Today’s podcast features coach, writer and educator, Dan John. Dan is a best-selling author in the field of strength training and fitness, with his most recent work being the “Easy Strength Omni-Book”. He is known for his ability to transfer complex material into actionable wisdom, has been a many-time guest on the show, and is one of my single greatest influences in the way that I see the process of coaching and training. As I grow older, coach more populations, and see the field evolve, I view and value Dan’s process and wisdom in new and even more meaningful ways.
One of those tenants of Dan that means more in each coming year is that, at its core, our training and movements are simple… it’s just the years and years of consistent, dedicated immersion in training to fully bring out that simplicity, that “trip up” many people. So often, we get caught up in the hacks, the shortcuts, and the “3 tips for X” within the social-media fist-fight for eyeballs.
On today’s episode, Dan talks about a few important concepts that any coach or athlete needs to come back to over and over again in their process, including the power of “compression”, the power of less, and the power of withholding. Dan speaks on this as it relates to cold track seasons (right before the 80 degree conference meet), and how it relates to the spark of coaching intuition that can happen in an environment deprived from one’s typical tools, and even how it can apply to our movement biomechanics.
Dan also gets into the nuts and bolts of “snapacity” (snap + capacity) that defines the core of athletic movement (elasticity and the work capacity to sustain it), and the related key muscle actions he calls “The 3 P’s”. Throughout the talk, Dan highlights the simple and core principles that drive training progress over time, as well tying in concepts on philosophy and personal growth that transcend training itself.
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Timestamps and Main Points:
2:01 – An update on how Dan’s track season has been, speaking on the upsides of the “compressed” format of his season based on weather 7:25 – Why “compressing and expanding” is such a critical element of one’s athletic performance, as well as life itself 12:13 – The importance of effort-level in human movement, and not “over-striking” a hammer against a nail 18:11 – The “3P’s” of muscle action; on the level of “Point, Poke, and Snap” as applied to explosive sport movement 29:41 – The importance of myth, story and tragedy in sport, life, and re-inventing ourselves” 35:01 – How sport movement, such as the discus or hammer, is like a symphony in nature, and how “over-trying” and imbalance of fluid effort reduces ones results 46:38 – The application and training of the critical athletic trait Dan calls “Snapacity” 1:00:09 – The simplicity, yet patience that the sport of track and field requires in athlete developmentDan John Quotes
“We often say, “what you compress, expands”; that is probably one of the greatest truisms of my coaching career. If I go into your gym and eliminate 9/10 of the equipment, then I find out how good of a strength coach you are”
“Sometimes taking things away is what makes you great”
“If you hit (the hammer too hard into the nail), it’s going to be worse….you’ve explained track and field, football, and every sport I’ve ever done in my life”
“The 3 P’s (of muscle action), point, poke, and snap”
“I teach discus throwing, javelin throwing that “you are a bag of rubber bands” and what we want to do for elite performance is get you to a place where we stretch those rubber bands, and then the important thing is, we release it, crappy throwers, crappy hurdlers, crappy jumpers, try to “add” a little more, when it’s too late”
“When you pull the arrow back, you don’t “push” the arrow forward, you let it go, elite performance is letting it go, it’s letting the muscles “snap””
“I’m always amazed when people think isometrics are new”
“It’s really hard to make money pushing sleep, fasting, protein and veggies”
“That’s why I like working with special operations guys, they are at a place where they know that simple is best”
“I talk to my athletes about stories (myths), when my athletes have a bad day, I quote Don Quixote to them… I also quote Chumbawumba”
“(In writing down my top 10 worst and best things that happened to me in my athletic career) all my worsts were followed by all my bests”
“When you find tragedy, go through it, breath out, because something better is coming around the corner”
“I think of symphonies as the way you throw a discus; lots and lots and lots of individual pieces, you blend them”
“Koji really specializes in getting rid of the excessive movement. When you break the flow of the rotation (in the hammer) you feel like you threw it farther, but it doesn’t go nearly as far, and that is a life lesson”
“If I was going to work with a team, I would train everybody as triple jumpers; there is something amazing about the triple jump where if you have an error, it got exposed”
“When I go to a high school program and watch them do plyometrics, I often cringe”
“(For track throws) In the offseason, you should keep your squat up, keep your bench up, and play basketball 2-3x a week; that should take care of everything you need”
“Instead of having throwers do plyometrics, have them (play games)”
“You can put together the best plyometric program in the world, but when I watch elite basketball players, they look like they jump pretty well to me”
“Bulgarian Secrets, that’s your next book: If you put Bulgarian, or Soviet, it sells”
“My high school coach was from West Germany, and he called the stretch reflex “shishh-kUH’
“We’re trying to build this capacity up by doing things that are relatively safe (like hill sprints, loaded carries, heavy weighted bag carries)”
“With Charlie Francis, if you hit any personal record, you were done for the day”
“I can teach you everything you need to know to be an elite discus thrower on day 1, it’ll take a decade of us pushing, prodding and snapping for you to figure it out”
About Dan John
Dan John has spent his life with one foot in the world of lifting and throwing, and the other foot in academia. An All-American discus thrower, Dan has also competed at the highest levels of Olympic lifting, Highland Games and the Weight Pentathlon, an event in which he holds the American record.
Dan spends his work life blending weekly workshops and lectures with full-time writing, and is also an online religious studies instructor for Columbia College of Missouri. As a Fulbright Scholar, he toured the Middle East exploring the foundations of religious education systems. Dan is also a Senior Lecturer for St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London.
His books, on weightlifting, include Intervention, Never Let Go, Mass Made Simple and Easy Strength, written with Pavel Tsatsouline as well as From Dad, To Grad. He and Josh Hillis co-authored “Fat Loss Happens on Monday.”
In 2015, Dan wrote Can You Go? on his approach to assessments and basic training. In addition, Before We Go, another compilation akin to Never Let Go became an Amazon Bestseller.
In early 2017, Dan’s book, Now What?, his approach to Performance and dealing with “life,” became a Bestseller on Amazon. Hardstyle Kettlebell Challenge became available in September 2017, too.
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