Garage Blog

For this article, I’m going to get into some squat variations: which ones are my favorites, and how I choose to program them for certain people. To start, I’ll just lay out the variations I can think of--Single Leg Squat, Cambered Bar Squat, Duffalo Bar Squat, Safety Squat Bar Squat, and Zombie Squat. Each has their own benefits and I’ll get into them below

Well, that did not go as planned. After starting the season well and heading to the Lehigh Games feeling confident, I just did not execute the way I had imagined. I had not performed that well the prior week at Princeton, but that can just be a tough place to throw discus due to the sector. I didn't have as much of an all-around great training week leading up to Lehigh as I did before Penn and Bucknell, where I PR'd, but I threw well enough the two days before that I figured I could take advantage of the favorable sector at Lehigh and go get a Nationals qualifying mark. But I think we all know meets often don't go as we want. 

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.

One very common question I receive about my programming is, “Is it percentage based?”. The answer is no, I primarily use a technique called autoregulation for planning weights in my programs. In this article, I’ll start to dig into autoregulation a bit and how I implement it with my athletes.

Here I’m going to go over a pretty common worry for any technical athlete, but particularly throwers: how long will it take for me to apply a new technical change? I discussed this briefly on a recent episode of Dane’s Platform, but for those who haven’t had a chance to tune in yet, I thought I’d give a quick, slightly more focused response to the question.

One question we get a lot is “what are the differences between lifts from the blocks (or boxes) and from the hang?”. Although they may look similar, there are some key differences when considering which movement to program. Before we get started, I just want to make it clear that this article is specific to weightlifters, performing a variation of either the snatch or clean! I do program partial lifts for my throwers, but the reasons behind those choices are for another article. So, let’s get into the details here.

Throwers are heavyweight athletes, that’s just a fact. Most of us have always been the big kids in our class, and we were lucky enough to find a sport that uses our size as an advantage. Since we all know that mass moves mass, if we can increase our mass, we should be able to throw farther, right? Well, as you may have guessed there are some considerations to be made when thinking of putting on weight.

Over the past two years, USA Weightlifting has taken a hard stance on the use of performance enhancing drugs (PED’s) inside and out of competition. The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) has done an excellent job enforcing the guidelines for athletes, including strict guidelines for whereabouts reporting and extensive education among coaches and athletes. The case we are about it investigate raises a few question marks on the principles of USAW and USADA.

Todd Lee speak is a unique. When children are learning language his or her parent is sometimes the interpreter. Toddler’s learn to be good at charades, in addition to language, to communicate their wants and needs. There are two things to focus on when children are developing language, word recognition and word pronunciation. This focus will depend on the child’s age and the situation.

The Arnold Sports Festival held the Pan American Trials session as a subsection of the American Open Series event held in Columbus Ohio on March 2, 2018. These sessions helped to determine possible qualifiers for the Senior Pan American team. There was some very impressive lifting during the Pan American sessions particularly women’s session and there was also some controversy. At the center of this controversy is a young woman named Quiana Welsh.

I like to train in Olympic Weightlifting, a sport that takes a high amount of precision and practice with technique. It also requires takes repetition to improve performance and numbers on the platform. There are two lifts in olympic weightlifting, the snatch and the clean and jerk. The best weightlifters train 15 to 20 hours in the gym working technical and strength movements to improve their lifts. At best, I have 10 hours per week to train, and yet I have still managed to improve my lifts with limited training time. Olympic lifting is my hobby, I am also a mom, a gym owner, and a business professional. The following are some ways to balance work/home/fitness life when I am being pulled in many different directions.