About
I became interested in all aspects of human performance physiology when I became involved in competitive sports as a teenager. This led me to obtain a degree in exercise physiology from the University of California in Los Angeles, graduating in 1993. I’ve dedicated nearly 20 years of my life to studying human physiology and the art, science, and practice of human performance, muscle gain, fat loss, and body recomposition. I use a combination of cutting edge research, canny tinkering, and sometimes, a little bit of intuition to develop my hypotheses which I then test in the real world on various guinea pigs (often including myself).
Athlete
I’ve been involved, to various levels of success, in competitive sports since my teens. Starting with triathlon, I spent altogether too much time on my bike in college. During that time, I got involved in the rapidly growing sport of inline skating which led eventually to racing. I competed for several years prior to burning myself out completely with chronic overtraining. After years of involvement in other activities had passed, I decided to return to speed skating with a move to long-track ice. I moved to Salt Lake City in 2004 to train full time at the Utah Olympic Oval. I am currently still training, with my coach Rex, attempting to make the US National team or beyond.
Writer
To date I’ve published seven books on various aspects of exercise, diet and sports nutrition and have numerous more projects in development. They can all be purchased from my Store.
I’ve written for numerous print magazines including Flex and the now defunct Peak Training Journal. I currently have a regular column in the new magazine, Muscle News. Additionally, I’ve written for numerous online publications including Cyberpump, Mesomorphosis, Mind and Muscle, Read the Core, Intelligent Design, Bodybuilding.com, Ironmagazine, Wannabebig, etc.
Coach
I’ve had the opportunity to work with athletes from numerous sports including bodybuilding, powerlifting, cycling, Olympic lifting and many others. I’ve developed training, nutrition, and supplement programs to help athletes maximize their potential. You can read about some of them on the testimonials page. A little more indirectly, through my books, I’ve helped thousands to lose fat, gain muscle and get stronger or perform better.
My Philosophy
To steal from Bruce Lee, my philosophy can be summed up by ‘Absorb what is useful’. I’m not alone in this idea, mind you.
Frankly, I am usually interested in what anybody has to say about training or nutrition because, odds are, they know something that I don’t. Even if I disagree with them on 99% of what they have to say, the 1% that teaches me something new or useful is worth it. In my mind, all training tools are only that: tools. Swiss balls, machines, free weights, compound movements, the Olympic movements, HIT, it all has a potential role in training.
People often get frustrated with me because they will ask me a question and typically get an answer of ‘It depends’. Because it does. In the lifting and nutrition world, it’s most typical to see people get married to a single concept and defend it for all people under all circumstances. whether it’s high-carb or low-carb dieting, high volume or high-intensity training, or the never ending free weights vs. machines or compound vs. isolation exercises debate, the message is the same ‘There is a single correct answer in terms of how to eat or train and I have it. Now give me money.’
So I’m a little cynical but I can’t look at training or diet or the myriad aspects of human physiology that simplistically. The appropriate training for a 35 year old female newbie who has never performed competitive sport before is not the same as what’s appropriate for a 22 year old athlete; a beginning powerlifter (or any athlete for the matter) shouldn’t be trying to copy what guys with 15-20 years of training experience behind them are doing. Whether machines or free weights or compound or isolation exercises are ‘optimal’ depends on the individual, their previous training, their current training, their goals and the remainder of their workout. It can all potentially fit into a given workout scheme, depending on the circumstances.
The same goes for diet. The optimal diet for a competitive cyclist performing 2 hours per day or more in the saddle won’t be the same as for a sedentary couch potato, or for a bodybuilder or powerlifter. Optimal can only be defined in a context dependent way: what is optimal under one situation isn’t optimal under another.
At the same time, I find that a lot of folks get too wrapped up in a million and one details that they tend to miss many of the fundamental principles of training or diet.
A training program must provide progression, overload, recovery and few other things to be ideal; what approach to progression, overload, and recovery are optimal for a given individual under a given situation will depend on the circumstances.
A fat loss diet needs to meet certain requirements to be correctly set up; that includes below maintenance calorie levels, protein intake and essential fatty acid intake. Beyond that, issues of how many carbs, or how much dietary fat, meal frequency and timing all depend on the circumstances.
The same goes for mass building; the diet needs to supply sufficient calories and protein for mass gains but the composition beyond that depends on an individual’s training volume and genetics (some people seem to respond better to higher carbs, others to lower).
The answer to any training or diet question is usually “It depends.” While that may not be what you want to hear and while it may not be as intuitively attractive as someone telling you they have the only correct answer, I think it happens to be the truth of the matter.