I spent last weekend at the Perform Better Summit in Providence, Rhode Island, where I was exposed to more information than I could possibly absorb. There was all the great stuff I expected from Stu McGill, Thomas Myers, and Gray Cook. My coauthor, Alwyn Cosgrove, spoke about fat loss in what I thought was the best presentation of the weekend. (And that’s really saying something.)

I missed a bunch of speakers whose talks would’ve been at the top of my list at any other conference: Dan John, Mark Verstegen, Charles Staley, Chris Mohr, Mike Boyle.

Even with all that talent and experience on the lineup, I thought the most provocative presentation came from Thom Plummer, who spoke about the future of the fitness industry. As I told a couple of friends afterwards, almost…

Tags: Tags: alwyn cosgrove, bodybuilding, cardio, chris bathke, fitness industry, nrol for abs, publishing, strength, thomas plummer, training

Tony Gentilcore has a terrific new article at T-nation, featuring five exercises you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. I can’t wait to try them, and experience that magnificent sense of total inadequacy you can only get when you do stuff that’s a lot harder than what you’re currently doing.

But here’s a hypothetical problem: Let’s say I’m currently in the middle of a serious, goal-oriented training program. If I do those exercises the next time I’m in the gym, I’ll have to deviate from that program. At that point, I’m no longer “training.” I’m just working out. And Tony frowns on that:

Whenever I happen to train at a commercial gym, one of the biggest mistakes that I see guys making is the fact that they’re not training, they’re working out. Most (not all) tend to just flounder around, do a few sets of this, a couple of…

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Tags: Tags: new exercises, strength, t-nation, tony gentilcore, training, working out

The biggest news last week, judging by the reaction on Internet strength-training forums, is Mike Boyle’s attack on conventional squats, particularly the part where he looks right into the camera and says, “Don’t do conventional squats anymore.”

Doesn’t get any less ambiguous than that.

Boyle’s rationale is that the weak link in squatting is the lower back, which he says is a poor transducer of power. The muscles of the legs are worked better in a split stance, where the back is less of a limiting factor. His preferred lower-body exercise is the rear-foot-elevated split squat, or RFESS. Most of us know it as the Bulgarian split squat.

I got the email from Mike the same day as everyone else. The difference is that I wasn’t really surprised by his position. When I was at TMUSCLE, I edited Mike’s article on split squats,…

Tags: Tags: deadlifts, mike boyle, split squats, squats, strength, training

Let’s say you’re a guy who’s always been … different. You realized this when you were 12, and lifted a piece of heavy farm equipment — a Troybilt rototiller — out of a pickup truck all by yourself.

When you finally got around to strength training, you were just past 30, an age when most guys are already settled into a life on the sidelines. But something clicked, and you entered your first powerlifting meet just two months later. You benched 425 pounds and deadlifted 500. Barely seven years later, you would set a world record in the squat with 1,200 pounds on your back.

Meanwhile, you were spreading the gospel of strength sports, first as a member of the Metal Militia, then as a gym owner in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. One important exercise you used with your clients at Nazareth Barbell is sled-dragging, a muscle- and endurance-building…

Tags: Tags: strength

The New York Times has a snoozer of a story on “muscles in a bottle” in today’s editions.

But I think it’s worth commenting on for several reasons:

1. The story quotes physician and drug-testing expert Linn Goldberg, as well as attorney Rick Collins, both of whom I interviewed at length for a feature in the March issue of Men’s Fitness.

Since my story is about steroids in sports, and the Times story is about nutritional supplements you can buy at your local GNC, and in theory there’s little crossover between the two subjects, I wonder why we ended up interviewing the same people.

Weird.

2. The story makes yet another reference to Mark McGwire and androstenedione.

I’m beginning to think the discovery of a bottle of andro in McGwire’s locker may have been a real stroke of luck for him. As long as his name is linked to a useless prohormone — as opposed…

Tags: Tags: strength

I think every guy who lifts, at some point, looks around the gym and wonders what the hell everyone else thinks they’re accomplishing. They’re using too much or too little weight, or doing useless or dangerous exercises, or have terrible form.

A lot of times the person looking around doesn’t have any better idea than the people he’s wondering about. (I speak from experience; I felt much more superior before I knew what the f*** I was doing than I do now.)

But now there’s evidence that gym newbies really are clueless, at least when it comes to the weights they choose to lift.

Key graphs:

“A recent study showed that many inexperienced weightlifters don’t come close to pumping enough iron to change the shape of their muscles, or really get any benefit at all.

“The study, done by exercise physiology professor Stephen Glass of Grand Valley State University in Michigan, was based in…

Tags: Tags: strength

I’m not much for press events–I’ve spent most of my two decades as a journalist avoiding them–but I sure wish I could’ve attended this one. (No one invited me, but that’s beside the point.)

Friends of the late Joe Gold, who died last month at 82, gathered for a commemorative service last Friday in Marina del Rey.

Here’s the opening of the story in the L.A. Times:

“The first time Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger walked into the original Gold’s Gym in Venice, in 1968, its legendary proprietor greeted the young bodybuilder warmly: ‘Arnold, anything you want, it’s yours.’

“But Joe Gold wasn’t done. He quickly added: ‘You’re just a stupid farmer from Austria and you got a balloon belly. It will take us a year to work on that.

“‘Hey, you need an apartment?

“‘You need a car?’”

How would you like to go back in time to hear someone call Schwarzenegger a “stupid farmer from Austria”?

If…

Tags: Tags: strength

First it was fat. The all-purpose dietary demon has been mostly rehabilitated into an important part of a healthy diet.

Now it’s lactic acid. When I first started lifting in commercial gyms, in the early ’80s, the accepted wisdom was that lactic acid caused post-workout muscle soreness.

Not only has that one been debunked, but new research from Australia and Denmark shows that lactic acid actually helps a muscle perform better. From The New York Times:

“After a muscle fiber has worked intensely for a while, it begins to lose potassium, and that dampens the fiber’s ability to contract. Lactic acid, by blocking the movement of chloride across the fiber’s surface membrane, helps the muscle fiber recover its ability to work, said D. Thomas Pedersen, a doctoral student at the University of Aarhus who co-authored the study.

“The fatigue an athlete feels is likely caused by the loss of potassium rather than the…

Tags: Tags: strength

So now we know: The track coach who blew the whistle on BALCO–the guy who turned in the syringe that contained a trace of the “designer steroid” that turned out to be THG–is Trevor Graham.

Graham is coach of Justin Gatlin, who won the 100-meter gold in the most competitive race ever. The open question is why Graham took it upon himself to ignite the greatest drug scandal in sports history.

From the L.A. Times:

“Speculation had long centered on Graham as the source of the syringe, though his motives remain unclear. At least six of Graham’s athletes have tested positive for banned substances.

“After Gatlin’s victory Sunday, Graham confirmed to reporters his involvement in triggering the BALCO investigation. Asked if he believed Gatlin would have won if he, Graham, hadn’t supplied the syringe that set off the investigation, Graham told the Baltimore Sun, ‘I can’t predict what would have happened. I don’t…

Tags: Tags: strength

Last night I watched a terrific special on the History Channel about how so many of the monsters of ancient Greek mythology were probably based on fossil remains.

I’ll confess I’m a total geek for Greek legends and lore. I got hooked on the classics in college, and have never really gotten over it. Say the words “Trojan war,” and my mind fills with a hundred thoughts, not one of which involves condoms.

One consistent belief you find in Homer’s epics and elsewhere in classical mythology is that the ancient heroes were bigger than modern men. Literally bigger, two or three times the size of Homer and his contemporaries.

The reason for this, according to the experts interviewed by the History Channel, is that certain areas of Greece contained a lot of fossilized mastodon bones that farmers regularly uncovered. Of course, they had no idea what a mastodon was, so…

Tags: Tags: strength