You think teaching American kids to read is hard?  Try learning to read Japanese.

Victor  finds out the Japanese government is proposing to add 196 characters to the already mandated 1,945 kanji already required to be considered “literate.”  Here’s his reaction:

Have you ever noticed how freakishly strong we all remember our fathers being?   Dads are the ones in the family who have to push-start the car, haul gravel, and open up a can of whoop-ass.  I even know guys who have stories of their dads lifting a cars engine block out with their bare hands – seriously! 

I’m sure some of it is just the perception of a kid, but the fact is, for a lot of us, our first introductions to what it meant to be big and strong were the examples set by our fathers.

This was certainly true for me. 

I grew up a tiny kid.  I was both short and skinny … very short, and very skinny.  My “little” brother is three years younger than I am, but the entire time we were growing up we were the exact same height.  I always looked like a girl who was three years younger than I was.  Not the poster-child for macho!

But, my Mom always told me that someday, if I was simply patient (and ate my broccoli), I would grow up to be just as big as my dad.

Hey, that sounded pretty good!  My dad is just under 6 feet tall, he’s athletic, strong – you know, all the stuff a hobbit-sized boy wants to be. 

Interestingly, like me, he wasn’t born with big muscles.  He was a naturally thin guy, but he lifted weights, went running, and built up his muscles the hard way.  By the time I was in high school he was getting pretty big. 

I remember in high school some friends and I were playing video games in the living room, and my dad was outside doing some gardening.  At some point one of my friends looked out the window and saw my dad tearing a tree out of the ground with his bare hands!

“Holy shit, your dad has big arms!” he said.  Seriously, veins popping out, muscles all over the place, tree branches cracklin’ … OK, memory is a tough thing.  Maybe it wasn’t a tree.  But, the dude looked huge and he was doing something I couldn’t have done.  I was impressed.

It’s now more than a few years later, and I’ve built up some big arms of my own.  I’m not a dad, I’ve never tried to pull a tree out of the ground,  but I have tried hard to build up that crazy “Dad strength” we all remember.

What is Dad strength anyway?

If I had to break it down, I’d say that Dad strength is the kind of strength that is highly functional, and is able to impress people when they least expect it.  This is the kind of strength you need to rip a tree out of the ground, move an engine block, or just open a sealed tight peanut butter jar for your lazy children.

You need total-body strength to lift very heavy stuff.  You need it to look pretty for the wife.  And, you also need to have the endurance to chase down those mangy kids when they’re trying to get out of a beatin’.

The TOP 5 Exercises for Dad Strength

Let’s get serious.  If you’re ever going to be big and strong, you’re going to have to work at it.

My brother and I, when we went camping, liked to find heavy logs and rocks to lift and throw around.  We used to fight for the front seat of the car by arm wrestling.  We’d have push up and sprinting contests.  In short (unlike the pesky kids of today), we actually played outside. 

It turns out that we were doing what we might term today as strongman training, without thinking about.  We’d go out and find random stuff to throw around and test ourselves on.  This is a great way to train for strength and power. 

Realistically, though, most gyms don’t come equipped with logs and rocks. (A shame, I tell ye!)  So, instead you can use the following five exercises to build up your own dad strength.

• Power Cleans.  If you are not an Olympic weightlifter, then do these from the hang position.  Cleans (of all kinds) will do wonders for building the kind of explosive power in your hips and legs required to kick the ass of an unruly kid.  (They are also unparalleled in their ability to bulk up the upper back muscles.)
• Front Squats.  As most of you know, I prefer front squats to back squats.  Front squats are not only safer, and easier to do correctly, but they more accurately mimic the movement you’re going to have to do when you lift that engine block out of the car!
• Deadlifts.  If you can’t lift heavy stuff off the ground, you ain’t much of a dad.  Guys should strive for a double bodyweight deadlift for 1 rep, and 20 reps with bodyweight.
• Push Press.  It’s like a press, but you cheat it up with your legs.  This means you can use A LOT of weight.  And you should.  Someday, that cute son of yours is gonna grow up into a pain-in-the-butt teenager and you’re gonna have to throw him out of the house … physically.  Holding heavy weights above your head is a must.
• Chin Ups.  In addition to making your arms look all pretty for the wife, chins will keep your shoulders healthy and your back strong.  I don’t care who you are, if you’re a man and you can’t do at least a few chin ups, we got problems.

There you have it, people.  For fathers day, get strong and make him proud.  And every time you feel like quitting, just remember those immortal words, “Don’t make me take this belt off, boy!”

This video is absolutely insane.  I knew Planet Fitness was painfully wimpy, but this throws it over the top and into farce.

I’d get kicked out of this place during my warmups. 

I’m a big fan of Turkish Get Ups.  Actually, let me rephrase that.  I hate Turkish Get Ups, but man do that work! 

I’ve only done them with dumbbells.  I’ve seen people do them with barbells, though, and that is rather impressive.  But, until now, I’d never seen one do them with women.  No, not women doing Turkish Get Ups … just watch these two vids:

Roy sent me this vid.  It’s hard to tell if it’s pro or anti crossfit – I’m fairly sure it’s a F&$k everyone video.

Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you.

–Sheng-yen

In Bob Takano’s recent newsletter mailing he has a piece about the fact that he’s been seeing a lot of WOD (workout of the day) designed for weightlifters.  He’s worried that the structure of these are often not going to get weightlifters where they want to go, that is, it ain’t specific enough to the weightlifter.

I’ve been seeing a lot of WOD’s (Workout of the Day) showing up on the internet and they are intended for weightlifters. They usually have one standard weightlifting movement (snatch, clean & jerk, pull, squat), and then some other bodybuilding exercises or other movements that are not especially beneficial to serious weightlifters.

After many years of designing training, one of my rules of thumb is to include one pulling exercise, one squatting exercise and one overhead movement in every workout. I know this can be bothersome to those who like to break up training into body parts or movement categories and concentrate on only one per session.

I believe there is enough empirical evidence to support the idea of training all three major aspects of weightlifting competition everyday, although not all to exactly the same degree. The load, volume and intensity can be varied in each case to provide sufficient variation.

I think that is good advice.  When I started out, I fell prey to the same problems.  If you hunt for them, you can find old WOD of my own that suffered similarly.  Until I’d been in the trenches for a few years, and coached enough weightlifters, I didn’t realize some fundamental differences that exist in training the weightlifter vs training everyone else (I expound on these below).

Over the years, I’ve been moving closer toward the Bulgarian side of the fence than I did when I started.  Nowadays, for most of the year, my athletes do some form of the snatch AND some form of the clean+jerk (usually the full classic lifts themselves) in every workout then get to the pulls and squats (nearly always front squats). They squat no less then 3 times a week, sometimes more – and heavy. 

That said, I do like to include some upper body “bodybuilding” work in.  There is ample evidence that many shoulder, elbow, and wrist injuries can be avoided if proper attention is paid to exercises like chin ups.  But if your training routine consists of more than 10% to maybe 20% upper body work, you’re not a weightlifter.

The Big Picture

Weightlifters have a problem.  They don’t need to be comprehensively athletic, and so most aren’t.  Sure, there’s a sizable minority of lifters who are good all around athletes.  But, only in a strength sport do you have a super-heavyweight class.  Even NFL lineman are more generally athletic than most supers.  And just because someone is lean, does not mean they have good endurance. 

By “generally athletic” I mean covering all the basics of good fitness:  flexibility and mobility; strength; power; speed; core stability; lateral stability; single-leg stability; cardiovascular endurance; muscular endurance; etc.  These are the qualities a strength coach is trying to build into the majority of athletes.

Most sports require some element of every type of fitness. This is true in baseball, football, tennis, swimming, volleyball, soccer, rugby, roller derby, even dodge ball.  But, not weightlifting.

Weightlifters are great at strength, excellent at power, right up there in flexibility and mobility.  But, they are grossly behind in both types of endurance – especially muscular endurance.  (You should see me trying to go on a hike!)  They are also often deficient in lateral and single-leg stability (not horrible, but not as good as they could be -  the new squat style jerk takes that last remaining split leg movement out of the sport, and makes it totally bilateral).

The reason for this imbalance is that weightlifters are more like marathon runners than they’d like to admit.  Weightlifters are in an extreme sport.  No, not extreme as in dangerous, extreme as in overly specialized.  We move very heavy weights, very fast, from down to up, in a fraction of a second.  We require as much endurance as marathon runners require strength.  Oh, sure, of course there is SOME need for it.  We don’t want to literally drop dead.  But, compared to other athletes, we suck at it. 

We also have relatively wimpy arms.  Relative to other strength athletes of course.  Powerlifters, strongmen, track and field throwers, highland games athletes – they all have bigger and stronger arms than most of us. They’re chests and shoulders and lats are usually bigger too.  Why?  Specialization.

Oly lifters are 80% legs, 20% traps.  OK, that’s an over exaggeration – but not much of one. 

I’m not saying this to disparage we weightlifters, but to make a point.  You WANT a weightlifter to be this way. You need them focused on the task at hand.  They are in an extreme sport that requires extreme training (again, I mean extreme as in highly focused, not dangerous).  They need constant work on the classic lifts themselves, stupid amounts of squatting, some pulling, and if you can fit it in, some upper body work to keep their joints healthy.  

A Slight Regression

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I do want to mention that during the summer – which for us starts after tomorrows State championships – I intentionally dump all of the above advice.  I spend a few months training my athletes like athletes rather than like weightlifters.  This has a nice psychological effect, as well as a physiological one.  It is hard on your body and your psyche to hammer away for months at a time on low rep Oly lifts and front squats – over and over and over and over  … ad nauseum. 

During the summer we get to do all the fun stuff we normally don’t, like single-leg work and higher reps; we add in more rows, pressing, etc.  It’s good ole’ fashioned training that any athlete would thrive on.  But, after a bit of that, we get back on the horse. 

Weightlifting is a means to an end for other athletes.  It IS the end for us.  The training should reflect that.

[by the way, if you haven’t already, make sure you sign up for Bob’s email newsletter.  It’s the best Oly-lifting focused newsletter around, hands down.  Just click here.]

Be glad you ain’t the camera guy getting landed upon by Kotooshu!  Ouch!