Category: Recovery

Dan John’s Tenth Commandment of Lifting is, “Know and love the roots of your sport.” There is more to lifting than just lifting, despite our tendency to sometimes simplify the process.  “I lift things up.  I put them down.”  History plays an important role in what we do.  Knowing your history makes for a more complete experience and makes you less vulnerable to the snake oils and marketing ploys of the fitness industry. History gives you a sense of perspective, without which you really have no sense of bearing outside the rituals of your own particular gym.  This can be… Read More »

Happy Monday, everyone.  I hope your weekend was as restorative as mine. Continuing our series on Dan John’s Ten Commandments of Lifting, let’s look at the 9th Commandment, “Put the bar on the floor and pick it up a bunch of different ways.” Chip Conrad, of Bodytribe, first brought this one to my attention, it’s his favorite, and with good reason.  This is the bedrock of creative lifting, and if it’s not already, should be the cornerstone of all Mental Meathead’s training rituals. Yes, I said ritual, not routine, I’ll get to that in a minute.  First, Mental Meathead.  As… Read More »

The 8th of Dan John’s Ten Commandments of Lifting is, “You have to put the bar over your head.” If we accept our previous supposition that training isolated muscles is a myth, on par with Nessy and the Sasquatch, then you can see how Dan’s 8th Commandment is so fundamental.  No other movement trains the entire body as effectively as taking a weight from the floor to overhead. In many gyms this is verboten.  Much in the same way I described my grandfather’s response to his neighbor setting a field on fire, the response to inflated egos taking on more… Read More »

The 7th of Dan John’s Ten Commandments of Lifting is “Keep it simple.  Less is more.” This one resonates with me on so many levels.  When I first started training retention was first and foremost in my mind.  My whole approach to training clients centered around what would make them happy and keep them paying me every month. As a result my training sucked.  Every day was a brand new workout, usually created on the fly, and I was all over the place.  My clients may have been entertained by a new movement every few minutes but they weren’t progressing… Read More »