Garage Blog

After my Sophomore year of college at Messiah College (small division 3 school) my coach left and there were no immediate plans to get a new one. I...

Olympic Weightlifting is one of the most rewarding and most frustrating sports you could compete in. I started Olympic Weightlifting in May 2014 after my collegiate football career. I came out of college hang cleaning 160 kilos, never really snatching or jerking in my life. My first senior nationals the May 2015 I snatched 147 kilos and clean and jerked 175 kilos to place 5th place in a very stacked weight class. After 4 years of increasing my clean and jerk and still snatching the same weight I decided to take some time off after the 2018 senior nationals. I needed to clear my head while also enjoy the birth of my beautiful daughter Henley. I think if I took a different approach toward weightlifting, I might still be lifting right now. We all look back and say, “damn, I wish I would have known that before I started”. Here are 4 things I wish I could have told myself before I started Olympic Weightlifting.

A lot of Olympic weightlifting athletes start around their teenage years (as I did). These I call the “Rebellious Years.” When I started weightlifting, I thought I knew everything. I would lift heavy when I was instructed not to, I argued in defense of my garbage technique for years, I did my own exercises sometimes because I thought what I was doing wasn't working, and most importantly, I wasn't coachable. When I got into my junior and senior years of weightlifting, I started to notice a minimal amount of growth. It was then that I realized that to be a champion you have to have the best technique. There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to be a champion, but my technique was nowhere near the best. As we started breaking down my technique and fixing all my flaws, I found myself extremely frustrated and ready to give up. Slowly but surely, I found myself getting better with my technical movements, however I was still nowhere close to the best. Still frustrated and angry I continue to tell myself “if you would have just listened 5 years ago, you would be closer to the best”

Third babies show early everyone says. I started to show a belly before I was ready to tell anyone I was pregnant. Now it makes sense. Even though my babies were the size of a grain a salt, the fact that there were two of them means two growing placentas, and and even greater increase in water and blood volume. Thus showing earlier that in previous pregnancies makes sense.

This article was prompted with the question, "What would you tell your collegiate freshman self about track and training if you could?" I've touched on this subject before, in an episode of Dane's Platform--if you haven't heard it, it's one of our most popular episodes. Check it out here! 

    2. You have to be very internally driven (no one cares)

Many high level athletes already know this well, but intrinsic motivation is absolutely necessary during the transition from collegiate to post-collegiate competition. There is no conference championship to care about, or any home meets to step up for. Now it’s just you, and USATF Nationals is the only meet that really matters (at first). I like to think of myself as having pretty high intrinsic motivation, but I am also a very team-oriented person. Losing the team atmosphere of collegiate track was definitely tough for me. It may sound overly negative, but the external roster of people who really care about what you’re doing seems to shrink a lot. Hopefully, you still have family members, maybe a significant other, your coach, and your training group (if you have one). Especially as a thrower, your sphere of influence in track and field is relatively small, and you won’t become a millionaire doing this sport, so you have to be 100% committed for yourself. If you’re not, things probably aren’t going to work out in the long run.

When a general person walks into a gym and pays a personal trainer to improve their body, they often begin a workout with bench, squat, or deadlift. These three movements are the competition lifts used for Powerlifting, and they are beloved by coaches, bodybuilders, and trainers. This is not without good reason as they are compound movements. This means that they involve not just one muscle, but a group or chain of muscles to move the weight. This results in a greater stimulus to the nervous system which causes greater increases in size and strength.

I spent 48 hours in the Neurological ICU. Every patient in this unit is was not well, and its a reminder that I am lucky that my condition is not more severe.

My stay started with a trip to the emergency room. I felt paralyzed through my right side and my speech became mumbled and undecipherable. Symptoms resolved pretty quickly, and within 10 minutes or so I could walk and move again. My speech remain very deliberate and difficult to understand, but improved in the hours that followed. Doctors ordered a CT scan which revealed there was a small spot of bleeding inside my brain. They followed up with an MRI hoping to identify and diagnose the cause of the bleeding.

If you follow Garage Strength or Jules on social media you will have noticed over the last 5-6 months that she has really been coming into form. Her technique has improved, her consistency in meets has improved dramatically and her energy levels are always seaping through her pores. IN training, she has smoked a 104k snatch and a 126k clean and jerk, while back squatting 160k as a 19 year old. We knew Jules was in good shape, especially after her last meet, a local competition where she went 6/6 and hit 100/122 at her new weight class, 90k.

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 trip was very interesting. The Eurasian Steppe is a region of considerable interest for Americans because we typically do not earn much about the region in parochial schooling. The silk road, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan all have had influence here, yet for some reason Americans know next to nothing about the country (myself included). Here is a quick debriefing.

This blog is just a simple write up of my analysis of the first Garage Strength competitor to take on the competition at the Junior World Championships in Uzbekistan, Hayley Reichardt. Hayley came to Uzbekistan in position to potentially bring home a bronze medal in the 48k division.  Heading into the start, there were four girls with a start total of 175k or more, Hayley being one of those girls. Her best total to date was 171k from the 2018 Arnold Classic.