because my letters were so great, but rather because in spite of the clumsiness of a child attempting to capture the nature of something so far outside the scope of any of us, the attempt was made. That boy loved that girl enough to try.

Those letters were a reminder to us. A reminder of two children who were embarking on a long road that would lead to far greater love, far greater sorrow, and levels of complication that neither of us could have ever imagined back then when we were still hiding from her parents in her backyard trying to steal kisses in the grass.

The letters were a reminder of what was inside of both of us: a capacity for passion most people simply do not have. That capacity cannot be taken away. It is ours. We own it. And it will always be there for us when we need it most.

How Do You Explain Loving A Barbell?

“How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.” – W. B. Yeats

Loving a woman is one thing. Writing to her because you are compelled to express the inexpressible passion she brings forth in you by simply being her beautiful self is the kind of thing you can discuss when it is late, and you are drinking, and your swooning gets the better of you.

But how do you, in polite society, explain that you are madly in love with a long cylindrical object designed to bring you pain? That, my friend, will raise eyebrows, breed indifference and, if you are lucky, get you laughed at.

And yet, I am in love with that damned barbell. Only four years after I wrote my first love letter, I lifted my first bar. I didn’t do much other than curl it, of course. But it moved and it moved me with it.

I can’t explain it, as the process of truly falling in love was organic and there was no singular moment I can look back upon and say, “Yes, that is moment I fell in love with lifting.” Instead, I just did. And it has been one of the only things in my life that I can trust will always be there and will never let me go.

It has a hold on me. And like any other kind of love, there are times when it seems totally ridiculous the things you are willing to do for it and endure for it. But that is all made reasonable when you are mired in your worst moments and you realize you can’t live without it, and that, thank God, you will never have to.

A Workout in Haiku

“Take away love, and our earth is a tomb.” – Robert Browning

Whenever I am in need, I slip back into a very simple routine that is not a routine, as such, but a workout I simply repeat as often as I can. It is basic, it works, and it reminds me of the reasons I fell in love with that damned barbell in the first place: because lifting heavy shit is fun.

1. Behind the neck press to push press: sets of 8
2. Squat (back or front): Sets of 3 to 5
3. Pulls (snatch or clean): Sets of 1 to 3

I start with behind the neck press with the empty bar, and add a small amount of weight each set until it gets to the point where I have to push press it. If I feel feisty I will keep going up push pressing until I get bored or can’t make at least six reps. Or, I stop on the first set I need to push press. (Of course, you could do this in front of the neck just as well.)

Then I take a bit of a break, and start to squat. I choose front or back usually in rotation, or by mood. I don’t have a plan really; I just try to accumulate as many total reps as I can before deciding I’m done, which is determined totally by feel.

Finally, I finish with some pulls. I will do snatch or clean pulls usually, but about once a week I’ll do Romanian deadlifts for sets of five reps. When doing snatch or clean pulls, I rarely lower the weight under control, rather I just drop it. This cuts out the eccentric component – which is where much soreness comes from – and allows me to do them every day if I so choose.

The key is to not care. Your only goal is to be goalless. You are doing this to remind yourself of your love of heavy lifting without pressuring yourself, or the relationship, into being anything more than it can be at the moment.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post A Workout Haiku: Why Getting Back To Basics Can Save You When Life Kicks You In The Ass appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The “work smart, not hard” mentality has become so pervasive in our culture that we have fallen into a trap of believing hard work is not compatible with smart work. You have to choose. They are opposites. Either you work smart and see success OR you work hard like a mindless monkey and kill yourself in the process.

That’s nuts! If you want to reach your goals, and if your goals are big enough to scare you, then you have no choice but to work smart AND hard.

A Quickie Intro to Intensity Zone Training

The body is a highly complex organism, and driving the types of adaptation we are looking for requires that you take a comprehensive approach. You already know your muscles are made up of (in a basic sense) three main muscle fiber types: slow, fast, faster. Training all of them is important.

But there is more to training for weightlifting than the training of your muscles. You also have to worry about things like your central nervous system (CNS), your technique, and your ability to maintain proper technique with heavy weights. Just to name some of the big ones.

Thankfully, as complicated as all of that sounds, we can tackle them all quite well by using a model of training that is sometimes referred to as “Intensity Zone Training.” At it’s most basic, you intentionally do work at all of the major areas of intensity (or “hardness”): heavy weights, medium weights, and light weights.

What I’m going to show you is *my own adaptation* of something that is rather standard in sports science:

• Zone I: 90% of your one rep max (1RM) or higher.
• Zone II: between 70% and 89% of your 1RM
• Zone III: between 50% and 69% of your 1RM
• Zone IV: below 50% of your 1RM

Different coaches and scientist use different percentages, names, etc. But that isn’t the point. The point is you can split up the work you do into different zones that each address different aspects of your training.

Zone I is the most sport specific in weightlifting, and training in this zone is highly important. However, it is also taxing on both the CNS and the muscles and joints, so you can’t spend as much time here as you can in other zones.

Zone II is where most of your serious strength work is going to take place. Sets of three to five reps make a lot of sense here.

Zone III is where much of your baseline technical work will be done, speed training, and even endurance work. (What kind of work is being done is highly dependent on your rep ranges, rest intervals, and other factors.)

Zone IV is not used all that often outside of warm ups, and early beginner technical learning. That said, there are times when work with an empty bar will do you a lot of good.

Based upon this information, we can devise a snatch workout that will make you stronger, faster, less injury prone, and more technical all at the same time. And it will allow us to increase your total workload – thereby increasing your rate of progress – without being stupid about it.

Your Compound Interest Snatch Workout

What I’m about to show you isn’t the whole workout, it’s just the base for your “work smart and hard” snatch workout:

• 1RM in Zone I
• Hvy 3 in Zone II
• 2×5 in Zone III

Definitions:

When I say “1RM,” or one rep max, I do NOT mean the heaviest lift you ever made. I don’t even mean the heaviest lift you can make that day. I DO mean the heaviest lift you can make with GREAT form. If the form breaks down, but you still make the lift, that is what I’d call an “ugly make.” It’s a make, but it was ugly, and you will pay for it. Literally, that’s the whole point of this workout, as you’re going to see.

The term “Hvy 3” means “heavy 3 reps,”but not maximum. You ramp up from 70%, but you don’t go to the point of missing your third rep. These should look very good.

Adding Interest

Let’s jump into the fun part!

When going for your 1RM, you won’t always make a lift look pretty. Sometimes you will miss reps. Don’t fret. That’s okay. On a bad day, you will miss your first attempt in Zone I and decide that is enough. Other days you will be chasing a PR attempt, and make a number of misses. Both of these days are part of the process. What matters is how we adjust what we do with your Zone II work based upon what happened during your work in Zone I, and how we adjust your Zone III work based on what happened in Zone II.

Your Compound Interest Rules:

1. For every miss or ugly make in Zone I, you owe me one extra set of three reps in Zone II.
2. For every miss or ugly make in Zone II, you owe me one extra set of five reps in Zone III.

A seemingly odd thing about this kind of workout protocol is that on days where you are “on” and your lifts at the top end (i.e., in Zone I) look the best, you will end up doing less (rather than more) total work for the day in terms of reps. But you will likely have gone higher up in weight on your 1RM. This is part of the ebb and flow I’m looking for.

An Example Snatch Workout

Nothing beats an example when you’re trying to make something clear. Here’s a hypothetical example of a workout for a relatively new female lifter who snatches 100 pounds. (I know – it’s extremely rare that I write weights down in pounds!) Also, note I am not writing down warm up reps, but obviously some of those are playing a role in your adaptation process.

Zone I

• 90 x 1
• 92 x 1
• 94 x ugly make
• 94 x 1
• 96 x miss

Done. Made three solid reps in Zone I, and owes me two triples in Zone II.

Zone II

Start by dropping down to 70%, and then work up in sets of three reps until you hit your Hvy 3. THEN do your additional sets starting back at 70% again. (I have lifters who start closer to their Hvy 3, because of experience, etc., but I want you to get the extra volume in if you can help it.)

• 70 x 3
• 75 x 3
• 77 x 3
• 80 x 2 + one ugly make
• 70 x 3
• 70 x 3

Done. She made some great lifts, but her last rep at 80 was ugly. She owes me one extra set of 5 reps in Zone III.

Zone III

• 50 x 5
• 55 x 5
• 50 x 5

Your last sets in Zone III shouldn’t feel brutally heavy. Instead they should be *brutally perfect*! Go for the best technique, speed, and awesomeness that you can muster.

Extras

If you are missing more than two or three times in Zone I, you are finished. Don’t allow more than two ugly makes at most in any Zone. Avoid misses like the plague. But, don’t freak out if they happen, simply adjust the workout. If you are having a really bad day, then drop the extra sets. Don’t be fanatic or dogmatic about it.

Your goal with the compound interest sets is to fix what caused you to miss in the first place, NOT to kill yourself.

I want you to work harder, and this workout has FAR more reps and sets than most people would ever assume is necessary. And yet that total number of reps is quite in line with what the best lifters are doing, and how they became the best lifters in the first place.

That said, I also want you to work smarter, and having a program that adjusts by design (similar to how a coach would adjust you if you had one) can go a long way toward increasing your rate of progress. Work smart. Work hard. Have fun. Nothing magical about it.

The post The Compound Interest Snatch Workout: How To Train Hard And Smart At The Same Time appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I’m sitting here being stared at by a lion wearing eyeliner. His eyes are rather piercing and if he was anything more than a mural I’d be quite afraid for my life. He adorns the wall of my favorite bar for writing. I get some of my best work done under his gaze.

I am here often enough that all of the waitresses know me by name and know what I’m drinking. They also know what I do for a living, and why I spend so much time typing away on my pink iPad. I’ve become a bit of a fascination, and apparently a bit of an inspiration for at least one of them.

One of the waitresses who I’ll call Nicky (for purely narcissistic reasons) came up to me tonight and asked me how got started as a writer. She said she was thinking about submitting some articles to a travel magazine and wondered if I had any pointers about becoming a better and more successful writer and blogger.

Anatomy of a Writer

“If you had to pick one thing to tell me about what it takes to be a successful writer, what would it be?” she said.

“Just one?” I responded.

“Yes, I know you’re busy. You only need to tell me one,” she said, and added with a smile, “I’ll bug you about other ones tomorrow.”

I didn’t have to think that hard. The answer was obvious to me. I told her, “Write every day. Period.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I was writing everyday for five years before anyone knew my name.”

“You wrote everyday for five years?!” her face looked astounded.

“I have been writing nearly everyday for seven years, Nicky. It’s just that for only two of those has anyone known who the Hell I am.”

“Damn. You know, that’s really good advice.”

Her reaction was rare. Most of the time when I tell someone this they look horribly disappointed. They’d prefer I told them something sneaky, some trick that was a secret only the successful knew about and were hoarding for themselves.

There are no secrets. You already know what to do. The question – the only question worth asking – is whether you will actually do it.

Most won’t.

Prince Knows Practice

I’m a musician, and I used to spend a lot of my evenings playing live in shadowy rooms to shadowy audiences. On one of these nights, after I got off stage and was sitting at the bar with a friend, I saw a tall brunette with dark eyeliner wearing nothing but spiked heels, a black mini skirt, and electric blue bra walking intently toward me.

I looked up and gave her a bit of coy smile as if to acknowledge her approach. She smiled back and picked up her pace. Before she opened her mouth to speak, I said, “Nice shirt.”

She laughed, and said, “Want to trade?”

It turned out I was completely topless save for a pink feather boa. I was younger then, and a bit flamboyant, to say the least.

“Not a chance,” I said, “This is mine, and you can’t have it.”

Quickly getting to her point, she asked, “How do you do that?”

“How do I do what?” I asked, genuinely thinking she was talking about my ability to make superior fashion choices.

“Play like that?” she did a little air-guitar, “I’ve been practicing, but I’ll never be as good as you. You’re really talented.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

“What doesn’t?”

“That you’ll never be as good as me. It’s very hard to know something like that in the beginning.”

She looked puzzled, “I don’t know. I’ve been practicing a lot lately and I’m not even close to you.”

“When did you start playing, and what do you mean by ‘a lot’?” I asked.

“I started six months ago, and I play about an hour a day, three times a week.”

I laughed. Very loudly. So loudly I felt bad about it.

“I’ve been playing for almost ten years. When I started out, for over two years, I played about six to eight hours a day, every day. I’d even skip school to play. I didn’t hang out with friends. I even lost a job over it,” I said.

“Jesus.”

“And then, as if that wasn’t enough, one day I heard that Prince wrote a song a day. So I decided I had to do the same thing. And I’ve been doing that every day since.”

“How do you stay motivated to do that?” She asked.

“That’s a horrible way to think about it,” I said, “I simply see it as what I do, who I am. I don’t think too hard about it. I just decided that musicians play, and I’m a musician, so I play. What else would I do?”

Lift or Die

My worldview on success – applied to weightlifting and everything else – has been fundamentally shaped by the fact that I am a musician, a mathematician, and a writer. These are areas where more practice is always better. You can’t over train in any serious sense with any of them.

When it comes to weightlifting and strength training, clearly there are upper limits that have to be abided by. But the likelihood you are ever going to hit that wall is rather low. (I push my own athletes right up into the wall on a regular basis on purpose, but the work it takes to do that is far beyond what most people believe is even possible.)

The real concern is your basic mindset regarding success.

Most beginners drastically underestimate the amount of work it took for successful athletes to get to where they are – and they tend to attribute their success to talent, or steroids, or magic. Beginners also tend to drastically overestimate the amount of work they are currently doing.

If you ever hope to be great at anything then you have to put in an immense amount of work for a very long time. There is no other way except in the most rare of circumstances. But that can be psychologically daunting to think about.

My solution is to accept that writers write, musicians play, and lifters lift. That’s what they do. There is no other option. You don’t need to over think it or look for magic secrets.

Lift because that is what you do; it is who you are. You are someone who goes to the gym and grabs the barbell and does some yelling.

It is your only choice.

The post Lift Like It’s Your Only Choice – Because It Is appeared first on Breaking Muscle.