EliteFTS Boston Seminar Notes by Joe Trinsey

Monday, September 15th, 2008 | General | 455 Times Read

So after a hellacious 15 hours of total time on a Greyhound bus, almost no sleep and being terrified that Dave Tate was going to eat me (luckily I was apparently too small to be a decent meal for him) I made it back from the best learning experience I’ve ever been a part of.

The seminar took place at Total Performance Sports up in Boston. The first thing that jumps out at you is the gym. You can tell right when you walk in that this gym is all about serious athletes. There’s no chrome, no thigh abductor machine and the only mirror in the place was in the bathroom… which was about as big as a phonebooth. What they did have was every piece of equipment you could possibly want to get strong. Glute-hams, reverse hypers, a monolift and even a platform for loading Atlas stones; you name it they had it. Then the four presenters came in: Dave Tate, Jim Wendler, Marc Bartley and Matt Kroczaleski. The achievements of those four stand on their own as qualifications: they have all squatted over 900 in competition and have spent their lives training themselves and others. So when they spoke, I listened.

The seminar was designed to share their knowledge gained through experience with the attendees. It was all practical in nature. As Dave Tate said very early on, “We’re not going to tell you guys anything you can just look up in Supertraining.” And that was the truth, very little theory was discussed, it was all practical and application-based. All four of the presenters were knowledgeable, motivational and hilarious, especially Wendler. I have a whole bunch of random notes but they may not be that coherent since I was listening so intently I forgot to take notes sometimes. Anyways, heres some of the stuff I wrote down:

-Until you’re squatting 5 or 6 hundred pounds, you don’t have weakpoints, you’re just weak. So just focus on total body strength.

-Find the similarities, not the differences between knowledgeable coaches (been preached many times but worth repeating until the cows come home)

-One of the best ways to pack on muscle is to get up in the middle of the night and down a high-calorie snack or shake. It sucks at first but your body will get used to it.

-The basic progression is from RE to ME to DE work. You’re not ready to lift heavy weights until you get used to going to failure or close to failure with lighter weights and you learn how to strain. You’re not ready for explosive lifting until you learn how to engage all your motor units with heavy lifting. And if you’re weak, strength work will get you more explosive anyway.

-In general, eat enough fat and protein (not as much as you think you need) as you need, and fill the rest of your calorie intake with carbs. I wouldn’t have taken them for diet gurus, but Matt Kroc is ripped and Dave Tate is approaching 5% body fat so they’re not talking out of their ass. Bartleyon the other hand haha…

They talked a LOT about the mental side of training, I forget how it started but somehow a 40-50 minute dialogue between the presenters got started about attitude and mentality of training…
-Past the beginning state, 99% of the work you do will be futile, but you have to be ready to bring your best to the gym (training ground, court, etc.) to be ready for that 1% that pays off.

-Be your own toughest critic; so many guys can look at another person training or look at their program and see what they’re doing wrong, yet they make the same mistakes in their own training.

-Have the attitude that you MUST keep setting records in the gym. This doesn’t have to be max-effort work because obviously at a certain point that will stall. You can get higher rep PR’s just on sheer will alone.

-Look at where you want to be in the long-term, then start working backwards, ie: think of where you want to be in 5 years, then think of where you need to be in a year to be on pace for that, then think of where you need to get to in the next three months or so.

-”Be a trailblazer, not a follower.” forget what this was in reference too, but it’s inspirational nonetheless haha

-”No excuses, find a way to make it work.” And as Wendler is fond of putting it, “If your coach doesn’t play you, it’s because you suck.”

-If you keep asking other people for solutions, you’ll never be able to train properly. Likewise, if you bounce from program to program because you stagnated, your training will always be limited. Learn to continually make tweaks yourself and figure out what works and doesn’t work. Haphazard change gives you no information as to what works and doesn’t.

-You have to constantly focus on technique, with every exercise. Even something simple and “pointless” like curls is a chance to improve your muscle and motor control. On the big exercises like squats, it’s ESSENTIAL you keep working and working on technique.

-The MOST important training rule: be consistent. There are tons of guys who have no clue about the science behind training, they just show up and work hard for a while and get big and strong.

-For a beginner, pick somebody’s workout (whether it’s Westside or another template) and keep that template for a while. Start changing one or two things every once in a while and in a few years you will have your own customized training program. If you keep switching templates you’ll never develop this.

-In general, a beginner needs more and an advanced athlete needs less.

-Go ahead and overtrain, when you’re young and a beginner you can get away with training “mistakes” because you aren’t capable of stressing your body enough. You will find out what your body is capable of this way.

-”If you want to be where somebody is, do what they did to get there.”

-Find your indicators. That’s how you learn to program training. The presenters all spent a few minutes talking about various lifts or exercises that were indicators for them, ie, “If I can do 95 pounds on the back raise for 5 sets of 10, I know I can squat 900 pounds.”

-Give something time. You have to let any new element in your training stay in there for 8 weeks or so before you can tell if it’s worthwhile or not.

-Don’t miss lifts. This doesn’t neccessarily apply to beginners, who need to learn to strain and to find their limits, but for a more advanced lifter (remember this is in their context…), consistently missing in training can lead to overtraining and also set up negative pathways. It’s better to go a little lighter and smoke the weight then to go too heavy and miss. Anything over 90% is still developing strength, so you don’t always need to hit exactly 100% for ME work.

-The importance of training atmosphere can’t be overstated. So many people spend hours sitting online reading about training, but put no effort into finding better training partners or better trainign atmosphere. Wendler asked people how much more they think they would squat if they went to Westside and trained for a few weeks. Most people said something around 40-50 pounds. Then he said, “You all just confirmed how important training atmosphere is, so why don’t you do somthing about it??”

-Beginners don’t need to de-load that often. Squatting 225 is just not that much stress on the body to need a deload unless you have a lot of other training stress.

-”Treat the heavy weights like they’re light and light weights like they’re heavy.” One of the biggest mistakes lifters make is expecting a heavy weight to move slowly and thus not be as explosive with it, limiting their strength potential. Another is not taking lighter weights or warmup sets as seriously and not focusing. Tate said that most lifting injuries occur due to lack of focus in warmup sets.

-The best way to fix bad form is to drill over and over again with good form. Take light weight and do a shitload of sets with low reps.

-Situps with weight behind your head are Wendler’s favorite way to develop abdominal strength.

-Matt Kroc was giving me some advice on pullups. He said one of the best methods is to keep trying to hit rep PRs with various weights. Do bodyweight for a couple weeks until you don’t hit a rep PR, then bump up to say 25 pounds on a dip belt, go until you don’t hit a rep PR, then bump to maybe 45 pounds for a couple of weeks until you stagnate there too. Go back to bodyweight and you’ll almost certainly hit a new PR.

-Wendler said the best thing a beginning lifter can do is to pick 3-5 assistance exercises for squat and bench and to do them and nothing else for a year. You’ll have a great idea of what works after that.

-When Matt Kroc was 19 he had already been training for more than 5 years and his bench had just broken 300 and he was squatting about 4 and a quarter. About 15 years later and he set a world record total in his weight-class…

-Wendler’s a big fan of 45 degree back extensions with a barbell on the back. Similar training effect to a good morning but with much less stress on the body.

Building a beginner’s posterior chain?
-Reverse hypers, glute hams (on a GHR bench), sled-dragging and 45 degree back raises are the best way to start out with people who are extremely weak in the posterior chain. 2-3 weeks of doing those exercises 3 times a weak and a ton of empty bar or broomstick practice will have almost anybody able to sit back and push the knees out in a squat.

Progressions?
-I kind of forget what I was even specifically thinking about here, but they talked about the RE–>ME–>DE progression and also briefly some progressions with jumps. It’s all pretty logical, start with easy stuff like vertical jumps and broad jumps and progress by adding weight (with a vest or holding dumbbells or plates), jumping over barriers, doing multiple jumps in a row and ultimately to plyometrics. The more strength-oriented your sport is, the more you need to progress through weighted jumps, the more reactive it is, the more important those drills are.

Introduce instability (single-leg squats, etc.) first or later?
-It doesn’t seem to matter. They didn’t seem to be as big of a fan of single-leg unsupported (like pistols) are they are of single-leg supported drills such as lunges.

Box squats for athletes? Front squat vs. back squat? Squat vs. deadlift?
-Kind of grouping all of these into one. I was talking to Wendler about this and his message was, “Just squat the kid.” He said that, in general, whatever squat the athlete was good at was the one he had them do. Front squats, back squats, box squats, close-stance, wide-stance, it doesn’t really matter to him. He said the important thing to him was that they squatted and worked on sitting back and initiating the movement with the hips. Everything he could do on top of that (he likes wider-stance squats) is gravy. They also said that nothing can really replace a squat variation in your program for total-body development.

How frequently to deadlift? Cycles? Maxing?
-Kroc said he’s learned from experience to back off deadlifting 4 weeks out from a meet. The others had various experiences, some like to deadlift more and some like to deadlift less. The general consensus: figure out what works for you. I’m not totally sure of this (since I’m not positive on their individual styles), but the guys who pulled conventional seemed to be a fan of less frequent pulling and the sumo-pulling guys seemed to favor more frequent. I’d say lower-back strain would be the factor here?

In-season lifting for athletes?
I didn’t really get a lot of specifics here, since it’s different for every sport. The main message was to keep volume up for a large portion of the season, you’ll be able to drop it down and stay fresh at the end. ME work turns into “kinda ME”, ie, work up to a 3RM with a weight you know you can do for 5 or 6 reps. Do a shitload of “prehab work.”

Jump training? Box jumps for athletes? Weighted? %s?
-Weighted box jumps are great for heavier athletes who don’t cope well with reactive work. Wendler does the Parisi-style pogo jumps before almost every squat workout to fire up his nervous system, said he hit new PRs when he first started trying it. I kinda hit on the jump training a little earlier, but they said it’s very important for an athlete who jumps to keep jumping. A few weeks off in the beginning of the off-season is a good idea, but after that it is a good idea to do some jumps (doesn’t have to be high-stress jumps, could just be CMJ or BJ) before every lower-body session.

Dynamic squatting for athletes?
-This actually didn’t get hit on too much directly. I talked to Tate a little bit and he said it’s very important for an athlete like me (volleyball player) to keep monitoring my vertical leap, to know if strength work is helping or not and if weight loss/gain is helping me.

Plyometrics?
-They don’t seem to be too big on jump training for powerlifters, but obviously if used properly, plyometrics can be very effective for team sport athletes.

Loading with respect to age?
-We didn’t discuss very young athletes, but the general, obvious, “beginners need higher reps and advanced need lower” wisdom was discussed. Wendler discussed the Thomas Kurz book “Science of Sports Training” (or as he calls it, “the red one”) which states that, “Training is efficient when the greatest result is achieved with the least effort.” He said if you introduce advanced methods too early, you wind up an athlete stagnating a couple of years down the road. This brings up an interesting dilemma for high school-aged athletes, whose main goal is just to be as good as possible by their senior year, which is often only 1-3 years into their training career…

Bench pressing with shoulder issues?
-If it hurts don’t do it. Wendler is a big fan of trying to work through the full range of motion. Injuries often occur when loading is increased too quickly, particularly for an exercise like the bench press.

Building pullup strength with weak athletes?
-Matt Kroc was giving me a lot of advice on pullups. If you’ve seen how strong he is at this movement or how built his back is, you know why I listened! He said one of the most important things is to be able to feel the lats working, beginners can’t activate their lats at all. For that reason, he suggest working with pullups (hands pronated) from the very beginning and really working to engage the lats in the movement, too many beginners (especially girls) are all biceps when they do chins. Slow lowerings where the athlete is very conscious of the movement of the elbows can really help with this.

DE vs. RE for weak athletes?
-I asked this question pretty specifically during the group Q&A part and they discussed it for a while. The most important thing that was stressed was that a weak beginner needs to learn to strain and also to add on muscle mass. This is done through RE work. With that said, they do like DE work once the athlete is prepared for it, which, with a decent 16 y/o+ athlete, won’t take too long. The basic suggestion was that the standard Westside “one day ME, one day DE” template can work very well, the thought process should be, “on one day you lift real heavy, then bodybuild and on the other day you lift real fast, then bodybuild.” This was basically done to emphasize how important assistance work is to add muscle on a beginner. Another suggestion was to every once in a while, take your DE work and flip the sets and reps, ie, switch from 10 x 3 on dynamic bench to 3 x 10.

Loading frequency with relation to level of athlete?
-Everybody seemed to be a fan of 2x per week, which obviously has been proven to work well for a wide range of athletes. Some people in the upper-intermediate range, who are getting strong but whose work capacities have dipped (KellyB talked about this in one of his articles) might do better with a 1.5x per week, U/L/U, L/U/L setup. Beginners can do well doing basic drills like reverse hypers or sled-dragging, 3, 4 or even 5 times per week at a low volume. This teaches them how to activate muscles that are dormant.

Weekly layouts for athletes?
-Talked to Wendler about this off to the side (as he was an assistant strength coach to Kentucky football for a while) and he basically gave me the, “do you seriously want me to give you a cookie cutter program?” answer. After I hung my head in shame (haha) for a second, he basically said, “picking a layout isn’t that hard, think about your three elements, RE, ME and DE and balance the volume against how much sport-specific stuff they’re doing.” Common sense…

Potentiation methods?
-I’m kicking myself because I forgot to ask this. Wendler did mention the Parisi pogo jumps as a good, low-force way to fire up the nervous system for any method. Perhaps kind of similar to the “pulsing effect” Charlie Francis has talked about using med ball throws for?

Varying exercises?
The basic consensus seemed to be: vary your ME work, try to keep your assistance work consistent. Doing this does two things:
1.) It gives you an idea of, “If such-and-such ME lift is at X weight, then my squat will be around Y weight.”
2.) It lets you figure out which assistance lifts work and which are worthless for you. If you change three of your assistance lifts, and your squat jumps 20 pounds over the next cycle, you won’t know which one helped.

Gaining weight, how fast, etc.?
-I touched on this earlier, but Tate said, “think about it logically, you’re a volleyball player, your vert is key, monitor it.” If your vert is going down, you’re getting too fat, if it’s staying the same, it means when your weight stabilizes (assuming you’ve been getting stronger and adding muscle), you should be able to increase your vert and if it’s going up, everything is perfect!

Grip training?

-They are a big fan of the ultra-scientific “hold on to heavy shit” method. They said that a lot of the pinch-grip and crushing-grip stuff is not that useful unless it coincides with something you are training specifically for. They are a big fan of “Kroc rows”, which you might be familiar with if you’ve seen him do 175# for 33 reps or other insane feats. Basically, this is just doing regular 1-arm dumbbell rows, but going balls to the wall with weight and reps. If you can hold on to a really heavy dumbbell for 30 reps, your grip is fine.

And finally, squat and bench technique in a quick summary:

Squat
-Drive your head straight back into the bar, don’t look up, but press it back. Imagine you are squeezing a tennis ball with your chin.
-Force your knees out as you descend. “Show your groin.” Squat barefoot or in a flat-soled shoe, never squat in basketball shoes.
-Arch your upper back hard. Besides the knees, this is most important. It’s almost impossible to round your lower back while your upper back is arched.
-Initiate movement with hips, not the knees. You can have a training partner put his fingers against your lower back. On the way up, if you focus on pushing against his fingers, you’ll initiate the movement with the hips and you won’t GM it up. Credit to “Starting Strength” on that last tip.
-Squeeze the shit out of the bar

Bench
-Start with your head off the bench, grip the bar in a chinup grip and pull forward and up to get your arch set.
-Get your shoulders back and together
-Press your heels down as you descend
-Bring your stomach to the bar and tuck. Tucking the elbows is most important as it brings the triceps into play more and also saves the shoulder.
-Blast the bar up, squeeze the shit out of it like you are trying to bend it.
-Athletes don’t need to worry about a huge arch like a powerlifter does, especially since arching like that is stressful on the back.

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