Thoughts Of A Strength Coach: My FIrst Article on T-Nation!!!

I recently had my first article (co-authored with Mike Robertson) published on T-Nation!! You can check it out here: Gettin' MASSIve With Food

It details some of the strategies and recipes we have been using to help our athletes gain weight. I have also been using many of the shake recipes, and they are good! You can adjust the ingredients to make them a little less calorically dense if you need to.

I was super excited about this article because T-Nation was one of the sites that I first started out reading for my training information. It was where I learned about Mike Robertson, Eric Cressey, and Bill Hartman. Therefore, you could say I may have never ended up at IFAST if it wasn't for the site.

I owe a huge thanks to Mike Robertson for allowing me to co-author with him! As I have mentioned on here before, Mike (a.k.a Tomato Paste - just look at the pic below!) is a really smart guy and someone who I greatly look up to in the field. If you are not already checking out his stuff, then do yourself a favor and head to his website - there is a ton of great information.

In other news, I will be heading to the USAW course this weekend and am pretty excited. I have been practicing my clean, and it is coming along fairly well.

However, I can definitely see how the Olympic lifts take years to master. I was watching Glenn Pendlay's DVDs, Olympic Weightlifting Techniques, which are quite good by the way, and he was saying how the sport is similar to golf in that some lifts/shots feel great while others feel terrible. Even after practicing for only a short time, I can totally see this now - some cleans feel good while others do not at all.

I also just started reading Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky after seeing on Patrick Ward's Facebook that many people recommend it. The book is about stress and how we cope with and react to it differently today than what we used to. Because of this, we have many stress-related diseases.

Stress is something we impose on our clients each time they train with us. Therefore, it is important for us to have a good understanding of the stress-response and how we can manage it along with our clients' other stressors outside of the gym.

I have only finished the first two chapters, but I can already see myself picking up more books by this guy. He has a way of making geeky things (which I already like) more interesting and understandable for the general population.