For my birthday, I was kindly given the four-part DVD series that Dan John filmed as part of his book launch for Never Let Go. Part one covers Dan’s Philosophy of Strength Training.
Dan gets philosophical
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So what’s it all about?
The DVD basically has two main parts, which I’ll talk about in a bit more detail lower down. They are:
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The role of the strength coach
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Dan’s personal lifting philosophy
The format of the DVD is Dan delivering a lecture to a room of delegates, which include some other well-known fitness writers such as Lyle McDonald. And I need to make it clear that Dan is a very enthusiastic and engaging speaker, interrupting himself often and sometimes even interrupting his own interruptions with funny asides and comments! This is not a dry, boring lecture by any means.
I took quite a few notes as I was going along so this is quite a big write up. Since Dan draws a lot of diagrams and writes key points on a whiteboard, I’ve also prepared a few diagrams in PowerPoint to help you see what he’s talking about.
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#1: What is the role of the strength coach?
Dan starts by making the point that this presentation is directed at strength coaches but that if you are training at home, and you don’t have a trainer or a lifting crew, then you effectively are your own strength coach.
Dan then explains what he considers to be the different levels of strength coaching. You need to master a level before you proceed to the next level. The levels are:
- Do no harm – Dan notes that this level is often transgressed by both coaches and by people acting as their own strength coaches. However, it’s the most important, because a hurt athlete can’t perform and can’t train so they can’t improve. So, don’t hurt your athletes and don’t hurt yourself.
- Address issues – Dan explains how this is the level in which the coach addresses issues that the athletes face. Dan sees this as addressing qualities. Qualities are aspects of an athletes physical and psychological profile that can be abstracted and which are relevant to their performance. Qualities could be strength, power, endurance, body composition and flexibility. Dan is concerned to stress the point that there is no point addressing qualities that won’t have an impact on the athletes’ performance or long-term health. So figuring out what the necessary qualities are is essential to addressing the right issues.
- Yin-Yang – Dan uses the Yin-Yang model to explain how technical development in a sport and strength training can relate to each other in an advanced method of strength coaching. The two are developed separately most of the time but sometimes there is benefit in doing a sporting movement under load or doing a lift that looks a bit like a sporting movement.
- CANI – Constant and Never-Ending Improvement – Dan explains that at this level, the strength coach is constantly making observations and tweaking the programme to make sure that an athlete is always improving.
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How different sports are affected by strength coaching
After explaining the four levels of strength coaching, Dan goes on to discuss how the four different levels of coaching relate to different sports. In order to teach this, he starts by explaining how different sports fall on a continuum from clear to fuzzy. What do clear and fuzzy mean? Well, it is easier to see how a strength and conditioning programme impacts on some sports than on other sports.
So if it is clear to see how a programme impacts on the sport, this sport falls at the clear end of the contiuum. If it is very fuzzy to see how a programme impacts on a sport, this sport falls at the fuzzy end of the continuum. Most sports will fall somewhere inbetween.
For example, it is easy to see how a properly-designed programme can help a 1500m runner improve their time. The time is either quicker or slower than it was last season. On the other hand, it is harder to see how a training programme affects a whole hockey team, especially since the athletes in the teams they play each year are changing.
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The above examples set out four different sports, which are:
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Deadlift – it’s really easy to see how the deadlift can be improved by training. It either goes up or it doesn’t and suits don’t really help that much.
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Team sports – at the opposite end of the spectrum, it’s really hard to see how a programme can impact on a team sport, such as football.
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Discus – the discus falls somewhere close to team sports but less fuzzy because improving explosive strength is definitely going to help. On the other hand, an adverse wind or nerves can impact on the delicately balanced technique that is needed and make things go badly wrong.
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Shot – for the shot, wind is less of an issue and technique is less complicated so it is impacted more by a good programme.
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How different levels of strength coaching match up to different sports
Dan then explains how the different levels of strength coaching then match up with the different types of sports. The performance of strength athletes tends to be reflective of how strong they are, so level 4 is needed for these athletes. Team sports have lots of valuable athletes and not hurting them is a great plan, which makes level 1 ideal for them. Other sports sit somewhere in between.
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#2: Dan’s personal strength training philosophy
Dan’s personal strength training philosophy comes in two parts:
- Train movements not muscles – Dan identifies seven fundamental movements, which are squatting, deadlifting, ab roll outs, pushing (vertical and horizontal), pulling (vertical and horizontal), gait and rotation. Dan notes that most people fail to train gait, which he does a lot of with farmers’ walks, waiter’s walks, suitcase walks and forward and backward sled pulls.
- If it’s important, do it everyday – Dan believes that if believe that something is worth doing, then you should do it everyday. That doesn’t mean that you need to go heavy every day, but if it’s important, then you should at least do the movement pattern.
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Have you seen this DVD? Did you see the lecture? Were you there in the audience? Please let me know what you thought of it.
