Garage Blog

Garage Strength has six of the most explosive professional track and field athletes in the entire world. I decided to give whoever could jump t...

We're back again! After a week of semi-activity following the end of my season, I started up training again. During these early stages of offseason training, the hardest thing for me is always just staying in it mentally. Early offseason training isn't particularly fun--when it's 90 degrees outside every day, the gym doesn't have AC, and you have some pretty high reps in your program. So that's easily been my biggest challenge so far, but I still think I've made some decent improvements in and out of the circle. 

This blog is a transcript of a conversation between Garage Strength Head Coach Dane Miller, and three of his post-collegiate throwers: Sam Mattis, Ryan Njegovan, and Noah Kennedy White.

One of my biggest pet peeves as a throws coach is this prevailing idea that throwers can just eat whatever they want, whenever they want. Anyone is welcome to do this, but they should be ok with looking fat and unathletic, as well as training and competing poorly. It’s not productive for throwing or from a health perspective to eat with no plan and no focus on proper nutrition. Proper nutrition is important for all athletes, and it is one of the easiest ways to make huge gains!

I think almost every athlete has been in this situation before: creeping closer to a major competition, beginning your peak, and yet things just feel slightly off. Your legs aren’t moving as fast as you thought they would, and you aren’t throwing as far or lifting as much as you thought you would. Here, I’m going to explain why this is perfectly fine--and even expected.

There are many successful women on the world stage who coaches look to for inspiration. I think many coaches lose sight of the fact that these athletes are throwing, at the heaviest, a 4 kilogram implement (in the case of shot and hammer). The women’s discus only weighs 2.2 pounds! Yet I hear high school coaches telling female athletes things like, “you gotta go to McDonald’s, you gotta put on weight.” This is exactly the wrong attitude to take. Women don’t NEED to be huge to throw far. You can take one of a number of examples of excellent female throwers who are muscular, but not terribly overweight: Maggie Ewen, Valarie Allman, Whitney Ashley, Sandra Perkovic, the list goes on. Perkovic is easily the most dominant female discus thrower alive right now. Ewen is the most well rounded thrower, female or male, on the planet.

Many people see elite athletes training with a lot of frequency. Nine, ten, eleven times per week sometimes. I want to address some of my thoughts on training frequency, and some of the important considerations when a coach or athlete is deciding how much frequency is enough.

A lot of people point out that when you see my athletes benching on Youtube or Instagram, you primarily see them benching with a fat bar. I want to address some common questions I get about why my athletes use a fat bar to bench with, and why I see it as much more beneficial than benching with a standard 45lb bar. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume a fat bar is any bar with a diameter larger than that of a standard bar. Although, ideally, I’d have athletes use a bar with a 2” diameter. So, let’s start.

For those of you who haven’t read my article on why I tend not to program deadlifts for my throwers, check it out here. Since I try not to completely write-off any movement, I wanted to write a quick follow-up that would address a situation where I might program deadlifts for a thrower.

First, I just want to address what some people have probably already decided based on the title: no, I don’t hate deadlifts. Deadlifts can be an extremely effective tool for increasing strength. I really like deadlifts for a sport like wrestling, where more brute strength is required, and the sport itself is more of a grind. But for now, let’s dig deeper into why I don’t have my athletes deadlift in general.

One fairly common training tool used in the throwing world is overweight implements. I have my athletes use heavy shots and discs all of the time, and I thought it would be beneficial for me to outline why I use them with my athletes, and what to consider if you are thinking about using them with yours.

This is a continuation of my article on lifting from the blocks vs. the hang, but this will focus on how I apply these two variations to my throwers. Since I covered the basics of each position in the previous article in this series, I’ll just dive right in.