Month: March 2015

To strap or not to strap? That is the question.  Whether tis nobler to have your grip fail in the middle of a set or to maintain your macho hardheadeness in the face of complete wrongness….&c  I guess I’m feeling a bit literary this morning.  Anyhow, I want to talk about lifting straps but not about how to use them.  Rather I want to address the question many trainee ask which is “Should I wear lifting straps?”

Why Wear Lifting Straps?

Before getting into the actual question, I guess I should address why someone would want to wear straps in the first place.  Well, quite simply, they are grip aids, helping to ensure that you don’t lose your grip.  In that sense, straps are almost universally used for pulling movements (though I recall an article years ago by a guy who wore them on squats so he wouldn’t quite on the set).… Keep Reading

This will be one of those weird self-indulgent personal prattling pieces.  It represents the 6 weeks of my life before moving to Salt Lake City to pursue speed skating. This is the most absurd training I have ever done.

Let’s Talk About Overtraining

I suppose the point of this piece is probably a bit of a reaction to when people make claim about trainability/overtraining/the ability to adapt to “anything” or whatever and are basing this on their own short-term training experiences.

Because the fact of the matter is that you can get by on youth and stupidity for quite some time, and a truly insane amount of training can be handled for short periods.  It’s when folks try to stretch out those insane amounts of training in the long-term that they tend to break.  Sometimes they even learn from those experiences although that usually takes a few years.

This fact, the ability for the body to handle stupid levels of training for short periods, has actually been a frequent problem when researchers have tried to examine short-term overtraining. … Keep Reading

Before announcing my new book, I had detailed across four parts the first couple of month of my recovery from bipolar.  In those articles, I mentioned basically treating my training as coming back from a layoff.  Now for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, people seem to be fascinated with what my own training (and usually diet, which is insanely dull to talk about) look like.

Maybe it’s because I have spent a goodly amount of time talking previously about or they just want to stalk me, I don’t know.  But whatever, this is an easy update for me to make and that, above all, is enough of a driver for me to write it.  This details from start to about now what my (boring as hell) training has looked like in the weight room.  My other days are just various cardio days.   This is not going to be exciting stuff but will basically give a real-world example of how to come back from an extended layoff.… Keep Reading