As it turned out, my planned break from training (I take roughly 5 days off every 10-12 weeks to freshen up) coincided with Bob’s contest. We needed a vacation from SLC anyhow so we had booked the trip and planned for a long weekend.

We flew out to Ohio that Thursday morning and I took Bob through a short workout to see what he looked like and to keep him loose. Finished with some stretching for his traps and scalenes which are perpetually tight.

The problems started Friday, he went for a short hike/dog walk and got nauseous and started throwing up. We put him to bed for most of the day and re-hydrated him with Pedialyte, I was concerned about him cramping during the contest since it was hot and humid as hell.

Rested, I took him through the same workout that day as the previous, a little tightness in one hamstring/calf (an area he’d been working on with Dr. Zak but otherwise ok) was the only problem, everything else looked spot on.

Both days he looked snappy and strong, his technique was solid as hell on everything and it all looked good.

And barring any completely unpredictable happenings, he was ready.

He slept shockingly well the night before the contest (many athletes do not but as long as they’ve gotten a good night’s sleep two nights out there is usually no problem) and we got up on Saturday to drive out to Allegheny. Arrived at the Y after a little bit of getting lost to check things out. The contest had five events run in this order.

1. Log clean and press: clean and press from the floor for every rep. Maximum reps in 60 seconds.

2. Farmer’s walk: 100 feet with a turnaround at the midpoint. Best time wins.

3. Deadlift for reps: Maximum reps in 6 seconds.

4. Hussafell stone: 210 pound stone for 100 feet. Best time wins.

5. Tire flip: Supposed to be a 450 pound tire, best time over 100 feet.

We had no idea what sort of turnout to expect although it ended up being 26 total folks with 4 in the Master’s Category where Bob was competing.

The meet was a little bit disorganized and we did what we could to get Bob warmed up and loosened up (this was my big concern). Some easy bar stuff and a few reps with the log and he seemed fairly ready. His massage therapist from SLC had come out for the contest as well and did a little work on his hips (which are also perpetually tight).

At the last minute, they changed the order of competitors, deciding to start with the master’s class and Bob got called off first. Not only was this his first contest, the first athletic event he’d ever competed in, he got to lead off the whole thing.

I expected one of two complete extremes: either his training would come through and he’d just go on autopilot and kick ass or he’d choke completely.

He didn’t choke.

Rather than include a bunch of verbiage describing each even and what happened, I’ll just let the video speak for itself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That meant picking a competition.

Now, a lot of people have trouble committing to a competition. Being willing to compete means being willing to fail and that’s hard for a lot of people. You’ll hear from folks all the time about how they want to compete but want to get their bench up a bit, or get a little faster, or a little bit bigger, or a little bit more conditioned. These are the folks who will never actually get around to competing because they are never ready or willing to put their ego on the line.

At the same time, people who have competed will almost always say that competition is the singular best way to truly focus your training and make really exceptional progress; they are 100% right.

When your goal is just to ‘get in shape’, or something vague like that, it can be tough to stay focused. There’s always more time, there’s never a rush, you can always goof off a bit and lose your focus. When you know that you have a competition coming up in 6 weeks, you will focus harder on your goal and this is likely the reason for the success of the “Best shape of your life in 12 weeks” types of events.

In any case, an athlete’s first competition isn’t generally about winning anyhow; it’s meant to be more of a learning experience. You can identify weaknesses in preparation, find out how the athlete handles competition in general; winning is always nice but it shouldn’t be expected or aimed for in my opinion. Competitions are also often a hell of a lot of fun.

At the same time, competition can be stressful for a lot of people. In training, it’s can be easy to fall into the psychological trap of loafing a bit because you always get another chance. In training, if you miss a weight one week, you’ve always got the next workout to take another shot at it again. In competition, you usually only get the once chance and anxiety over that can cause people to tighten up. They get so worried about missing that they end up trying too hard, causing them to fuck up.

In any case, a good starter meet came up in Allegheny, PA that was close to where Bob lives so we decided that it was time for him to make the commitment and sign up. The weights were reasonable and the events list were things that he was good enough at that I felt he’d have a solid first competition experience.

Bob had the added complication of being in his 40′s and never having competed in anything athletic in his life. Entering a contest where he just got absolutely crushed would have been a huge mistake (from a psychological standpoint) which made the Allegheny meet a good one to start with.

Even there, this was something that he’d been working towards for 2 solid years, and he had no idea how to deal with it mentally. It’s one thing to think sort of ‘theoretically’ about entering a contest and another to actually be signed up and realize that you’re going to have to go through with it. I tried to reassure him that anxiety about it was perfectly normal.

My main concern going into the contest was therefore two fold:

1. To not screw up his taper so that he’d be at his best physically to compete

2. To handle the invariable psychological issues that would come up.

Athletes often go a little bit crazy right before a competition. They start questioning themselves and their training (and their coaches). Did they train enough, are they ready, should they have done more, could they have done more? It’s all too common to hear of athletes losing it in the final two weeks before a big competition. They’ll try to cram a bunch of training in and end up doing far more harm than good.

You’ll hear of powerlifters or Olympic lifters taking their openers the day before the meet (or in the warmup room) or athletes doing race pace work two days out. And then they compete like dogs because they blew their wad before it was necessary.

A quote from Dave Tate (or was it Jim Wendler) in PLUSA comes to mind here:

“There’s nothing a lifter can do to get stronger in the last three weeks before a contest; but there are a lot of things that they can do to get weaker.”

Wise words indeed.

The point being that, that close to a contest, all of the preparation has been done and the athlete is either ready or they aren’t. If they aren’t, you can’t change it except to fix their training the next go around and learn from your mistakes. All you can do is taper them down to try to ensure that they perform at their best on the competition day.

As far as I was concerned, Bob was as prepared as he could be for his first event, his strength was very good, he was getting comfortable with the implements technically and I felt his conditioning would be sufficient. We had finished with some conditioning stuff in his last block, timed sets of deadlifts and such to get him used to that style of training and there wasn’t anything else we could have done at that point to get him more ready.

Luckily, outside of some pre-meet anxiety about two weeks out (part of which was caused by being so rested he had energy to burn), Bob didn’t really go through any of the pre-meet insanity. We had one phone call about that time where I helped him put some things in perspective and that was that.

Physically, he put himself completely in my hands for the last few weeks.

Which was good in that I didn’t have to worry about him doing anything crazy.

And it was bad in that it also put the entire success or failure of the taper on my shoulders: if it went wrong, I would be fully to blame.

It didn’t go wrong.

I planned a fairly long taper and decided to err on the side of too long than too little. Given that he’s older, has a massive number of connective tissue issues and goes pretty heavy most of the year. I figured that even if I tapered him a bit too early, he had strength to spare, even if he lost a few percentage points, he’d still be fine.

I actually started his taper three weeks out with his final heavy lower body workout on a Saturday. A final heavy upper body workout came about 5 days later and then it was just a gradual reduction of volume and intensity as we went. 80% two weeks out, 70% the final week. I was trying to find a balance between keeping him loose and mobile and ensuring he was fully recovered.

To be concluded in Bob and Strongman: The Contest Part 2.

There was also the issue of determining what he would best respond to in terms of training volumes, intensities, frequencies, etc. While there are certain generalities I tend to follow when programming training, that’s all they are: generalities. There’s always tweaks and changes that have to be made as you progress and see how the person is actually responding.

Tangent: This is a place where a lot of coaches seem to go wrong. They assume that their training program is inherently perfect and that it’s then up to the athlete to either keep up and survive or just fall off completely. Their training program could never be at fault and coaches like this tend to destroy their athletes by refusing to change any aspect of their ‘perfect’ training program even if it’s not working.

Of course, I don’t train people that way. Of course (part 2), in person it’s a hell of a lot easier to make adjustments to a training program (on a given day or what have you) when I’m there in person. I can see how the person looks, how they are handling the training load and make adjustments as necessary. Is the person blown out from the previous session? I’ll ignore what was planned and make this day easier. Do they look fresh and ready to PR? I’ll throw out the plan and let them take a run at it. This is a bitch from a distance since all you’ve got to rely on is the person’s own observation and commentary.

Tangent: And I want to make it clear that this isn’t really aimed at Bob specifically but just in general. And the problem with relying on what the athlete is telling you (rather than what you’re seeing) is this: athletes lie. Athletes tend to be inherently (over) motivated and don’t like to admit when training is kicking their ass or what have you. They’ll tell you they feel great when they feel like warmed over shit and usually want to go hard even if they need an easy workout. An attentive coach can suss this out in person b/c when you see the athlete during warm-ups, you know they are worked over. Coaching from a distance, all you have to rely on is their self-reports.

Bob had the added issue that happens with almost all athletes at some point in their career. He expected every workout to be a record breaker and to go stunningly. Any workout that didn’t show progress was considered a failure; given what he was contending with with changing ranges of motion and the injuries, this was a potential recipe for disaster. Although it took months, I eventually got Bob to realize that single workouts aren’t really that important in the big scheme.

Rather, it’s the long-term accumulation of training that leads to results and progress down the road. I also got him to try to understand that even if almost everything goes badly, there’s just about always something good that you can get out of every workout. Something technical clicks, something goes more smoothly. It may seem like psychological trickery and maybe it is but it’s key to keep the athlete motivated when everything isn’t going absolutely perfectly.

Ultimately, one bad workout isn’t any big deal. Even a couple of bad workouts. Of course, when 1-2 bad workouts becomes a series of bad workouts, you have to reassess what you’re doing.

And guided by Bob’s (honest so far as I could tell) comments and what was happening with his progress, it became clear early on that I was overtraining him. He had started on what is essentially a Westside/Elitefitness 4 day kind of thing. Two upper and two lower days with heavy work on one day of each followed by a variety of supplemental and accessory work. And, without fail, a few weeks in and he’d start to crash. And we’d start over. And he’d crash.

It was clearly too much. So we ended up merging two of the days and moving him to three days/week (Tue/Thu/Sat). This actually ended up fitting with his strongman goals a little bit better anyhow since Saturday became a ‘full-body’ type of day where he’d either work with implements (which he gradually accumulated in his garage) or do training with weights that supported or mimicked the events. Tuesday was a heavy lower body day and Thursday was a heavy upper body day.

In addition, we programmed some very light bodyweight stuff to accomplish a variety of goals including conditioning, active recovery, some work that would challenge muscle groups and stabilizers that weren’t getting hit during the main sessions and just for general movement work (balance, proprioception, etc.). He’ll do at least one hike per week and one day is dedicated to his ART session with Dr. Zak (a one hour ART session being a huge stress unto itself).

Over time we also realized that he best responded to a pattern of no more than two truly heavy weeks followed by an easier week. Three heavy weeks in a row was simply too much and would crater him every time. Every once in a while, if needed, he’d get a longer period completely off although we try to avoid that: with his various connective tissue issues, total immobility causes him to just lock up. I’d rather keep him moving to some degree and just keep it light for recovery.

I’d note that the above is describing a process that took over a year, possibly a bit longer. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t without more ups and downs. As Dr. Zak gets thing loosened up with Bob, it’s not uncommon for a muscle that hasn’t fired in damn near 20 years to suddenly ‘come on line’ and cause some short-term problems.

In one specific case, Bob (who was deadlifting in 400′s at this point) gained some new range of motion in his hips and hamstrings. And pulled a hamstring about a month before coming out to visit. It just had too much stress thrown onto it after decades of inactivity. This didn’t stop him from rehabbing it and making his first 500 lb pull (this was one of his long term goals and he’s just short of 600 now) on that visit.

I’d also note that there have been other changes to his program as we went. Initially there was a lot of rehab type work in the program to get his shoulders and such healthy. This was supplemented by basic strength work to start getting everything strong. Over time, the rehab stuff has become less prevalent as he’s needed it less and less.

Every time he comes out to SLC for hands-on training, he usually has a laundry list of things he’d either like to work on (from a previous visit) or begin learning (e.g. despite almost no range of motion in his scapula, we’ve taught him a decent enough power clean, crucial for the log clean and press). This is usually accompanied with a shot for a PR in one of his lifts. The latter doesn’t always happen but does often enough. He hit 500 on the DL one visit and just missed 600 on a latter visit (he made a 575 lb pull and a 405 back squat the same trip).

Of course, we had to start working in more and more implement work to his training as well since all of the general strength in the world wasn’t going to prepare him for that. Towards that goal I contacted several online folks I know who have forgotten more about strongman than I will ever know. They were nice enough to give me input and feedback to help guide Bob’s training and how to integrate the implement stuff with his other training.

Bob also has had the opportunity to train with some local strongmen in his area, to help him with implement technique: this isn’t something I can help him with and he ends up teaching me about it whenever he visits so that I can better program the other aspects of his training to support it.

Of course, all of this was ultimately leading up to his first contest, which came around earlier this month. I’ll (finally) tell you about that on Friday.

Especially given that I was working with him from a distance (he’s in Ohio).

As I said before, I have a real problem with online training model and this was a very illustrative example of why.

Bob had been lifting off and on for years and had apparently been into bodybuilding when he was younger. I ASSumed that his technique would be ok on primary lifts.

I was wrong.

Tangentially, that’s fundamentally the problem with the online training model. Because, with so few exceptions as to make them irrelevant, everybody has terrible form in the weight room. Unless you lift in a very atypical gym, you know this is the case; it’s gotten so bad that the handful of people with decent form in any weight room stand out amongst the 99% who are doing everything absolutely wrong (this usually includes the staff trainers).

Everybody says they squat deep and nobody does, everybody says they train hard and nobody does.

Taking on an online client, writing them up a workout and then ASSuming that they will actually do something approximating what you wrote technically is destined to be a problem.

This was made clear when Bob planned his first visit to SLC for a hands-on training camp. He came out for a few days which we spent assessing and drilling technique in the weight room. None of his technique issues were helped by either the DISH or his other injury concerns. He had limited range of motion in a lot of movements and his body simply didn’t move right. It had found an amazing number of odd compensations for the various injuries and this showed in the weight room.

That said, we corrected a lot of basic issues and I sent him home (we shot video of the whole thing so that he could review it himself). The first blocks of training were mainly to focus on good technique along with addressing the various injuries. Essentially, he had to get in shape to be able to train hard.

Of course, it was also important that his training be somewhat satisfying and this can become a real balancing act: you need to fix the problems but that tends to be tedious slow going and it’s easy to lose trainees. Something about training has to be enjoyable and rewarding enough to keep the person coming back to it.

It didn’t help that on any given day or week, depending on how his joints and tissues were acting, everything would change. Some days he could squat perfectly, other days it would take him endless sets to even hit basic ranges of motion. Planned training programs beyond some generalities were fairly impossible and trying to do it from a distance became a real problem.

In practice, he’d either send me daily workout reports or at the very least weekly logs so I could see what was happening and make adjustments.

Over time he also had to become fairly self-sufficient about his own training, I had to essentially teach him how to adjust the day’s training depending on what was moving and how he was feeling. This is stuff I’d have done myself if I were working with him first hand. It took much longer doing it via email, phone and video.

“The only things you might want to add, b/c they definitely played a role:

Severe disc degeneration in the lumbar spine (L4, L5, S0), causing sciatic
impingement
Arthrosis of the lumbar spine
Arthrosis of the hips

So – not just DISH. I’d add that, just b/c we spent a shitton of time
dealing with fallout from it.”

Simply put, he was pretty messed up when we started two years ago.

This isn’t true.

I simply don’t train many people right now (and I put my years in training people years ago anyhow).

There’s several reasons for this, the primary one of which being that my own training for speedskating takes up an absurd amount of time each week. Between regular 3 hour sessions for skate training along with extra bike rides, I don’t have a lot of time to do much else but eat and (try to) survive. Certainly not enough time to schedule regular clients at the gym (outside of the one person I train here hands-on).

Of course, I could do online training and get asked about it from time to time, but there’s huge problems with that model not the least of which is that I’m a huge pain in the ass about proper exercise technique and that’s nearly impossible to fix from a distance (giving feedback based on video being a second best).

Last but not least is that the situations that most of those who seem to approach me about online training don’t require much more than setup and some basic rules. I know that ‘contest prep’ is a popular thing for online trainers but most of that seems to be hand-holding and minor diet tweaks than anything concrete. Frankly, folks can get about 99% of what they need of my information out of any of my books.

Hell, they can get some of my information out of other people’s books.

Simply put, I’m generally not that intrigued by ‘Bro, can you train me to get a six-pack.’

However, there are exceptions and one of them is BobW. Bob showed up on my forum 2+ years ago, seemed to fit in with the generally anarchic tone and posted some videos for feedback.

I told him that something looked severely messed up (in his upper back) and that he should get it looked at. He said that he had and the doctor told him he was fine. I told him to find another doctor and, although I forget the details, he eventually looked up an ART practitioner (I may be getting the details of how this all worked out wrong) who did a proper assessment.

In any case, it turned out that Bob has a rare condition called DISH, which stands for diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperstosis.

Quoting from the Medicine.net website:

Diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH) has also been called Forestier’s disease. It is considered a form of degenerative arthritis. However, DISH is characterized by unique, flowing calcification along the sides of the vertebrae of the spine. And, very unlike typical degenerative arthritis, it’s also commonly associated with inflammation (tendinitis) and calcification of tendons at their attachments points to bone. This can lead to the formation of bone spurs, such as heel spurs. In fact, heel spurs are common among individuals with DISH.

Combine this with having been a computer type for a couple of decades, and he was in bad shape. As I recall, at least one doctor told him that he should pretty much accept that he’d end up in a wheelchair. Fairly shortly.

Even the ART practitioner wasn’t sure he could do much good with Bob but he told Bob he was willing to try.

Bob decided to try. He took me on as his coach to handle the strength and conditioning part of it, he took Dr. Zak on as his ART guy and he decided that he was going to fight like hell to not end up completely crippled.

Then, he decided that he wanted to compete in strongman.

To be continued.