Home Gym on a Budget
By John Garafano, 16 March 2020
While it may be great to have an expensive power rack with lots of add-ons, various specialty bars, and numerous name-brand machines in your home gym, the fact is that many people have built their elite-level strength on very minimal equipment setup. Try to resist the urge when first putting together a home gym to want to buy ‘everything’ and ‘the best’. Just know that over time, you can build your home gym up while you collect equipment (and pay less since you can buy used or take advantage of yearly sales). If you are a powerlifter, you can get by on this minimal setup:
Optimize Your Training Paradigm to Optimize Gains
By Mark Robb 02 February 2019
In the quest for strength, it seems that I (we) sometimes lose sight of the big picture, and the importance of various factors unconsciously shifts, without notice. This may not be an issue for some, but I think that I can safely theorize that anyone that is goal driven, that has numbers in mind, is susceptible to what I’m about to explain. If you’re a competitive athlete, this probably includes you.
Read more…Self-Organizing Technique
By Mike Tuchscherer 19 November 2018
We all want athletes to have the proverbial “perfect technique”. Some astute coaches even say “THEIR perfect technique” – to emphasize that “perfect” is relative to the individual athlete. But how do we get there?
Why Skipping The Wave-Load Might Be Useful
So I’ve been talking about Emerging Strategies for a while now. If you’re not sure what that is, you’ll want some background before proceeding. I suggest this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdGP120e4B0
Naturally, a question to arise from a concept such as ES is something like, “Which is better, ES or a more traditional approach?” Of course if I’m advocating for an ES model, then that’s my answer. But I also think that it depends on what you mean by “better”.
Peaking with Emerging Strategies
IPF Classic Worlds 2018 is underway in Calgary. We have 16 lifters competing this year — a point of pride among RTS coaches and athletes. As such, this seems like an ideal time to write in a bit more detail about how we taper for competition.
Emerging Evidence For Recovery Techniques
I recently came across this review article: https://www.
I quickly noted that they ranked massage as one of the best recovery modalities around. And if course then I remembered that I wrote an article last year saying that (n=1) I got no real results from it. You can read that article here: https://articles.
Leadership, Relationship, Creativity
By Mike Tuchscherer 2 April 2018
There are no magic programs. Coaching is about a lot more than writing a good program. Of course writing a good program as part of being a good powerlifting coach especially in an online setting but to think that there is just writing the program is to misunderstand the process and to do a serious disservice to all the clients who put their trust in you. Read more…
Custom Training in The Face of Athletic Adaptation
By Mike Tuchscherer 07 March 2018
Many of us treat “what works for you” like a math problem and it’s not. If I ask you “What is 247*53”, you likely don’t know the answer right off the top of your head. But with a little calculation, you can pretty easily figure out that the answer is 13091. Now if I ask you again “what is 247*53”, you don’t need to go through the same steps. You just remember that the last time the answer worked out to be 13091 and assume it’s the same answer this time. And as long as you did the math right, that’s a good assumption to make. It saves you time.
Why I Don’t Use Prilepin’s Chart
By Mike Tuchscherer 28 February 2018
Bottom line up front: It wasn’t developed for Powerlifters and will have limited direct applicability. A much better way is to extract the useful information from it and apply the principles rather than the chart directly.
The Effect of Fatigue in Training
By Mike Tuchscherer 14 February 2018
Bottom line up front: measuring fatigue helps you make useful training choices, but will not help you to decide whether to go for a PR or not. Read more…