This past June, I went to Russia for the IPF raw world championships. I met one of the Austrian lifters in the 120kg class — Alex. He was a real nice guy and we had a good chat about training and such. Fast forward until a few weeks ago. Alex emailed me to let me know he would be on a road trip and they would be passing through my neighborhood. So they stopped by yesterday and we trained. It was really cool to have a training partner, even if we did tend to chat too much between sets.

One of the things we talked about was the feeling you get after going to a big competition. For both of us, it’s this imperative feeling that you MUST train more. You MUST find a way to get better. In lots of ways, it makes the obsession deeper. It’s a reality check of sorts. “Hey, there are plenty of other strong folks out there. I better get back to work!” Speaking for myself, it makes me want to train more, train harder, and basically pour more effort into perfecting this craft. Read more…

When an athlete approaches me for coaching, I have a big task on my hands. There is a lot of information I have to gather about them so I can write the most effective training programs possible. For each athlete, there are many small details that affect the way they will respond to training and my job as a coach is to find out what those details are and address them in training.

Since I conduct the majority of my coaching via email, I have developed some specialized questionnaires to help me extract these details about each new athlete. I then pair that with the general knowledge base I have built and the results speak for themselves.

But how can you as a powerlifter do this for yourself? How do you get a training program tuned in to your body’s unique responses? Fortunately for you, you have much of the information you need already. Many lifters who are in the intermediate and above stages of powerlifting will already know many nuances of how they respond to training as well as the fundamentals of how a powerlifting training program should work; things like having adequate recovery, training with low reps, etc. Read more…