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1. DO NOT buy any books or manuals that tell you how to lose fat, you don’t need them. If you already have, then you will be better served eating them for their fiber content than actually following them.

2. DO follow a training program that uses compound movements (squatting, deadlifting, presses, Olympic lifts) with progressively heavier weights. You must train hard in order to stimulate the anabolic hormones in your body. When you train this way muscle magically appears and the body uses a tremendous amount of calories; two very important factors involved with losing fat. (Try Bill Star’s 5×5 workout.)

3. DO eat 6-8 times a day.

4. DO include a protein with each meal that either walks, flys, or swims. (no F$%@ing vegetable products unless you have the metabolism of a beef cattle.) Protein meals elevate metabolic rate.

5. Do include a low glycemic carb with every meal (less than 70 GI), This keeps insulin levels in check.

6. DO include a good fat with every meal (olive, high oleic safflower, CLA, flaxseed oil, ect.) This will further reduce your insulin response.

7. DO include a soluble fiber with every meal. This will lower the GI.

So to sum it up train hard and eat like an athlete, not a yoga instructor!

–
Fight to your very last breath!

-sw-

Tags: Rants by Sean
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I cant tell you how many times I have heard certain coaches rationalize not using particular barbell exercises such as the squat or power clean because the were dangerous. I will say this, judging from some of the videos I have seen of their athletes lifting, there 100% correct. What they had them doing was absolutely dangerous however none of it resembled a squat or power clean.
Program design is the easy part of coaching beginning, intermediate, or untrained athletes. Anybody who passed the CSCS or reads a book on periodization could write a program. However that program will not work if the exercises are not performed with efficient technique. If you could teach an athlete just to squat correctly, they would be better off then implementing some elaborate program with dozens of exercises performed incorrectly.

With any trade there are particular skill sets that are required in order to do the job properly. Just because somebody doesn’t know how to do what’s needed, doesn’t care to do what’s needed, works for a company that doesn’t support what’s needed, or cant figure out how to make money doing what’s needed, doesn’t mean they should do things poorly. Where is the fucking integrity?

This seems to be really prevalent in strength and conditioning. You would never see a doctor who is scheduled to perform a double bypass decide to do a teeth whitening instead because he didn’t feel like going to school the day they were teaching heart surgery. Then, have the balls to tell the patient that teeth whitening is the future of bypass surgery! So why are so called Strength Coaches allowed to do this to their athletes? It’s our responsibility as coaches to know how to do and to teach the exercises that our athletes need. Don’t make the excuse that you are 20 years ahead of the science of training to justify some bullshit training methodology just because you figured out how to make money doing it.

When somebody pays money to a coach, they trust that you are doing everything you can do to help them meet their performance goals. They trust that you are a professional who took the time to hone their craft. Not some snake oil salesman only interested in forwarding their agenda. How would you feel if you spent your hard earned money on a diamond and it turned out to be a petrified piece of shit? Probably the same way you would feel if you hired a strength coach and got a glorified personal trainer with a fear of science, a big mouth, and a bad attitude.

Fight to your very last breath!

-wax-

Tags: Rants, Training Articles by Sean
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In athletes other than Weightlifters, I use both the Olympic and Power Squat. Because of the mechanics of the Power Squat, I like to use it for supplemental posterior chain work, with athletes suffering with knee tendonitis and/or an injury the medial structures of the knee. However, the majority of the Back Squatting volume in my training comes from the Olympic Squat. It is true the Power Squat will allow you to squat more weight however, more is not always better. Is a 700lb Back Squat going to help you more than a 500lb Back Squat? In the sport of Powerlifting it most certainly will, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to improved performance in other sports. Sport is not about maximal force development. It is about maximal rate of force development. Once my athletes reach a particular squat weight (between 2-3 times bodyweight calculated as a function of body weight and the physical demands of the particular sport), I maintain their strength levels while switching the training focus to generating force quickly. I use the Olympic lifts to accomplish this because they do it better than any other exercise. It would seem foolish to spend valuable training time continually getting an athlete stronger if the strength gained cannot be utilized on the field of play. A 700lb squat doesn’t mean shit if you’re a statue!

BETTER!

The Olympic Squat provides many benefits for athletes that the Power Squat does not. Here is my top three:
• The Olympic Squat adheres to the normal anatomical function of the joints.
• The Olympic Squat distributes the load evenly between the knee and hip joints.
• The Olympic Squat promotes flexibility in the ankle and hip joints.

In reality, because of the “functional training” plague that has swept through the Strength and Conditioning world, if a coach has an athlete squatting with a barbell at all regardless of style, it is better than the circus acts the pariahs masquerading as Strength Coaches are pawning off to their athletes as strength development. For those of you that understand the value of the squat and use it as an integral part of strength development, I salute you. If you are a “functional” clown please continue using your revolutionary, 20 years ahead of the science exercises with your athletes. The rest of us enjoy watching our athletes continually help yours off the ground, brushing the dirt off of their backs and sending them on their merry way.

I had a bad training day today. I needed to vent!

Fight to your very last breath!

-sw-

Tags: Training Articles by Sean
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Keep A Training Log

What the hell does writing stuff down have to do with getting stronger unless of course you are writing it on big stone tablets?

Most things we write down are reminders of what we did in the past so we can figure out what to do or not to do in the future. The beauty of training for a sport like Weightlifting, is we have a general idea how things will turn out. If you start at the right age, show good physical attributes, have a good coach, and don’t beat up five security guards, get your ribs broken by the cops, get locked up for three days, lift with broken ribs until you piss blood and have to take a month off, you will likely be able to at least reach the qualifying totals for Nationals in a predictable time period. The qualifying totals are well known so the planning of training has a definitive end point. A coach can work backwards from that point and based on the athletes’ ability, can determine roughly what and how long it will take to meet the desired goal.

Now I know this is a very simplistic overview of periodization however, this exactly how it works. In between your first day in the gym and the day you actually qualify for what ever it is you are training for (macrocycle), there will be a series of sequential plans (mesocycles). The planning of these mesocycles will be determined by the results of subsequent mesocycles. All the alterations made will be done so with one eye on the desired end result and the other on the past results. In other words if you don’t know what worked or didn’t work to get you to where you are, then how are you going to know what to do or not to do to get you to where you want to be?

Is thirty days of keeping a training log enough information to make you stronger in thirty days, perhaps not however, you have to start somewhere. And eventually those first 30 days turn into 330 days and now you have what to work with.

Some sample training logs:

Next up…Eat More!

Fight until your very last breath!

-sw-

Tags: Training Articles by Sean
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Andy is the head coach at the Olympic Training Center in Northern Michigan. We were training partners for a few years in the 90’s. He was a great training partner. We had a great team at that time; Andy, Mark Cannella, Francisco Coello, JP Nicoletta, John Garhammer, Timmy Chin, Diana Fuhrman, Leslie Musser, Thienan Nguyen, Joe Carbone, and Emmy Vargus. And the warden of that insane asylum was Bob Takano

Our entire lives, for many years revolved around only one thing, finding ways to Snatch and Clean and Jerk more weight. When we weren’t training we were talking about training or watching training videos. We were always together.

It was an amazing (or some would say crazy) time in my life and I’m a better man because I had the opportunity to share that experience with Andy and the rest of the freak show.

Thank you for the memories!

News Clip Of How Andy Tysz Is Making America Strong!

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I was fortunate to have my own column in Muscle and Fitness called “Power and Strength” for almost two years. They let me write about whatever I wanted to (most of the time.) They also allowed me to act as the technical adviser on the photo shoots so the exercises looked correct.

In this article the model never performed an Olympic lift. I had to put him into the correct positions. Unfortunately, the editorial staff didn’t use the pictures I would of liked. In the first picture I would of liked to have seen a picture used that had his knees back a bit more and his shoulders ahead of the bar. But otherwise I think it was a fairly good representation of the lift.
I hope you enjoy it.

The Hang Power Clean

-sw-

Tags: Sean in the Media by Sean
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We live in a world of instant gratification. Where patience and progressive development are thought of as archaic concepts. We want it, and we want it now. The world of sports is not immune to this ugly reality. Coaches are constantly being fired for not producing championships right away. Teams mortgage their future and trade away their prospects for more seasoned players so they can win right now. There is one thing we can learn from the results of this attitude towards development; it doesn’t work. There are no short cuts to sustained success.

“A Journey of a thousand miles starts with one step”
Lao-tzu, the first philosopher of Chinese Taoism

The worlds of Strength & Conditioning and Weightlifting have had this instant gratification attitude creep into the depths of its psyche. Strength and Weightlifting Coaches have become fixed on the outcome and have forgotten about the process.
A coach is a teacher. We are not teaching our athletes how to find the coefficient of restitution for balls dropped from a height of 72 inches however, much like the aforementioned biomechanics problem, we are teaching them how to properly and effectively reach the correct solutions for their physical problems. The most effective method for solving any complex problem, is to identify the desired end result, then determine what steps are needed in order to reach said result. This goes for any problem, whether you are trying to figure out how high a ball is going to bounce after you drop it or how to get an athlete stronger and more powerful.
Putting a bar in an athlete’s hand and telling them to lift it with out proper instruction is not teaching; it’s butchery.

Proper athletic development is a process that not only takes time to occur but also takes a skilled coach to implement. The questions then become, what is the correct process and what is a skilled coach.

The Correct Process

Some definitions first:
Process- A series of actions or steps taken to achieve a particular end.
Series- A number of events of a similar kind or related nature
coming one after another.
If we combine these two terms we get: A process is a number of events of a similar kind or related nature coming one after another to achieve a particular end.
This is in essence what the process of proper athletic development should be. An athlete comes to you with a particular goal or “end.” It is then up to you to guide them thru the proper steps so that they achieve the desired goal.
Volumes have been written on the different types of systems that can be used for developing athletes. Unfortunately, this information has gone largely unread or ignored by many coaches involved in Olympic Weightlifting and Strength and Conditioning even at the highest levels. However, the scope of this discussion is not what system works best, but what part of the system is often overlooked.

Development in Olympic Weightlifting

I have been involved in Olympic Weightlifting as an athlete and coach for over seventeen years. I can say unequivocally that the VAST MAJORITY of the athletes I have seen have correctable technical flaws in their lifting technique that go uncorrected. More disturbing, many of these athletes have been taught incorrectly by so called qualified coaches. It doesn’t matter if you have comprised your training program using the NASA supercomputer, or had you’re equipment forged by the same craftsman that made Thor’s Hammer, if your athletes are not efficient with their lifting movements, you are depriving them of the full benefit weight training provides as well as increasing their chances of injury.

JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN, DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD

The ultimate goals of a Strength Coach and a Weightlifting Coach are the same, to elicit the best possible performance from their athletes. In Weightlifting it is seemingly easier to determine what a coach is doing is working. If your athlete lifts more than the next guy/gal, what ever you are doing is working. Lets examine this rational. According to this approach, whoever is on the medal stand at the National Championship or qualifies for an international team must have the best coach. This is not necessarily so if you take into consideration the genetic potential of the athlete. I will make the assumption that the genetics of the population of this continent are not dramatically different than those of other continents. Therefore the genetic potential of the US population is at least as great as other populations. However, as a country we do not perform anywhere near the level of other countries, and haven’t for quite some time. Than why is it our best athletes, who possess the same genetic potential as their international cohorts, cant compete at the international level? The first thing people look to is drugs. There is no doubt that drugs play a role in the landscape of Weightlifting. Would a systemized drug program propel us to the top of the Weightlifting world? The answer is absolutely no! Drugs will not solve the three most important and overlooked variables as it relates to Weightlifting success
1. The program design used to develop juniors
2. The loading parameters used on juniors.
3. Technical efficiency of the lifters.
These variables are being missed used due to lack of understanding of the process of proper athletic development. Many coaches in this country lack the physical science background that is required to understand the physiological effects training stress has on the biological and mechanical systems of the body. Couple that with inability to discern between proper and improper technique, and it is no surprise we perform as we do.

Program design and loading parameters
It first takes years of training with progressively higher volumes with sub maximal loads, using not only the classical Olympic lifts but basic weight training movements as well, to effect the necessary changes in the connective/muscle tissue and endocrine system needed to withstand the training loads required to excel at the highest levels of sport. It can take four or more years to elicit the changes needed in order to move on to more specialized training. This crucial phase of development is called the Process of Achieving Sports Mastery or PASM..It is in this phase, the athlete “trains to get into shape to be able to train.” A wide variety of exercises should be implemented at low to moderate intensities. During this time the classical lifts and their variations are taught and perfected as well. The exercise distribution over the PASM period should start with a predominance of strength exercises (roughly 75%) such as squatting variations, pressing variations, pulling/posterior chain variations, as well as specific wrist, elbow, rotator cuff, and ankle exercises. During this time the athlete should be taught how to perform the Olympic lifts. The distribution of Olympic lifts in the beginning of the PASM period should be roughly 25% of the overall volume. This 75%-25% ratio should gradually begin to flip flop thru out the four year PASM period culminating with an athlete that is prepared to handle much a much higher training load (intensity x volume).
Two things should occur during this PASM period if the training is implemented properly. First, as mentioned earlier, the athletes physiology will change. Their muscles will be strong and balanced. Their bones will have thickened. Their actual connective tissue will have strengthened along with where it attaches on the bone. Their work capacity would have improved to the point where they would to be able to handle and recover from more intense training load.

Technical efficiency of the lifter

Second, the athlete will have created a “habit” According to motor control research; it takes approximately ten thousand repetitions of a movement to create a consistent, unconscious movement pattern. Over the four years the athlete will have completed approximately ten-thousand reps in the Olympic lifts and three or more times that in the strength movements. Their technique in all movements should be biomechanical efficient and consistent. At this point there should be little or no technical deviation on lifts in the upper intensity ranges.
However, if you examine the developmental method used by many Weightlifting coaches, it expresses none of the characteristics of PASM. Instead coaches rush their unprepared, under trained athletes to the competition platform. These athletes are often weak, unbalanced, underweight, and technically inefficient. Because of this poor implementation of PASM, athletes are not developing past their first 4-6 years of training. This is often due to the accumulation of chronic injuries, or they become limited by the biomechanical flaws in their lifting technique.

Next up: Athletic development in Strength and Conditioning… Where we are getting it wrong

-sw-

Tags: Training Articles by Sean
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I wanted to do my part to help Strength Coaches who prescribe to the “Functional Training” dogma get out of the darkness and step into the light… To drop their balls and pick up a bar… To stop balancing and start squatting (and that doesn’t mean Split Squatting Mr. Boyle.)

I will lead them down a 9 step re-enlightment process. Not unlike the experience Castaneda had with Don Juan. I want to help free them from their ordinary reality which has been pounded into their awareness ever since they purchased their first Bozu ball. I will attempt to open their doors of perception and lead them towards the non-ordinary reality which will indeed be radically different from their ordinary reality they have experienced as part of their unfortunate social conditioning.
Without anymore hesitation, lets begin!

1st step towards re-enlightenment: Physical Therapy protocol provides a training stimulus, which restores normal movement and function, which has been threatened by injury.

2nd step towards re-enlightenment: Strength and Conditioning protocols are designed to enhance normal movement and function in order to improve athletic attributes such as power, and strength.

3rd step towards re-enlightenment: You cannot train a health athlete using Physical Therapy protocol and expect to maximize athletic attributes.

4th step towards re-enlightenment: High repetition, low intensity training is not optimal for developing strength and power.

5th step towards re-enlightenment: The optimal rep range for developing strength and power is between 3-5 reps.

6th step towards re-enlightenment: The body is one unit that is comprised a linked system of interactive muscle groups.

7th step towards re-enlightenment: The most effective exercises to develop strength and power are Squatting, Pulling, and the Olympic lifts!
(I know this is where I am going to loose some of you however, this is not my opinion. This statement has been proven to be true and the results are reproducible using real scientific method, not bullshit psudo-science.)

8th step towards re-enlightenment: Squatting, Pulling, and the Olympic Lifts require the entire body to act as one complete unit.

This concludes the eighth step of the journey. One more to go! It will all be clear in the end.

Until next time!

-sw-

Tags: Training Articles by Sean
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