Interview with Isaac Wilkins

Towards the end of 2010, I approached some of the strength enthusiasts, writers, strength coaches and personal trainers that I knew and asked them to do interviews. Little did I know how much I would gain from doing this.

Without exception, I was simply blown away by their generosity. They all gave freely of their time and expertise in discussing all manner of training tips and issues and I learned a great deal from them.

If you missed any of them, you can find them here:

So I am both pleased and proud to announce that I am starting 2011 with a number of similar interviews, including this great interview with Isaac Wilkins, a performance coach working with athletes and recreational lifters and, as you will find, an extremely thoughtful and intelligent guy.

CB: Isaac, thanks so much for doing this interview. I have been a big fan of yours for some time now. I really appreciate your genuine approach to the business of fitness and the passion you have for helping people achieve their goals. Why don’t you introduce yourself to my readers?

IW: Hey man, thank you so much for the kind words. They mean a lot, and thanks for the opportunity!

As for who I am, well, the quick and clean version is that I’m a performance coach living and training clients in Bangor, ME, in the US (I know you have a strong number of UK readers). I also spent several years in Charleston, SC, and I know there are quite a few people who associate me with the South, too.

I earned my graduate degree from the University of Maine where I worked with Football, Soccer, and Women’s Ice Hockey. Since then I’ve been working with athletes, specializing in Football, Soccer, and Wrestling/Grappling as well as hard-training adults who want to take their life to the next level.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s who I really am: I’m a performance coach (that means “educated meathead”) who uses any and all means necessary and available to help my clients achieve their goals and maximize their life. I get to guide driven and exceptional people to achieving goals that “normal” people shy away from or don’t think are possible. I have the greatest job in the world.

I like my beer dark, my women smart, and my steak rare.

CB: Educated meathead. I like that. Plus, it seems that we have at least three things in common (beer, women and steak). So you describe yourself as a performance coach, working with athletes to improve their strength, muscular development, movement patterns, rehabilitation and mental toughness. Can you describe some recent examples of how you have been improving an aspect of an athlete’s performance?

IW: Sure thing, Chris. Every athlete is a project and very rarely is it just “one thing” that you do in order to maximize their results. You really need to train the entire athlete if you are going to get them to their potential. As an example, one of my current athletes is a national-level Master’s discus thrower. When we started, she was spending way too much time performing aerobic exercise to “stay in shape”, was very quad-dominant, was a little too heavy, and overthought/overstressed everything.

She’s a very open-minded and motivated client, so we’ve really been able to do a lot. In a nutshell here’s what we’ve done:

Revamped her warm-up process to activate her posterior chain specifically and her CNS in general. She doesn’t train (or throw) until there’s some “spring in her step”. Every time she’s to perform (gym or circle) she needs to be ready to go and we’ve now tweaked her warm-up to maximize that.
Slashed the aerobic exercise. As a thrower her need of aerobic conditioning is minimal, and excessive, hard steady-state distance training was doing nothing but slowing her down. I’ve never seen a power athlete with such a long loading phase for jumps as she had when we started. She still does the occasional light “cardio” for GPP and recovery work, but we’ve altered her training sessions to provide a minor conditioning effect and increased her overall training intensity but reduced her volume. She’s now much leaner and more snappy.
Put her on a steady diet of Deadlifts, Low Box Squats, Kettlebell Swings, and Glute-ham Raises. Her jumps, triple-extension, and overall power are far better, and she has less back and knee pain than she did before. She actually gained so much strength so quickly last season that it took her a while to compensate her throwing technique. She threw some good PR’s, but it took her a while to catch up to the new explosiveness!
After much work, including lots of telling her to “just stop being crazy”, she’s at least somewhat backed off of the “more is better” line of thought that so many athletes have. We’ve pretty much mentally conditioned her to the point where she is ok with working hard, working perfect, and getting out of the gym/throwing pit.

She’s leaner, stronger, more balanced, and far more explosive now. Needless to say, we’re pretty excited about this upcoming season.

CB: That is a fantastic case study, Isaac. You really thought about that programme, I can tell. Do you find that there are areas that you can always improve quickly with athletes that come to you? Quick wins and low-hanging fruit? Or is it always a slow, steady process of gradual improvement?

IW: Man, that’s a great question that I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me before.

The answer is “both”. There’s almost always something that can be done early to improve an athlete’s performance. When developing an athlete, it’s important to look at it in the right way, and here’s where I think training gets messed up a lot: Too many athletes and coaches get caught up in promoting “their program” or put their goals and ideas on the athlete. Or even worse, they just copy a famous coach’s program and stick it on their athletes, regardless of what the athlete actually needs.

There are two things you need to keep in mind when programming athletes or fitness clientele: What are the demands of the sport, and where is the athlete strong/weak right now? That’s it. If you can internalize that and are able to make those two meet then you have what you need to churn out great athletes.

For example, most athletes (especially younger ones) will walk into your gym way too tight through the hips and way too weak in the glutes and hamstrings. Fix those areas and teach them how to drive and explode with their hips and they’ll run faster, jump higher, throw harder, and so on.

Other athletes will have a simple technique issue such as having never been taught how to run correctly. I had a heavily recruited high school offensive lineman (American Football for you guys over the pond) come to me for combine preparation. His 40yd dash time was 6.0, which is not scholarship-worthy. I watched him sprint and was shocked; It seriously looked like he was doing a fast jog.

I taught him a track start (allowed in the test), fixed his hands, taught him to run at an angle, and got him off his heels. He ran a 5.5 at a combine two weeks later. We still had work to do, but that’s quite an improvement and all we did was fix some major technique flaws. Low hanging fruit.

So that’s how you can see great improvement quickly: Find something the athlete is weak in and bring it up to speed. Then go find something else they’re weak at and make it a strong point. Rinse and repeat. Building a great athlete over time is a long, gradual process of this weak point to strong point development.

CB: Great answer, I like it. Hard work, intelligent work and patience. Things that many people like to ignore. And on strength building in particular, what kind of templates do you use for your athletes? What kind of set and rep schemes? How do you use max-effort work, dynamic effort work and repetition effort work?

IW: Strength is the cornerstone of my program. My objective, regardless of the specifics of a client’s needs, is to get them as strong as absolutely possible relative to their bodyweight. If they’re strong then everything else is easier to produce. So no matter what the client’s programming consists of, we do some legit strength work.

As for a basic template of what we do, most sessions go something like this:

Dynamic warm up: a dynamic warm-up including soft-tissue work, upper and lower body mobility, and activation work. This also doubles as skill practice for some basic movements like squatting, lunging, pushing, and pulling.
Dynamic exercise: we then perform a dynamic exercise, either lower body (jumping), upper body (plyo push-ups or throws), or full body (dumbbell or kettlebell cleans or snatches). In addition to developing power, this helps prime the CNS for the upcoming exercises.
Max effort exercise: usually we then move on to the “big” exercise of the day. This is the Max Effort exercise, either lower or upper body. With the athletes we tend to work up and try to beat records in heavy 5′s or 3′s. With more advanced athletes I will go up to a heavy single or double every few months. This is more for the mental exercise and the occasional challenge. My younger and less experienced athletes don’t do this. They just don’t get much out of heavy singles and tend to risk injury through bad technique.
Repetition effort exercise: after that we move on to repetition work for whatever the goals may be (usually hypertrophy). This is done fairly quickly, usually in a circuit-like format of 2-5 exercises with relatively brief rest periods between. I’m also a big fan of “traveling” circuits where station A might be something like Foot-elevated Push-ups, then the athletes lunge 20yd to Station B which is Rope Inverted Rows, then lunge back, etc. This lets me get a lot of work in over a short period of time to maintain a mild conditioning effect.

CB: That looks very like Joe DeFranco’s stuff, or Jason Feruggia’s, both of which are awesome. But moving on from strength, and onto the subject of rehabilitation, you’ve had to work on yourself quite a lot over the years, I understand, with a number of injuries. Does that make you extra careful with your athletes?

IW: Oh, yeah, I’m a mess. That’s one of the big reasons why I’m in the field, actually. I kept jacking myself up as a recreational lifter/powerlifter, so then I’d have to learn how to fix it. The more I learned, the more interested in performance training in general I became.

You know, I can’t say that I’m “extra careful” with my athletes, per se. Unfortunately if you’re going to push the envelope of performance, whether it’s in the gym or on the pitch, you’re going to get hurt eventually. That’s just the way it is. I know coaches that spend more time trying to keep their athletes from getting hurt in the gym than actually getting them strong. And, as a result, they tend to have a bunch of weak pussies for athletes. These are often the coaches who spend lots of time teaching agility ladder and stability ball stuff.

All of this experience being messed up has taught me a lot about how to stay injury-free, though. I’ve learned a lot of stupid stuff to avoid and I’ve learned how to keep an eye out for potential problems, which helps me with my athletes. Very, very rarely has an athlete of mine been hurt and I don’t run around wringing my hands with worry about it.

CB: And speaking of strength and size, you’re not a small chap by any means. But your currently in the process of leaning out a little. How are you going about that?

By being miserable and contemplating taking a bite out of my laptop. I kid, I kid (sort of).

Yeah, I’m leaning out a little. I went through some fairly serious life problems that saw me not even finish a workout for about a year and my weight balloon way up to about 295lbs. The gym, and a lot of other things, had stopped being fun. After getting my head on straight(er) I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that if I couldn’t live a healthy and fit lifestyle then what business did I have coaching other people to do it?

It started with just getting back into the gym, but now that I’m starting to see my abs come out (under the right light *wink*) while trying to maintain as much size as possible there’s a bit more to it:

I’m lifting in pretty much the same manner as I usually do. I still am working to push up my primary lifts as well as my new challenge of conquering the barbell overhead press. You need to stay strong when dieting and continue to push for improvement in the weight room in order to maintain muscle mass. I certainly am not gaining strength very fast, but I have increased my lifts since I started dieting.
My assistance work is done in a circuit form much like I described for my athletes above. This is a bit different than from what I used to do (which was more old-school straight set bodybuilding for the assistance stuff), but I think I’ll keep it.
I usually have a “conditioning” day per week where I play with some exercises I haven’t done in a while, do some sort of challenge for time, or something like 100 kettlebell swings with each hand. I don’t structure this day much and just try to do something hard and take a mental break. Very technical, I know.
Nutritionally I mostly just cut out the garbage. I have been experimenting with intermittent fasting on Mondays and Thursdays for the past few weeks and so far so good, but otherwise there’s been no big tricks. I tend to run better on a lower carbohydrate diet anyway, so I keep my normal days’ carb intake somewhere around 80-120g per day, mostly following a paleo-type diet. I get a little looser on the weekends and intentionally take my carb intake up a bit, but other than one or two big “cheat” style meals, usually pizza or something similar it’s still pretty clean.

I’m a pretty hardcore nutrition geek so not over-analyzing it has been a struggle. But I’ve come to the realization that you can train hard or diet hard, but you can’t do both for long. I have done some very hard dieting in the past, which worked, but my training and lifestyle really suffered. This approach of training hard and dieting moderately has been a lot more fun and just as effective.

CB: And what do your own training sessions look like? Other than a bit of fat loss, what goals are you working towards?

IW: My training sessions look a lot like my athletes’ that I described above. I tend to focus more on the power lifts in their competition form than my athletes do as that’s my sport. I also do more barbell Olympic-style lifting because it’s fun for me. I don’t tend to teach it to my athletes as I don’t find the return worth the investment for most athletes.

I do teach some of my adults the Olympic lifts as I have longer to train them and it’s more recreational for them, just like me. We old, broken-down meatheads need something to keep us interested.

As for goals the fat loss is the primary goal right now, along with some gymnastic movement-type goals. I’m just taking it slow to maintain as much mass as possible and continue to slowly build the primary lifts. Business and writing have really taken the vast majority of my energy for the past few months, so I’ve had a hard time focusing on a real hardcore physical goal. That’s something I need to remedy in the coming year.

CB: You’re planning one day to open your own facility. Let’s day-dream for a moment about what that might look like. Tell us how you’d like to fit it out. Spare no detail, please.

IW: Ooh, now that’s a can of worms that you might regret opening. This is something that I could talk about for hours (just ask my interns), but I’ll try to spare you of that.

It’ll be several phases of development, but the final phase will look like this: An open warehouse-style facility with 20+ foot ceilings. The floor will have plenty of open space. There will be a 50 yd indoor turf area as well as a half wrestling mat area. Ropes and rings will hang from the ceilings. There will be multiple power racks, Olympic/deadlift platforms, squat stands, and one competition bench press. A couple of glute-ham raises a 45-degree hyperextension will round out the stationary equipment.

Other than that stuff I don’t usually use much. Most of my training utilizes barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, bands, chains, sleds/prowlers, sandbags, sledgehammers, and Bulgarian bags. I’ll have some toys like specialty bars (I especially like safety squat bars, buffalo bars, and Swiss bars), fat bars, logs, some strongman equipment, and grip stuff, but otherwise that’s about it.

I’ve found that in general the success of a facility and its athletes is inversely correlated to the amount of money spent on equipment. My goal isn’t to build some sort of shiny showroom of the latest equipment, but an old-school physical culture hall with a few new toys devoted to building great athletes, a great community, and a great culture.

Oh, and a bad-ass stereo system.

CB: Sound brilliant, I can’t wait to see it. And you run a couple of nice little websites, including Wilkins Power and Strength, your main site. One of them, NewPolyMath, was formed in praise of the the Complete Man,the Renaissance Man, or Polymath. It’s about enjoying culture, music, arts, women, sports and all that life has to offer. Tell us about some of the cool things that you enjoy outside of the gym. Go on, surprise us…

IW: Outside the gym? What’s this “life” thing you speak of? Just kidding.

I’ve sort of had an “awakening” over the past couple of years about what being a man and living life is all about. I was in some serious times in my life a while back and I realized that what I needed to do was to get serious about not taking life, or myself, so seriously. Life is this fun, dark, exciting, twisted, and totally awesome thing.

You know that feeling when a beautiful woman walks into the room, looks at you, and smiles? That’s a slice of life, man. You know that feeling when you’re stumbling around in the middle of the night just trying to make it to the can and you smash your toe on the door jamb? That’s the other side of life letting you know that it’s still there. They’re both life.

That’s what NewPolymath is all about: Living and maximizing your life. It’s figuring out what being a man is all about while taking what life gives you, squeezing every drop out of it, and doing things on YOUR terms.

As far as what I do outside the gym that would be surprising… Well, I guess I’ll go over what seems to shock people once they realize that Mongo can read…

On that note, I read. Constantly. Lately it’s been a lot of business, mindset, and training material, but I try to knock out a novel every couple of months and a “classic” of some kind as well.

I listen to music almost all of the time, like almost everyone else in our culture. What people find surprising is the wide range of music I listen to. I’m always trying to find some great underground singer or band. The same with movies. I’m always chasing some indie film and irritating my friends with my enthusiastic reviews of them.

I’m a big “skill and experiences” guy. I’m always trying to learn something, research some esoteric topic, or finding a new destination or experience. I love going to local sporting events, theater productions, and music shows. I’m always trying out a new recipe in the kitchen. I’m a casual outdoorsman (hunting and fishing) and I love to garden. I’ve lately been trying my hand at wood carving and serving as the world’s worst lab assistant to one of my buddies who brews beer.

Oh, and my other obsession is constant improvement and becoming a superhuman. Tim Ferris totally stole my thunder with his new (but awesome) book. It’s cool, though. I’m bigger than he is.

CB: Significantly. In fact, you probably ate his bodyweight for lunch. Let’s wrap up now with the question I’ve been dying to ask. What’s this panda thing all about?

IW: Ah… the Panda thing.

Well, first off I’ll say that I’m blessed with something that every successful man should have: a group of friends who show me no respect whatsoever. Thanks to them I’ve had the nickname of “Panda”, and at times “The Pretty, Pretty Panda” since my undergraduate days.

In college I was operating a much more classically goth-lifestyle and wore almost entirely black clothing. I still do wear a lot of black (it’s a good color for me), but at the time it was a statement. I’m also a pretty pale guy. By “pretty pale” I mean that if my shirt comes off at night little kids get blinded and moths start circling me. So at one point somebody said that I was bear-like in my physique and one of my wittier friends latched onto that and started calling me “Panda” for my ebony clothing and alabaster skin.

Needless to say, that’s not the image that you use to get chicks. I learned that girls love panda bears. I did also learn that girls don’t love sleeping with panda bears, despite how fierce one maintains the panda to be. Check Youtube. Panda maulings left and right, damn it.

CB: Every man needs friends like those. Sounds like you have a great bunch there. Anyway, thanks for the great interview, Isaac, I think this will go down as being one of the very best.

IW: Chris, man, thanks for the great questions and the opportunity to express myself. This interview was a blast! You’re running a fantastic site and it’s been an honor to be a part of it. Cheers!

Interview with Isaac Wilkins

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