The following are things that I will very openly admit I’ve investigated, learned, and stolen from smarter and more experienced people than me. Then I tested them out myself and they work (for me). Among these people, Pavel Tsatsouline, Dan John, and Jim Wendler stand out as the ones whose writings resonated with me and made the most sense. As such, they are probably the people I am plagiarizing the most. A couple of these ideas are things I’ve realized myself along the way but I’m not delusional enough to think there’s some original spark of genius in here. Everything true or worthwhile is usually a rehashing of something that people have known for centuries.

I’m no expert trainer, PhD Kinesiologist, or record-holding strength athlete but I’ve been lifting weights in a powerlifting gym, with a strongman group, and now in my garage gym long enough to know what works and to know how to shy away from what doesn’t. I’ve read a lot of (too much) information about training and have tested out quite a plethora of programs and training philosophies. The following is a list of fitness ideas and systems that have worked for me. I’m writing this for myself as a personal distillation of my training philosophy as much as I am to pass along proven information that works. I’m not super dogmatic about these things, they are just what I’ve learned, tried, and have caused me to have some success. If you disagree with something here, that’s fine. There’s always another side to the coin but these are my thoughts that have been stolen from many of the greats.

Live to Fight Another Day

My overarching belief is that in training you should always live to fight another day. Training should enhance your life, not take away from it. It shouldn’t beat you up and cause you to miss out on other important physical activities, relationships, and hobbies of your life. Along this line, simpler is almost always better. The more sets, reps, and lifts you add into your program, the more complicated things become and the more things you are trying to simultaneously improve. Generally speaking, picking fewer things and a simpler lifting program and focusing on them with more intensity works better than trying to do everything at once.

Of course, a professional strength athlete trying to compete on the elite level will have to beat himself up to get to that level and that is his life as opposed to being somethat that detracts from his life. But for the average person trying to train for another sport or just for personal reasons, your training should not be a huge drain on the rest of your life. Doing that month after month is not sustainable.

(Almost) Never Attempt a Rep You Aren’t 100% Sure You’ll Get

Getting in solid rep after solid rep builds confidence, allows you to learn and reinforce good form, makes recovery easier (thus allowing you to do more per week and accumulate more volume), and saves energy for other important activities in your life. Grindy near-maximal and maximal lifts are DRAINING. As tempting as it is to see just what your absolute max is, doing so will wear you out and reduce the overall volume you lifted that week. Doing this again and again causes you to experience failure a lot and thus doubt yourself. In the last year or so, when I get a PR I smash it out of the park so ridiculously that I know it’s not an actual 1 rep max. That builds confidence and inspires me to keep going and set my goals higher! There’s also something incredibly provoking about not actually knowing what your max is. It allows you to never actually place a known limit on your strength. I remember hearing multiple World’s Strongest Man Bryan Shaw say in an interview that he would often go into high level competitions without truly knowing what his max was on certain lifts.

(The only possible exception to this is PR attempts at a competition. Even then it’s smarter to be conservative and leave with the confidence-inducing thought that you had a few more pounds in you than to fail a rep).

The idea of building strength vs. testing strength is very helpful here. Pavel and many of the other authors at StrongFirst have a lot of good things to say along these lines.

Strength is a Skill

As such it needs to be developed. View your workouts as skill-development sessions. Don’t kill yourself every session. Start small, be consistent, and gradually increase intensity/volume/etc. Record yourself with a camera and be incredibly critical of your form. Ask for third party feedback and don’t get defensive if you need to improve something. Don’t ever give yourself the benefit of the doubt by letting yourself get away with using poor form because that is counter-productive to developing the skill of strength. Treat strength as a skill and your numbers will go up. Treat strength like a 100 yard sprint or try to cut corners and you’ll get hurt or burn out and quit.

Movements > Muscles

Making sure you squat, hinge, push, pull, and loaded carry (and do them well) is more important than making sure you’re isolating each individual muscle. Bodybuilders are obviously going to break this rule but, even then, everyone who trains for longevity should be prioritizing movements over individual muscles. This is Dan John’s wheelhouse and I absolutely can’t do his work justice in this area. I gladly parrot this truth because I have discovered firsthand that prioritizing the 5 main movements over everything else yields great and sustainable results.

IT…TAKES…TIME

It takes time to build good habits. It takes time to get stronger. It takes time to learn a new movement and develop perfect form. It takes time to get shredded. Don’t get down on yourself when things don’t change overnight. You wouldn’t be dumb enough to try to rush a tree’s growth so don’t be dumb enough to sabotage yourself by seeking quick-fix results. The all-important trait you must develop in training and in life for any kind of improvement is consistency. Consistency is more important than discovering the perfect program or training modality. With consistency, you can get gains from even a mediocre plan (and make excellent progress with an intelligent program).

The Importance of Diet

Diet (specifically manipulating caloric consumption) is a much more important part of the equation than training when you’re trying to lose fat, build muscle, or (heaven forbid) do both at the same time. You can undo a whole week of hard training by eating too much or not enough quality food. Often times, training is the easy part. Eating the right thing week after week to lose fat and build muscle—that’s the hard part.

Strong Back and a Strong Grip

Build a strong back and grip and everything else seems to fall in place. You can’t quick fix or cheat/fake these and for some reason they seem to help everything else. A strong back builds the foundation for almost everything else. Grip strength is weirdly inversely correlated to mortality rate. Someone’s grip strength tells us more than it should about that person. Show me a person with a freakishly strong back and grip and I’ll show you someone who has a good chance of being good at any strength or grappling sport, is hard to injure, and will probably live a long healthy life.

Shorter Training Sessions (but MORE OFTEN)



I believe in training for less time during each session, always leaving a little bit of energy in the tank, and getting in more sessions per week. For me, this has worked much better than doing a grueling 2.5 hour workout and feeling sore and beat up for days. Maybe if you’re on steroids or are incredibly genetically gifted you can have great success with super high volume/hammering a body part or several hours once a week technique…but it did NOT work for me.

Do a little research and you’ll see that is not how most of the strongest, most athletic, and longevity-focused people in the world train. There’s always more than one way to skin a cat but this is what has been working well for me and what has worked very well for countless stronger/smarter/more athletic people for centuries.

Discover What’s Fun and You’re Less Likely to Quit

You have to find out what’s fun for you. You’re way more likely to stick to a style of training that you actually enjoy. Don’t train a certain way or try to push yourself in a certain area of fitness if you don’t enjoy it. I believe training should be fun! It should be a relief from your day. We juggle enough obligations and responsibilities in or lives. Training shouldn’t be another chore you have to finish if you want to make it a consistent long-term part of your life. Try out new styles/methods and don’t be afraid to mess up. Forget about how other people are training and find out what you enjoy and what works well for you and your schedule/lifestyle. If it’s fun you will look forward to it and will probably stick with it. If it’s a drag or you’re doing it just because you “should be” then your heart won’t be in it; it will be harder to stick with. I see hardcore meat-heads hating on kettlebell enthusiasts because kettlebells aren’t the optimal tool to build raw strength. So what? They found something they enjoy that is challenging and works a lot of things at the same time. Maybe kettlebells are amazingly fun for them and they would never stick to barbells due to boredom. Recently, I realized even people taking Pilates or 20 minute easy circuit classes at a rec center are doing what they find fun. We certainly shouldn’t judge them. God forbid we might even learn a thing or two from an activity that isn’t as “hardcore” as weight training.

That being said, there are times when training will suck and you have to stick with it anyways. But overall, the main feeling you should have towards your training is that of blissful anticipation. If you hate it day after day maybe it’s time to find something new that you will actually enjoy.

Bodyweight Exercises

Don’t sleep on bodyweight exercises. Dips, chin-ups, pushups, etc. are effective even if you are an advanced trainee. Too many people completely neglect these movements. That’s a shame because they provide such an amazing bang for your buck, can be done with very little equipment, and make you move your body through space in a way nothing else can. One of the most impressive things to me is a big guy who can hammer out a set of 10+ pullups with ease.

Treat Training as a Life-Long Endeavor

You have lots of time to improve. Don’t burn yourself out trying to get to some destination or goal as fast as possible. Once you get there you’ll have to raise the bar again anyways. Just enjoy the process and keep your long-term health in mind. I believe being strong and healthy throughout your life is more important than setting impressive records in your younger years and being too injured/beat up to do anything else after that. We all know people that push themselves so incredibly hard early in life and then quit. Their view of training is 100% or 0% and you never see these people last long term and maintain a strong, healthy body well into their old age. Don’t forget to take a step back from time to time to allow yourself to stay in this game for life.

(Professional athletes chasing elite goals while they are young enough to attain them obviously provide a notable exception to this but I’m pretty sure you aren’t one of them).

Cardio won’t destroy your gains

It’s good for you and you should be doing it. I wish my very strong but fat powerlifting/strongman friends would realize this. Their heart would thank them in 20+ years.

Find a cardio activity you enjoy (preferably a low impact one) and stick with it. Cardio doesn’t always have to be some puke inducing HIIT circuit to be good for you. A simple 10-minute walk outside per day will make you feel awesome mentally and physically. If Mark Bell and Stan Efferding are recommending to just walk 10 minutes a day, you’ll probably be able to keep your hardcore man card if you do it as well.

TODAY’S Workout Isn’t That Important

It’s not about any one specific workout. It doesn’t matter if you had a bad day or a great day in the gym. What matters is a long-term accumulation of quality sessions (whether you felt good on those days or not) to consistently give you a stimulus, recovery, and adaptation. This is how you make sustained progress. When you see that big picture, you realize it is absolutely counterproductive to destroy yourself in the gym. You have to see it as a long-term game of several training sessions building into weeks building into months building into years. That is the kind of progress and life change that is sustainable, not losing 20 pounds in a month or putting 30 pounds on your bench press in a couple weeks. It’s a long-term game! Almost anything you do for quick fixes will be counterproductive in the grand scheme.

Loaded Carries are Tragically Under-utilized

Another gem from Dan John for which I can’t possibly do justice. Loaded carries simultaneously suck and are the answer. They are not a lot of fun and most people find it very easy to neglect them even if they know how amazingly helpful they are for athletic/real world strength development. Honestly speaking, if there was ONE single movement that people aren’t doing that would give them the biggest bang for their buck it would have to be loaded carries.

It’s crazy how quickly you can feel them developing real world strength for contact or grappling sports in as little as a few weeks of consistent training.

As a side note, people who train strongman only know loaded carries as near-maximal horrible chest-caving, lung-burning activities due to farmers, yoke, sandbag carries, etc. I have it on good authority that it’s actually not a capital offense to reduce the weight and train them in a manner that doesn’t take a week to recover from… Waiter’s walks, front rack kettlebell carries, and unilateral farmers walks, for example, can all have you in a world of pain with a light weight.