What does Dan talk about for the whole seminar?

Dan starts by teaching the Koji squat, named after the famous Japanese hammer thrower Koji Murofushi, who won the gold medal at the Athens Olympics in 2004.

The Koji squat sequence starts with the front squat, which is easy to perform if you’re an Olympic lifter.  Then Dan adds chains, which create an instability.  After that, he adds kettlebells to the chains, which add even more instability.  Finally, he starts pushing the kettlebells around, which make things really quite challenging…

Apparently, this was a technique used by Koji but I can’t find anything else about it online.

***

Dan doesn’t do assessments any more

Dan explains why he doesn’t do assessments any more.  Why?  Because everyone has the same issues these days:

• The hip flexors are tight
• The glutes are weak
• The pectorals are tight
• The rhomboids are weak

I have to agree but I am not sure that I would go so far as to preclude assessment, although I understand that Mike Boyle doesn’t do them either.  I guess when you have a large number of young athletes it is much less of an issue.

***

So what’s with the warm ups?

Well, Dan likes the idea of covering lots of movement patterns in every warm up.  Then, even if you are doing a body-part split or an upper/lower or a push/pull/legs split, you are covering all the key movement patterns every time.

Dan likes walking with weight so he starts with walks:

• Waiters’ walks (right then left hands)
• Suitcase walks (right then left hands)
• Heartbeat walks – pushing a kettlebell out from the chest while walking

Dan also likes working on hip flexor mobility, so he does:

• Goblet squats
• Hip flexor stretches
• Boot strap squats, to pry apart the hips (think Pavel)

Dan really likes planks so he does:

• Planks
• Planks with one arm raised
• Planks with one arm and the opposite leg raised

Dan is a fan of scapular mobility so he recommends serratus press ups.  I love these things.  I love how people who have never done them get almost zero ROM but when you’ve been doing them a few months you start to get massive amounts of ROM and people look at you like you’re a mutant…

Dan likes mixing up one arm and one leg training to help improve whole body stability.  I am not convinced by these except for testing to see whether someone has stability.  I don’t really believe that these drills improve stability and balance and I don’t like the torque on the spine.  Having said that, it really shows people how unstable they are (as the attendees on the seminar discover).  Additionally, I think it was useful to hear this approach and I will definitely start playing around with a few stability one-leg / one-arm exercises here and there to see what happens.

Dan likes Turkish Get Ups and Swings, so he does some of these at this point.  He also introduces a sequence to assist with the Get Up called the star plank progression, which starts with a plank, lifts an arm, lifts a leg to produce a side-lying plank with one arm and one leg in the air and then shifts the leg over to touch the ground on the other side to produce the high hips bridge position.

Finally, Dan goes back to hip mobility when he does some hurdle step overs.

You can see where Dan’s thoughts are during most of his warm up items, although the massive quantity of exercises seem overwhelming to me.  I do maybe eight or ten exercises (including foam rolling movements) each day but the sheer quantity of movements Dan runs through seem to take an enormous amount of time.

This is the point I realised that when Dan says that the warm up is the workout, he means it.

***

And what’s with the complexes?

Dan introduces complexes.  From the look of the attendees, I would have made them sign something legally quite robust before letting them loose on a proper barbell.  But then I am quite risk averse… Anyway, Dan introduces the following complex:

• Row
• Clean
• Front squat
• Overhead press
• Back squat
• Good morning

***

And finally, the workouts

Dan’s purpose in the workouts section is to introduce a different way of doing things.  He notes that while the workouts appear easy on the DVD when the attendees are doing them, they become much more interesting with serious weight.

Dan introduces a set / rep sequence involving 3 sets of 5 reps, 3 reps and 2 reps.  His chosen exercises are:

• Safety squat bar Koji squat (reps 5 ,3, 2)
• Bench press (with chains) (reps 5, 3, 2)
• Hurdle walk overs (single walk)
• Tumble walks (single walk)
• Backward sled pulls (single walk)

The whole sequence is done all the way through in one go before moving on to the next set.

I wasn’t convinced by introducing beginners (as most of the attendees appeared, in strength terms if not technique) to chains.  I agree with Dan in a lot of areas, like focus on technique and strengthening glutes/rhomboids, stretching pectorals/hip flexor.  However, instead of dynamic work, I would prioritise getting stronger at the repetition method on squats, deadlifts, presses and rows.  I just don’t see dynamic work as useful for beginners.

It’s the kind of thing that you can do with unlimited equipment, time, resources and enthusiasm.  It looks like great fun but it ain’t going to happen in my garage….

***

Dan’s final seminar was more interesting than I had expected.  However, there was a lot more on the warm ups than I anticipated and a lot less on the complexes.  I was also surprised by a few things, including the Koji squats, chains and tumbling.  I’m not convinced by them all but they have made me think.

I was interested to see what Dan would do in this seminar, because I have played around with Olympic lifting a little myself but still classify myself as a beginner.  I figure that I can clean well enough not to feel like an idiot but I would never jerk unless I had to.  I’d be more comfortable push pressing.

Dan, telling it like it is

***

Olympic lifting is jumping with weights

Dan starts out with the idea that Olympic lifting is jumping with weights.

He explains that the jump is a hip hinge driven by the hamstrings.  He then works through a number of hamstring drills based around the Romanian deadlift, the exercise that was so beloved of the Bulgarian Weightlifting team.

***

The hips

Dan then explains the hip does two basic functions:

• The hip hinge
• The squat

Dan explains that the hip hinge is the key to explosive movements like jumping and throwing the discus.

Dan explains that the squatting movement is also fundamental but in a different way.  He believes that it is the squatting “movement” that is key to athletic performance and not the amount of weight involved.  So he would rather his athletes squat lighter weights regularly than heavier weights less often.  I need to think more about this to understand what he means by this.  I think I can see what he is getting at but I am not completely convinced.

***

The “muscle beach” position

Dan explains how the first position that you need to master before beginning the Olympic lift is the “muscle beach” position, where you set your weight on your heels, push your chest out and put your chin up.  Letting the weight get in front will pull you onto your toes and you’ll lose the weight.

Dan comes back to the “heels” cue a couple of times.  He seems to think it is very important.  I think I can see why but it’s not the easiest thing to put into words…

***

The snatch

Dan always teaches the snatch first because he figures that the clean is easy to do when you know how to snatch.  He starts teaching the snatch by coming back to the Romanian deadlift.  He aims to create as much tension as possible in the hamstrings by steadily getting more and more range-of-motion in the Romanian deadlift until the bar is close to the ground.

Dan explains that the Romanian deadlift came from Nicu Vlad. He claims to have been there when it was invented but you never quite know with Dan…

Dan is relaxed about the bar path.  As the weight gets heavier, the bar path tends to get shorter…

Dan then uses the goblet squat to help groove the correct position for the overhead catch position.

***

The jerk

Dan likes to teach the jerk by starting the jerk from the top position.

He also likes to find out which your dominant leg is by pushing you off balance…  Works once, apparently…

***

That’s it.  It’s an interesting seminar but I get the feeling I will need to watch it again with a bar in my hands to get the full benefit.  If you’ve watched it and benefited, please let me know…

Having watched the DVD a few times, I decided I’d tweak my own training programme now and incorporate some of the lessons learned from the DVD.  

The two main lessons I learned from the DVD were:

1. If it’s important, do it everyday
2. Focus on Janda’s phasic and tonic muscles for long-term health

So, let’s have a look at what I’m going to do about it…

***

#1: If it’s important, do it everyday

While talking about this, Dan also discusses the importance of training movements and not muscles.  So I came away with the idea that since I am concerned for long-term health reasons to have full facility of movement in my old age, I should be doing the basic movements everyday.

Now, Dan is at pains to point out that you don’t have to train the movements under heavy load everyday, you should just make sure you do the movements everyday.  I like this idea, as it doesn’t take long to pull together a few targeted warm ups that cover all the bases.

This is my current workout plan, based on a five-day split.  It started out as a full six-day split based on the DC training model of push-pull-legs-rest-push-pull-legs.  I then modified it to take out one of my pulling sessions because my body just doesn’t recover fast enough to make bi-weekly gains on pull ups.

So, as you can see, there are some big holes that need filling when it comes to covering all of the bases, especially on my pull and push days!  So, in the last week or so, I’ve been playing around with the following warm-up, using two sets of a few reps or one stretch on each side as appropriate.  It’s not a lot but I feel that it is making a different to my overall movement quality.

1. Goblet squat with kettlebell
2. Lunge stretch
3. One leg RDL
4. Press up
5. Inverted row

Now, the eagle-eyed amongst you will note that I have not included anything in respect of twist or gait.  For the twist, I still haven’t got my head around how this might be best trained.  I am still doing my own research.  I suspect I may come down on the anti-rotation side of the argument, which could be interesting.  As an aside, one of the most challenging anti-rotation drills I have done is the one-arm pull up…

***

#2: Focus on Janda’s phasic and tonic muscles for long-term health

Dan made a number of interesting comments about training on the back of a discussion about Janda’s phasic and tonic muscles, as follows:

• Phasic muscles get weak and so we should train them as fast twitch muscle fibres
• Tonic muscles get tight and so we should stretch them everyday

What are the phasic and tonic muscles, you ask?  Well, there is a long list but here is the table that Dan puts up on the board:

Now, I think I probably train everything as fast twitch muscle fibres so I’m probably covered on the first point.  As regards the second point, I think I might be a little lacking.  So I’m going to include the two stretches that Dan suggests after each workout, which focus on the pectorals, biceps and hip flexors.

As I see how they impact on my general movement quality and how I feel, I will do an update. I’ll also be writing more on Janda in due course, probably once I’ve read a book or two…

***

 That’s all folks.  For more on Dan, check out my selection of Dan John articles.

***

So what’s it all about?

The DVD is devoted mainly to teaching the two basic kettlebell exercises, which are the swing and the turkish get up.  Right at the very end, Dan goes over teaching the snatch.  Also, Dan gives a quick talk about what he calls the “hip displacement continuum”.

The format of the DVD is Dan delivering a workshop to a room of delegates, which include some other well-known fitness writers.  I am sure I spotted the World’s Strongest Librarian!  And 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 few 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.

***

The swing and the Turkish Get Up

I had mixed views on the teaching of the swing and the Turkish Get Up.  I really liked the emphasis on these movements as I agree that they have good corrective properties and there are lots of benefits to doing them.  However, I do think that the Turkish Get Up was taught better than the swing.

• Turkish Get Up: I really liked the way Dan taught the Turkish Get Up, as it emphasised the bottom portion of the movement, which I feel has the lion’s share of the benefit but is much less tedious to do than the top portion.  I like the high hips position, as I think that people need to do more bridging work and I like that it emphasises open rather than partly closed hips.  I like the emphasis on the shoulder stability.
• Swing: I felt that Dan gave some great explanations for the way that swing should be done and I liked the discussion of why most people do the swing wrong, in that they keep doing squat-swings.  However, I couldn’t help noticing that most of the delegates kept doing squat-swings and I couldn’t see any cues that were helping them.  Maybe I was hoping for some magic here that just doesn’t exist.  Maybe the swing is just really hard to learn.  That has certainly been my experience.

This made me wonder whether there is something that needs to happen before we teach people to swing.  I REALLY hate the squat-swing.  It hurts and it’s bad for you.  In fact, I would go as far as to say that doing a swing wrong (i.e. using the quads and lower back) is probably as bad as doing a back squat wrong (i.e. using the quads and lower back), which ranks pretty high on a list of silly things to do in the gym.

If anyone has any great cues to get people to start swinging properly, I’m all ears.

***

Hip displacement continuum

Dan discusses a concept that he came up with called hip displacement continuum.  The idea of this continuum is that at one end of the scale the hip uses a very large range of motion and is the primary hinge.  At the other end of the scale the knee has more of a role to play.

Dan notes that the swing is the most extreme example of the hip taking almost all of the hinge function.  Dan demonstrates this live (which obviously I can’t do) so to demonstrate this, I think I’ll pick Tony Gentilcore as having the best form I have seen.  You can see in this video that Tony’s swing is pretty much pure hip hinge:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzMkFw2UMNc

And here’s Eirik Sandvik demonstrating the goblet squat, which has much less hip hinge and quite a lot of knee hinge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKi2bcj2whc

It’s a nice way of classifying leg movements according to joint movements.  I need to think more about how the ranges of motion (ROM) relate to the classifications, as I think the deadlift probably moves through less hip ROM than the ass-to-grass goblet squat but obviously the knee moves through a much smaller angle.  I wonder whether it’s the knee angle that is the defining characteristic?

***

Have you seen this DVD?  What did you think?

Dan gets philosophical

***

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:

1. The role of the strength coach
2. 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.

***

#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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

***

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.

***

The above examples set out four different sports, which are:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Shot – for the shot, wind is less of an issue and technique is less complicated so it is impacted more by a good programme.

***

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.

***

#2: Dan’s personal strength training philosophy

Dan’s personal strength training philosophy comes in two parts:

1. 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.
2. 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.

***

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.

And if you’re already a fan of Mr J and I’ve missed out your favourite article,  just let me know in the comments.

***

1. Three simple tips that work: if you have time, read the whole this article.  Hell, if you have time, read everything Dan has ever written.  But if you are short of time, and who isn’t, just read the first tip about using rack work to improve your strength from a dead stop.
2. One lift a day: it’s a simple principle and one I have yet to try.  Bench on Monday, Row on Tuesday, Squat on Wednesday, Press on Saturday and Deadlift on Sunday.  Workouts are short, maybe just 45 minutes, but brutal.  Dan asks “have you ever tried to squat for 45 minutes?” No?  Me neither.
3. The 40 day programme: This is one of those articles that is great fun to read if you’ve already seen the light and somewhat painful if you haven’t.  Dan wades in, all guns blazing, and makes it known that in his opinion most people who train “to look good naked” have to be naked before you can tell that they train.  Ouch!  Dan tells it how it is: if you want to lose fat, lose fat.  If you want to gain muscle, gain muscle.  Stop trying to ride two horses with one ass.  You know who you are Mr Internet Warrior, you.  The 40 day programme?  It’s a gift for reading to the end of the article and one I am looking forward to trying out one day.
4. I hate medium: the source of the great Dan John quote “fat loss is an all-out war.  Give it 28 days, only 28 days.  Attack it with all you have.  It’s not a lifestyle choice; it’s a battle.  Lose fat and then get back into moderation.”  So saying, Dan lost 26lbs on the Velocity Diet in one month so he knows what he’s talking about.  But Dan doesn’t limit himself to talking about fat loss, he covers all the bases.  The premise is that your highs need to be high and your lows low.  Most athletes spend most of their time doing chipper workouts when they need to go hard, to go heavy and to go home.  Still don’t get it?  Read the article.
5. More new techniques: Dan goes through some stuff that he likes.  He praises the Neti Pot, Sugar-Free Metamucil, Vibram Five Fingers, and fish oil, amongst other things.  But none of these are the jewel in the article, which is his ladders protocol: 2, 3, 5, and 10.  One set is 20 reps.  Do five sets and you’ve done 100 reps, just like German Volume Training, but a lot easier.  Dan recommends you try this with a single lift for a week’s worth of workouts to get some extra volume.   
6. My secret coaching methods: Dan reveals the secret to why people ask him to coach them and extols the virtues of training at home, maybe in your own Garage Gym.
7. The Gable Method: “if it’s important, do it every day.  If it’s not important, don’t do it at all” was Olympic medal-winner and coach Dan Gable’s motto.  Dan picks it up, dusts it off and gives it a new lease of life in this article.  If you’re talking about a particular lift, it doesn’t necessarily mean every day (although it can!) but certainly every training session.  Dan also gives a great little introduction to Percy Cerutty, the iconoclastic Australian track coach who suggested as early as the 1960s that runners should lift weights and run up hills.
8. The Litvinov Workout: Dan tells the story of Sergey Litvinov at the 1983 World Track and Field Championships in Helsinki, Finland.  Litvinov took gold in the hammer that year, noticeably leaner and more muscular than the other competitors.  His secret was the rather strange workout that he did: eight reps of front squats followed immediately by a 400m run.  He lifted 405lbs for the front squats and ran the 400m in 75s.   
9. Three mentors: Dan talks about his personal encounters with three great sportsmen, Wilt Chamberlain, Fortune Gordien and Robby Robinson.  The lessons? One: you’ve got to do it in competition.  Two: simplify.  Three: toss out the extras.
10. Dan John’s Top 10 tips: Dan offers some no-nonsense tips for beginners and experts alike, which seems like a good place to stop.

But if you want to see Dan in action, check out this short clip on YouTube about goal setting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmGRH4eSSAs

Or this clip on strength training and physical performance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn1NUoLi0Hg