How To Learn From Your Coach

I have been coached by Brad Couillard since October of 2018. As a coach myself, I hired Brad not only to help accomplish my own lifting goals, but as a primary way for me to continue to learn myself. I’d argue there is no better way to learn about powerlifting than to have a knowledgeable coach. And with that, I wanted to discuss what I have learned from Brad and how I’ve applied it. Too often people just regurgitate what their coach says, rather than learning, understanding, and applying it within their own system. There have been things I’ve learned from Brad that maybe I didn’t even try to apply until 6-9 months later, after extensive research myself and gaining a better understanding so I could teach, rather than regurgitate. While I could probably list a couple dozen things I have learned, the 4 points below are the key topics that I look back on and can see the transformation I’ve had as a coach over the past 2 years due to Brad’s guidance.

1.) Something I used to do was structure off-season training blocks having the majority of the exercise selection with technique in mind. For some reason I started to get away from that though. I started programming with more competition specificity and not allowing enough time periods of lower absolute intensity training by using self limiting variations that promoted technique improvement. For anyone who has been coached by Brad, he loves tempo work. Like tempo on every exercise of the entire week, and 5 second tempos for reps. He wants to slow down everything to hammer positions and engrain those patterns. And while I find high benefit in tempo work, I think what I found within my system is that I had a strong preference for pause work. Pause squats, pause deadlifts, long pause bench, and so on. In particular Pause squats became a major staple in most of my programs, as they seemed to engrain the squat pattern and cueing I’d teach more than anything else. I started to go back to being more intentional with off-season training blocks and taking long periods of time to focus on these variations to master positions, as I saw the benefit and the long term success in my own training from these types of blocks that Brad would program for myself and his other athletes.

2.) One of the main reasons I hired Brad originally was because of his knowledge of PRI (And maybe slightly because I thought I would eventually look like Charlie Dickson if Brad coached me too!). But what I learned more so once I started being coach by him is more than just the knowledge, but the specific application of PRI within powerlifting. PRI has been a hot fad recently and you see a lot of people doing these crazy things with probably not much understanding or intention of what they are doing. This is for sure one of the things I spent a vast amount of time studying on my own before ever trying to apply it myself. And while some of the warm-ups and movement prep exercises you see can be great, more so what I learned was the understanding the body and its mechanics within movements through a PRI lens. The way I look at the squat, bench press, and deadlift as movements is completely different than 2 years ago. When I worked in Fitness Management for Gold’s Gym, I used to tell my employees that if you can’t look back 1 year and think to yourself, “Wow, I really didn’t know what I was doing” then you didn’t learn enough in the past year. I can for sure look back 2 years and be dumbfounded how I could even teach the squat, bench press, and deadlift without the knowledge I now have. That doesn’t mean I was a bad coach 2 years ago, but it does mean Brad has helped me spark an understanding of these movements that goes way beyond what I used to know.

3.) About 3-4 months into working with Brad I sent him a long video one day about how I came to realize I wasn’t really that motivated to push like I used to, which I’ll explain what that means later. We had spent a good deal of time working through my current injuries and improving patterns within my movement, and started to finally push a bit more. At that point came the increased soreness and fatigue. While that necessarily wasn’t a bad thing, its just powerlifting, from my context I had just spent 3 years not being able to squat, bench, and deadlift. I realized at this point I didn’t care as much about making progress as much as I did about just being able to train and feel good doing it every day, not just some days. I am telling you as a coach, if you want to be a high level powerlifter, there is no such thing as feeling good all the time. I knew that, but I also knew my goals had shifted. If I never added another pound to my total, but I felt good day in and day out, I would be content with that (but I will still take progress, but that was now a lower priority). That probably isn’t what most coaches want to hear from their athletes, in that they don’t want to push anymore. Brad had a unique understanding of what I was going through though, as he had gone through the same thing himself with injuries, and without any hesitation he immediately adjusted our focus and training to match my goals. This gave me an even better understanding as a coach of adapting to my athletes goals and taking their feedback to heart. It is not like I didn’t do that before, but I think seeing Brad’s willingness to listen and adapt opened my eyes to being more understanding of everyone’s individual needs and tailoring a program not only to help them progress, but to maximize their enjoyment and be centered around their goals, not mine.

4.) I have done some form of RPE training dating back to 2014, but probably for the 2-3 years prior to working with Brad I had been biased a bit more towards percentage based training in how I programmed. In hindsight, that is most likely because at the time I found I preferred percentage based training for myself, as I loved having a number that I had to hit in a workout. I also had the time had a fairly narrow focused of how to apply RPE training, and that limited my application. In working with Brad, I think he naturally started to gravitate toward RPE training for me due to my injury history and some ups and downs we saw in training. To allow for auto-regulation, RPE based training made more sense for me than strict numbers. I as an athlete grew a lot from this, as I started more and more to understand how to do the best I could each day rather than forcing pre-conceived ideas of what I thought I should do. That is exactly why I spent 3 years being injured, because as soon as I felt good I’d start trying to do the same weights I had hit previously. But now as a more experienced lifter, I understood that I can only control each days performance and what I did 1 year ago or what I will do 1 year form now has no bearing on what I should do today. This led to me having a much better understanding of RPE training, how to implement it, and allowed me to find ways to be fairly creative within people’s programs to best utilize auto-regulation as a tool for each individual. I have people I have coached for years that we had tried RPE training prior with the little success. But now that I had a much better understanding of how to be creative in applying this training tool to suit an individuals needs, I found these same people thriving on RPE based training. My issue before is I was using RPE without much context behind it. And rather now I think about how and why RPE specifically could benefit an athlete and how we could best utilize it.

Comprehensive Guide To Foot Rooting In The Squat – CLICK HERE

What is foot rooting in the squat? While that question seems fairly basic and straight forward, I can tell you their is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about what foot rooting is. Ask 10 different people and you will probably get 10 different answers of what cue they use, but few probably could actually break down the anatomy and mechanics behind foot pressure and strength. In my latest YouTube video, I give a comprehensive breakdown of what is foot rooting, what is our mid-foot, how we create tension within the foot, how we find our mid-foot, how we maintain foot control, and skill practice drills to improve strength and context with our foot position. Click the link above to view!

Deadlift Starting Hip Position

Recently I’ve had Rob and Payton switch to sumo for the time being to test their strength on their opposite stance and see if we can handle higher training volumes. I wanted to highlight both of these lifters, because they both display the same characteristic on their conventional deadlifts, which at times led to excessive lower back or SI joint fatigue. Whereas with sumo, that issue is not present with them. If you scroll over to the conventional deadlift videos (CLICK HERE), you can see both Rob and Payton have a slight pelvic tuck as they pull in. If we are looking directionally, on conventional deadlift they tend to pull/tuck their hips into the bar, versus on sumo I would describe their movement more as pulling their feet and hips into the floor. While we want our hips as close to the bar as possible, we also want them far enough away too. That probably doesn’t make much sense at first, but we have to understand that every lifter has a certain genetic structure. In particular for a neutral back and pelvis to occur, the hips must me a certain distance from the bar. If our shoulder/shoulder blades are over the bar like they should be, and our torso is a certain length, the hips must be a certain effective length away from the bar to create a neutral back and pelvic position. If you scroll to the 5th and 6th picture, you can get more of an idea of what I mean. In the 5th picture, we have Payton with near perfect neutral position. If he was to bring his hips any closer to the bar, his lower back would have to flex and his pelvis would have to posteriorly rotate under. In the 6th picture, we can see this exact difference with Lorenzo. Typically what will happen when we tuck our hips too close to the bar is our strength off the floor will actually be stronger, but come lockout a lifter will get stuck about mid thigh. In that scenario, at lockout the lifter has already fully contracted their glutes and hamstrings and are just relying on lower back extension to finish their lockout, which is not optimal. And in Rob and Payton’s case, it was placing a higher amount of stress on their lower backs and SI joint.

So for Rob and Payton you may ask why we didn’t just fix that on their conventional deadlift? Well that is easier said than done, and they both tended to struggle with this concept on conventional deadlift. But as soon as they switched to sumo, this concept just naturally occurred without me having to cue a thing. This happened naturally because with sumo that effective distance will be less due to a more upright torso position. So for both Rob and Payton, they did not feel the need to tuck their pelvis under in the same way, as they already felt their hips being much closer to their center of gravity just from the positional change. Would I make this change for every lifter who struggles with this? Definitely not, and these two examples of stance change are much more the minority of what I would typically do. But in their cases it has currently provided the solution we needed, and now it is time to continue to progress their sumo deadlifts to see if this is a long term solution with matching or exceeding their conventional strength while being able to handle higher training volumes.

Home Gym Accessory Movements I Program Most Often

With gym shutdowns nationwide, home gyms have had a meteoric rise. And while those who have access to a barbell, rack, bench, and plates right now are feeling very fortunate to continue their training, the one downside of most home gyms is the limited variety of accessory movements. Lacking dumbbells and machines limits a lot of what people normally do for their upper and lower body accessory work, but most would be surprised by how much you can still get done with just barbell. To give some ideas, I wanted to put together a breakdown of the 9 accessory movements I have found myself programming most often for my athlete’s home gym workouts. I’d also recommend searching “barbell landmine variations” on Google to open yourself up to even more ideas. But looking at bang for your buck, these are the 9 movements I think most will find very beneficial. (CLICK HERE for videos)

1.) Inverted Barbell Hamstring Curls are a movement I like year round, but are fairly unknown to the general population. And within a home gym setting you have even less options for leg curls accessories, so these move up my totem pole of importance even more. Like many of these other bodyweight movements, we can make adjustments with our body angle to regress or progress the difficulty of this movement. Most lifters will find it plenty difficult with their feet on the floor, but you can also elevate your feet 12-18 inches to make it even harder. The biggest key though on Inverted Barbell Hamstring Curls is to fight the eccentric, so I always program these with a 3-0-0 tempo to notate that the eccentric motion should be under control at all times.

2.) Zercher squats provide a great alternative to Goblet squats and other lower body accessories in the absence of dumbbells. A big benefit of Zercher squats is there are many different variations of this movement that can be performed. For those who have done Zercher squats before, you probably know the limiting factor tends to be your core and is a very common accessory movement I program for Strongman competitors to mimic stone loading. But for powerlifters, providing some heel elevation by placing your heels on a 45lb. plate can change the leverages to better target your quads. This allows you to stay more upright and bias towards greater degrees of knee flexion. The Zercher position could also be carried over to other exercises like lunges or split squats.

3.) Meadows Rows acts as a great substitute for single arm dumbbell or machine rows. It may be a bit less optimal to be gripping the end of the collar versus a dumbbell, but for alternatives within a home gym, its hard to beat Meadows Rows for a back accessory. It is very easy to set up, load, and perform while allowing the ability to work through low to high rep ranges.

4.) Outside of Barbell Bench Press and Dips, its tough to find horizontal pressing accessories within a home gym. My personal go to is Barbell Pushups. The issue with regular pushups is we tend to cut range of motion due to the proximity of our face to the floor, so slightly elevating a barbell and lowering our chest to the bar creates a higher degree of difficulty. For most you will need to add further difficulty to this movement, so options to do so include elevating your feet, adding a tempo, and placing weight on your upper back if possible.

5.) Reverse Lunges is already one of my favorite lower body accessory movements, but I do prefer them performed with dumbbells. But with home gyms and limited access, Reverse Lunges can still be a great exercise used with a barbell. The issue I find with a barbell is most people tend to want to extend more at the low back, so just be very mindful of your bracing while performing these.

6.) Pull-ups are the typical home gym bodyweight back accessory movement, but often overlooked is Inverted Barbell Rows. These offer a great way to train the horizontal pulling motion with low stress on the lower back. A great benefit too is this movement has a wide degree of regression and progression based on changing your body angle. Most powerlifters will tend to need to invert though, placing their feet on a bench to create adequate difficulty. And if needed, I will also add a tempo to increase difficulty even further. 

7.) I program Pendlay Rows fairly often, but find myself doing so even more frequently now with the gym shutdowns. I personally am not a big fan of barbell rows due to the low back involvement and the tendency for people to cheat on them. So for this reason, my go to barbell row variation is Pendlay Rows. The key with these is being strict and limiting the use of “body english” to perform the movement. When done right, it doesn’t take much weight to make Pendlay Rows fairly challenging.

8.) Half Kneel Landmine Presses are another great substitute for pressing work in the absence of dumbbells. I promote the half kneel position as it take out the use of the legs to get momentum. With the Half Kneel Landmine Press, there are also a variety of angles you can perform these at to target the pressing muscles differently. For the purpose I have been programming them, I like to keep a vertical torso angle so that the press angle mimics an incline press. If you’d like to use this as more of a direct shoulder work accessory, Eric Cressey has a great breakdown of these on his YouTube channel. He promotes a slight forward torso lean as you press to achieve a finishing position that would be directly overhead.

9.) While Larsen Presses are not quite an accessory movement, but more so a variation, I did want to touch on the the reasoning why I am programming these more than ever. Many people are stuck with crappy benches that are far from the normal IPF spec competition benches they are used to. This makes it very difficult to replicate the same setup and positioning you’d typically be able to achieve on bench press. So instead of having my lifters try to struggle through this, I am programming more Larsen Pressing to remove the factor of the bench. While bench width still does play a role on Larsen Presses, it does remove the bench height variable which is where most lifter’s issues are arising. I find more consistent training pushing Larsen Presses at this time since the position and form they can achieve in their home gyms can still closely mimic what they’d be doing at their normal gym.

How To Program After An Extended Break From Training – CLICK HERE

With the current crisis, many people may be going 2-3 months without touching a barbell. So how do you program for powerlifting after coming back from a hiatus in training? In my latest YouTube video using Dan as an example, who took 6 months off powerlifting last year, I detail exactly how we structured his training to get him back near full strength within 5-6 weeks. In these videos (CLICK HERE), you can see the comparison of his week 1 pause squat set of 275×3 versus week 5 where he hit 350lbs. for 3 reps! I show the full breakdown of his training with the sets, exercise selection, and volume progression we used to get these results. And at the end, I give a general structure for anyone to use with the percentage of volume to start with for each lift and then the increases each week. Click the link above to watch!