Deep Squats, Shallow Thoughts

Achieving The Standards 1.0 - 135 press, 225 bench, 315 squat, 405 deadlift - is more important and useful than getting down to 10% bodyfat and it's not even close.

“You built great legs. How much do you attribute to squatting in the beginning?” “90%” Everyone today wants to skip ahead to the advanced, complex training that already developed lifters do Listen to the pros Build your base ᵀᴹ

Guys like me and @sam_gzstrength have taught numerous unathletic late middle age and seniors to squat and deadlift without thinking twice about it, meanwhile many Top Minds in strength and conditioning say they can't do this with the most athletically gifted 20 year olds in the world and need to use alternatives like the trap bar and bulgarian split squats. Weird. Let's talk about how this relates to the Wright Brothers. Almost 125 years ago, the US Govt was in a race with the other world powers to invent the first airplane. They chose Samuel Langley to lead the project. You probably never heard of him, but in his day, Langley was a big deal. He had all the credentials: a renowned scientist and a professor of astronomy, Langley wrote books about aviation and was the head of the Smithsonian Institute. It was the kind of decision that managerial bureaucrats - and their "follow the science" acolytes - still make and support today. Give taxpayer money to the smartest guys in the room - defined as the ones with lots of degrees and credentials and government related positions - they’ll do the best job, and you mere plebs without degrees and credentials have no standing to question them, anyway. The US Department of War gave him $50,000 for two experiments, and he got an additional sum from the Smithsonian, too. That was a lot of money back then. What did the citizens of the United States get for their investment? The Great Aerodrome! On October 7, 1903, the aircraft developed by Langley and his team of experts was launched from a catapult on a houseboat in the Potomac River. “It fell like a ton of mortar,” wrote one reporter. They managed to salvage the plane, and two months later on December 8, Langley and his team of government funded, credentialed brainiacs tried it again. This time, the airplane got caught up in the launching mechanism and dropped into the river. The War Department concluded: “We are still far from the ultimate goal, and it would seem as if years of constant work and study by experts, together with the expenditure of thousands of dollars, would still be necessary before we can hope to produce an apparatus of practical utility on these lines." Then what happened? A mere nine days later the Wright Brothers had their first successful flight outside Kitty Hawk. With only $2,000 of their own money, these uncredentialed bike mechanics did what the entire apparatus of well funded credentialed experts could not. And the rest is history. But not quite. The part of the story you don't hear is the decades long fight that Orville had to endure (Wilbur died in 1912) to get credit for their invention. Between a fight for patents and the Smithsonian still wanting some credit, it took a long time until what every schoolchild knows today - The Wright Bros invented flight - to be accepted. In some ways, we are like the Wright Brothers of strength coaching today. Don't get me wrong, I don't have delusions of grandeur that what we do is as impactful as what the Wright Bros did. Nor did we invent the squat. But we routinely do things that the majority of the fitness and strength coaching world, with all their funding and credentials and citations, think is impossible: we safely and efficiently teach people of ALL ages and athletic capabilities (or lack thereof) how to do all the big, fundamental barbell lifts. We successfully do with unathletic 53 year old accountants and 37 year old soccer moms - what many of the big brains, the D1 and pro coaches and their online fanboys, say can't be done with the most athletic people in the world: safely teach them to squat and deadlift with a barbell, and have them perform those lifts with increasing weight on a regular basis without any problems. A vast swath of articles, blog posts, and videos have been dedicated to explaining how to do other exercises that kind of, sort of mimic the squat, press, deadlift, and bench press - based on the assumption that most people lack the ability to do them, usually citing something like lack of mobility or safety. "Sure, squats are great, BUT..." is an entire genre in this field. Sad! I suspect one of the reasons we get so much hate and people call us dogmatic in that we "force" everyone to do these movements is because deep down, they don't like that we can teach these movements to your 68 year old gramma in one session, and they can't even correctly teach them to a 20 year old college athlete. It's a skill issue. It's trivially true that you can "work the same bodyparts" without ever doing these movements, but can you achieve the same complete results in ~an hour, 3 days a week, using only 5-6 movements that can be progressively loaded in perpetuity? No. But we can teach you how to do that. All the accolades, social media followers, credentials, peer reviewed citations, before and after progress pics, super ripped jacked selfies in the world - can't buy you that. But one or two sessions with us, can.

I know you're all waiting with bated breath to hear another hot take about the midterms with pure speculation presented as insider knowledge, but instead I'll remind you that if you can't press 135, bench 225, squat 315, and deadlift 405, you should get to working on that ASAP.

I've seen a lot of lifters get wrapped up in micromanaging and technique-paralysis-by-analysis where they focus so much on little tiny things they did wrong that they start to overthink every rep and lose the ability to just push, pull, and brace hard against heavy weight. Yes, technique matters. But: - There is a difference between bad technique and a minor imperfect execution of a single rep. - Driving hard also matters, and if technique is good enough then it probably matters more than losing drive to improve from good enough to great. The order of operations for new lifter or someone really learning to do things well for the first time is: 1. Get basic technique down pat, to the point that it's your default setting. 2. Add weight in small, manageable increments so both nervous and muscular systems improve at a to which pace they can adapt. This will require you to drive progressively harder. 3. While adding weight, continue to work on reducing the delta between 'basic technique' and 'excellent technique,' but not at the expense of #2 as long as basic technique stays solid. There can be a little individual variation where someone has a unique case, but that covers the vast majority of situations.

“What muscle does that work?”

Stole the picture for this one from @DisaffectedPod , whose post today reminded me of an article I wrote a few years back. Lightly edited and updated for today.

Generalizations are good, actually

A good program executed with high consistency and high effort is better than the perfect program executed with inconsistency and low effort.

It’s astounding how many coaches will attribute these kind of problems - the hips are shooting up at the start of the lift! - to various muscular or positional weaknesses and prescribe complex programming to solve them, when the problem is simply that they do not know basic pulling mechanics and the standard pulling position

It's funny that people still seem to present anti barbell posts as edgy and "unpopular opinion, but..." when that view has become the mainstream or even dominant view among the physique oriented community.

Happy Columbus Day to all my fellow America Enjoyers

Fat, pink, and healthy

Saying that every man should strive to achieve The Standards 1.0 isn't derailed by the fact that people come in different sizes and strength potentials. It's a general statement that is generally true in the same way as saying every man should strive to graduate high school. You can find rare exceptions of cognitive deficiency, but we don't order society or our expectations around those exceptions. We don't expect every man to achieve a 600 deadlift or 500 squat just like we don't expect everyone to get a PhD in physics. Not everyone has the capacity or interest level to sacrifice what it takes to do that. But 135/225/315/405 is available to the vast overwhelming majority of men who put in the effort, and usually within a year or two if they do it right.