John broke down “past forty” training into two basic “phases:” Phase One, which may last from 30 days to 30 years, and Phase Two, the key to superlative performance in not only the Master Athlete, but everyone else, too.

Yet, none of this came clear to me until after the Northwest Regional Masters Track and Field meet when George Mathews mentioned that “the problem with being a Master is the loss of muscle mass.” He noted that at a certain age, you suddenly become frozen, it seems. Hypertrophy, the building of muscle mass, seemed to be the answer.

The problem? The traditional means of periodizing, building up one’s training over a few months was shaped like this: Period One: Hypertrophy (Good old Bodybuilding) Period Two: Basic Strength Time (Go Heavy, Go Hard, Go Home) Period Three: Basic Power Stage (This is when one starts lifting faster in the weight room, more emphasis on speed on the track Competition …compete Period Five: Recovery (an active rest period of a few weeks where one backs way off and lets the mind and muscles heal.

For the older athlete, this may still work, but John noted that there was a key element missing Passion! George also pointed out that the loss of hypertrophy (muscle mass) was the missing.

An overview: Phase One

This could last as long as a whole career. Basically, it is the “nerve and muscle” stage. One learns the techniques of the sport and ingrains a simpler and smoother method of performance. Ideally, one would begin with a full blood profile test, I would argue for HDL and Triglycerides to be monitored throughout one’s adult life. John Powell added testosterone and DHEA levels for men, too.

During training, one strives for, first, correctly performing all the movements…from lifting to jumping to the competitive movement. Second, John recommends repetitive, but rhythmic, sets of “big lifts,” i.e. squats, cleans and snatches.

John had an illumination in his throwing career when he talked with World Shot Put champion Peter Sarul and then members of the British Javelin team…who were very

successful at the time. They told him about this workout:

Power Clean: 60K x 10

Squat: 70K x 10

Power Snatch: 50K x 10

Front Squat: 60K x 10

Crunches: 25

You did these in a circuit, one after another, then tracked your heart rate on completion. You did this cluster for three sets. As your heart rate would go down (over time), obviously your conditioning was better. Also, your total circuit time should try to go down, too.

John discovered that these “fast”workouts focusing on speed and condition, led him to his lifetime best throws. For basic training, John believes that repetition is the mother of instruction in Phase One. He though any drill that one could do over and over…while focusing on making the technique simpler and simpler…would be the key. For a discus thrower, he recommended doing the turn forwards and backwards (without throwing) with an overweight implement, then going through a workout.

In every sport, there are drills that ingrain technique.

But how to move on?

Phase Two

John had only one word: Passion. From the Latin, “to suffer,” I can’t think of a better word to describe the Love/Hate/Suffer/Fury that is required to improve as an athlete. Sadly, many young athletes have all the physical gifts, yet no passion. “The Love of the Game” is a perfect title…for a disappointing movie.

Passion. Well, how do we get it? Master athletes can teach the youth here:

1. Travel to a lot of meets.

2. Hang out with your competition for long periods afterwards.

3. Read everything, watch everything you can about your sport.

4. Travel some more. Hang out some more. Learn more.

5. Spend your money on your sport! 6. See number four above!

Yet, something is missing. I think George hit it on the head when he discussed hypertrophy. For Phase One, we can focus on speed and technique (nerve and muscle), but in Phase Two…as we build passion in our hearts…we need to build muscles in our body. The more I think about this, the more I KNOW IT IS RIGHT!

As a matter of interest, short spurts of intense training increases the natural Growth Hormones of the body…the anti-aging drugs. In Phase Two, a serious attempt to both raise GH and build muscle are a yin-yang relationship!

The research, although it is tough to discover, seems to point to several things, if you want to increase GH (and hypertrophy).

1. Eat some protein before lifting…ten to twenty grams.

2. Monitor rest periods between sets (one minute rests have shown, in some studies, to spike GH)

3. Use “full body” lifts, such as my favorites:

Power Clean and Front Squat Power Curl Clean and Press Overhead Squat

Good Morning or variations Clean grip snatch Power snatch

With Kettlebells, are you kidding me? Goblet Squats, Swings, Snatches, Get Ups, Clean and Presses…the whole RKC!

4. Don’t be afraid to “bodybuild.” Get those arm curls, triceps extensions, pull upswhatever. Put your time in during Phase Two building your Passion and Body.

That’s Good Advice!

I know some that I have can help one rekindle the passion that drives great athletes. Let’s look at a few obvious ideas:

1. Keep a journal. If I could recommend only one thing, it would be to keep this on-going conversation with yourself. As you link the days together and watch the ebbs and flows of your training and life, you can pick out the clues that lead to success in your life …athletically and real!

2. Buy books and videos on your sport. Brian Clay’s discus technique has changed my vision of things! Read magazines, books and internet articles that apply to your sports and try new things!

3. Practice both single and wide focus in your sports. Single focus would be bowling alone on one lane trying to just throw strike balls …ignoring all spares. In your sport of choice, you should occasionally strive to fix just one thing: all your resources should pour into attacking or improving one aspect of training. Wide focus is what a football coach does: the coach measures and adjusts his 92 man team, seven assistants, four managers, bus drivers, et al to deal with the opposing team and the whims of the officiating staff. Both, single and wide focus can be exhausting…but for different reasons.

Single can be “boring,” yet every athlete needs the “groove” from multiple repetitions. Multiple focus can simply over stimulate the senses. The Highland Game experience is a study in multiple focus: dancing, piping, drinking, eating, noise…and up to ten different athletic events with only a few that share any technical skills.

A couple of ideas for training multiple focus: listen to music you hate while you train; train for three sports (throw, lift, carry, whatever) in a single training session; train in extre mes…cold, heat, fasting, time of day, odd locations; learn a new sport!

Finally, invent new ways to train your current sport…seriously, “think outside the box” and restructure your whole training…or just one aspect of training.

“Passion” fuels the athlete far beyond the next workout, the next week or the next season. It also may be the secret cure to aging!

The questions that I can never get around to answering well deal with “rest.” How many seconds do you rest after a max deadlift? In my experience, three weeks. How long do you rest after a set of 20 reps with 405 in the Back Squat? It seems to be somewhere between ten minutes and three weeks. Of all the topics in training, “rest” is the hardest one for me to get a handle on for others. Me? Oh, I understand it.

I have been there. I hadn’t missed a workout in five years. I trained on Christmas Day, heavy and hard. I worried over finding a gym on family vacations so I could not miss a Front Squat or heavy Clean workout. I swallowed gag filled soy protein shakes that probably did more hormonal damage than good and, mixed with whole milk, turned slight acne into a burn unit case. I did “everything right.” No alcohol or marijuana passed these lips and, sadly, few female lips, too.

And, then, I melted down. Fortunately, it was such an epic meltdown that when my wife first met her current boss, he mentioned being from Montana. My wife laughed and said, “The only thing I know about Montana is that my husband got hit in the head by a discus there.” Tiff’s boss stiffened: “Oh my God, that was your husband? I remember that.”

Between throws, I was standing outside the sector talking to our assistant coach, Ferron Sonderegger (you just can’t make up names like that) and his eyes widened. Before he could speak, I had been hit in the skull by a two kilo metal and wood discus at about 140 feet from where the throw was delivered. It was my fault, I should have paid attention. The impact should have killed me, but, well, the universe had other plans. The resulting personality change from the concussion did some interesting things. First, I made every bad decision I could for about six months and I apologize for that. Second, I totally lost some memories, as I had the chance to display at my Russian History that next week. I sat down, look up at Professor Glatfelter and said: “I don’t remember anything.” But, the third was unexpected: I quit. I stopped training. I stopped throwing. I quit school.

Somewhere around October, about five months after the hit to the head, I “woke” up. My handwriting returned to, well, simply awful versus the illegible scrawl I had developed and I began rebuilding my life. I went back to school, starting training again, and, to my surprise, was stronger than I had ever been in my life. I threw the discus and hammer far further than before with “less” effort.

I still am working on the insights that I have unpacked that this experience. Part of the reason I am so “vague” on rest, especially rest periods between sets, is simply that I see rest as a continuum that needs to be discussed in detail before moving on.

Let’s start with the big one: Eternal Rest. This isn’t a theology discussion, but as I always tell my athletes, “You can rest all you want when you are dead.” There are two sides of this first point:

Longevity: Sadly, few gurus in the strength and conditioning field talk about longevity any more. My favorite magazine growing up was “Strength and Health.” We seem to only talk about health when it goes downhill. “Living well as long as one can for as long as one can live well” is more than just my first attempt at a Country and Western song. It’s a reality for me. As I walk on the closer each day to my death, the quality of life is important. I was told by my doctor years ago that there are only two statistically relevant issues for living longer:
1. Don’t smoke
2. Wear your seatbelt

Everything else is arguable! There are people living over 100 who will recommend a good cigar as well as others who will give frightening advice like “never drink booze.”

But, I am not just interested in the number of my years, I worry too about the quality of my time here on earth. Clearly, the best sign of age is a relative abundance of lean body mass. I want to cling to muscle and keep bodyfat at bay for as long as I can. Hypertrophy training, as I have noted before, becomes even more important as one ages. In addition, the impact of a 42 year athletic career has led me to believe that joint mobility trumps practically everything else when it comes to dealing with the ills of age. In other words, stay lean, muscular and loose for as long as you can.

As I continue to watch the sad lines of my friends die way too young, often from the effects of youthful experimentation with drugs (usually the “performance enhancing” kind), I realize that longevity is only important when its your turn.

Eternal Life: I’m not going to get into what happens after you die, but I have always taken the advice from all the world religions that is something like “do to others what you would want done to you” is a big factor in how things are going to end up on the “other side.” I have also embraced a teaching from Steve Ilg in his book, “Total Body Transformation.” He asks a simple question: when is the last time you picked up some litter?” The other day, I cleaned up a neighborhood eyesore that has bugged me for weeks and felt lighter and happier. Each time I drive past it, I feel better. Also, take some advice from one of favorite characters in literature, the Alewife:

Gilgamesh, whither rovest thou?
The life thou pursuest thou shall not find.
When the gods created mankind,
Death for mankind they set aside,
Life in their own hands retaining.
Thou, Gilgamesh, let full be thy belly.
Make thou merry by day and by night.
Of each day make thou a feast of rejoicing,
Day and night dance thou and play.
Let thy garments be sparkling fresh,
Thy head be washed; bathe thou in water.
Pay heed to the little one that holds on to thy hand,
Let thy spouse rejoice in thy bosom!
For this is the task of mankind!

The Alewife leads us to the next point, where is the role of “rest” in your life? For years, I have been giving a simple workshop that discusses a point that I was taught in the Second Grade. Now, if something I learned in the early 1960′s still impacts my thinking and teaching today, it’s worth of discussion.

My teacher went to the board and put up four words where North, South, East and West would be on a compass. She put the words Play, Pray, Rest and Work. She made a simple point, in life, these four things must be balanced. If one gets too “far,” like work, you will slowly burn out. If you play all the time, like the grasshopper in the story, “The Grasshopper and the Ant,” you will have to catch up when things go wrong (and they always seem to go wrong). “Pray” could simply be alone time or your efforts to do those internal exercises that keep us going along. Rest is the problem for many of us today as we tend to stay up longer and longer and cut into our sleep time. Also, working 60 hours a week leaves little to to take care of rest!

I tend to listen closely to people who build into there programs and protocols an understanding of this concept. Ilg’s “TBT” book is a handbook of bringing strength training, yoga, meditation, nutrition and life together into one training system. I have always enjoyed reading Pavel’s two headed monster of brutal grinding strength training with insightful, even artistic, flexibility and mobility work.

My simple compass of Rest, Play, Pray and Work illuminates my life. Certainly, I have ignored it throughout my years, just read my articles for just some examples of my idiocy, but when I am at my best, I attempt to tie together these four points in all my life. A few examples:

Wine Walks. I think that long walks are an underappreciated element in strength training. I’m not talking about packing on plates and sleds and attacking a mountain, I’m thinking of what my wife and I do occasionally. I have this specialty backpack that holds a bottle of wine, glasses and an opener. We go for a long easy walk and find a suitable place to pop the cork, talk about life, laugh and enjoy nature and our relationship. The walk back is always interesting.

Meat Fests: We have a tradition of bringing a bunch of people over to our house to train. Because of the numbers, we have to move to the “way back” where we set up Highland Game equipment, weights, sleds, kettlebells and odd stuff. The group dynamic tends to lead to long fun workouts with some challenges and a lot of laughs. We all bring cuts of meat and then end with a long party of meat and drinks.

Throws Training: One of the ways I prepare myself for competition is to bring a kettlebell out to a field with my discus (or whatever implement is going to be part of this next competition). I combine throwing with various kettlebell drills for as long as I need to be there. I try to just keep finding the small spaces in my body to stretch out with the kettlebell and try to carry this feeling over into my throwing. I try to go “inside” during this time and block out everything and everyone else. Oddly, most of my articles seem to pop into my head during these workouts, especially the ones where I think I need to talk about rest.

One could argue that mixing these three workouts would be an ideal way to train. It certainly has the feel for covering all the keys to training. Notice how the four elements of Pray, Play, Work and Rest naturally come together in these workouts. Take a few minutes to assess your life and see if any of these elements are missing from your life. If you work, work, work, keep your eyes open for a discus.

The next stop on my continuum of rest after Eternal Rest and the Role of Rest is simply understanding lay offs and vacations. I seem to constantly give conflicting information, for example, if you want to lose fat, stop talking and give me the 28 days of the Velocity Diet. If you want flexibility, sign up for the Bikram Yoga 30 challenge and give it a go. I also give this advice: take six weeks off.

What? It’s something I have NEVER done on purpose. Oh sure, after this surgery or that surgery, I took time off and when I got really sick, I took two weeks off. In hindsight, I should have listened to a friend who had studied in sports training in another country. I asked him about how Americans trained. His simple response: “Well, the consensus is that you are all overtrained.” “Well, what about me?”

“Dan, you are the poster child for overtraining.” Off the top of my head, I would suggest that a hard training individual take about six weeks off a year. And, I mean off: no basketball tournaments, no aerobics classes, nothing. Now, the sad thing is this, basically, those of you who don’t train hard just decided to take the next six weeks off. Those who train hard will take those six weeks off when they are dead. I never understood taking time off until far too late in my career. I remember Dan Cantore, fresh from the 1976 Olympics, telling me he was taking some time to “regroup.” My thought was “The next Olympics are just four years away!” I could have had “more career” by more “regrouping.”

In the same vein, when you go on vacation, go on vacation. Don’t try to keep your normal training going. Now, having said this, I also find that visiting a weightroom or gym on a trip allows me to meet a bunch of new people and enjoy experiences that might not happen otherwise. You need to make a choice on this as to whether or not you want to have a fun minimal workout on vacations, but I also enjoy the free food and drinks that always seem to follow my little coaching pointers in an alien gym.

There is also a lot to be said for “Active Rest.” It’s a term that has been around for decades, but still overlooked. It’s this idea: for a few weeks, instead of doing your basic training, get involved in some other activity. Famously, the Soviet athletes got into volleyball, so much so that several weightlifters achieved Masters of Sport in the game. The German discus throwers used to enjoy downhill skiing and it’s hard to imagine American athletes who don’t enjoy pickup basketball games. Do Active Rest long enough to realize that your gifts are probably not good enough for the NBA.

Sleep, the daily cure for all that ails you, is still overlooked as the key to recovery. Years ago, after reading “Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival” by T. S. Wiley, I came away with the courage to do a famous experiment on myself: I would try to sleep up to twelve hours a day for a week. The body fat dripped off of me that week and I had to force myself to eat. To prepare myself for this article, I decided to follow that path again. As I am typing this, I am coming off a 12 hour snooze. Yesterday, I only got nine hours sleep, but I was able to sneak in a three hour nap in the afternoon. My young friend, Chloe Clark, calls the afternoon sleep “the short nap” and the evening sleep “the long nap.” Napping is underrated and worthy of an article on its own.

The first time I tried this experiment, I went from 226 to 214 in about six days. I ate zero carbs, save one salad, and really feasted on eggs and coffee. I’m still bravely working on this protocol, but I did sneak on the scale yesterday and saw I was 222. That’s less than I weighed when I finished the Velocity Diet. On the VD, I ate nothing, but enjoyed six shakes a day. On this diet, I lay around in bed. You decide which one is easier.

Not long ago, I was called out on another forum for “pimping” supplements. Bah, I say to you. I do things that work. If they work, I tell you about them. One may note that I don’t tell you everything I try because not everything you pop in your mouth works like promised. Where’s my Bee Pollen?

There are some supplements that I use every night to help with sleep. Years ago, I had two friends divorce their wives and make very poor decisions over the course of about two years. One buddy ended up in Federal Prison as a result of these decisions. Talking with both of them, they had one common sentence: “I can’t sleep through the night. I only get about four hours a night.” After a few months of no sleep, they both started making bizarre choices. I learned from that lesson: lack of sleep is not only hard on your training, it’s hard on your life.

First, invest in a good bed, good pillows and adequate blinds. We buy new pillows at least once a year, usually twice. We take the old pillows on trips or use them in the television room. You spend a third of your life in bed, so invest wisely. Second, about a half an hour before I go to bed, I take the following:
Three ZMAs
Three Z-12s
Three to Five Flameouts (Fish Oil Capsules)
A serving of Orange Flavored Sugar Free Metamucil

With a glass of wine, you can feel the body relax. I think Mg continues to be the most underrated of supplements and its wonderful calming effects combined with its wonders for the bowels keeps it as my first place winner as supplement of the year. If you have a hard time sleeping, read before bed, but don’t watch television or play on the internet. If you need books that will put you to sleep, try the “Twilight” series. (Oh, meow!)

For napping, you can only do what you can do. I have a small cot at work and I found a place that no one will bother me for about twenty minutes and I’m not telling you where that is! Some suggest eye shades and those airline neck pillows and I think that might be a good idea. If you can nap, do it. The tradition in elite track and Olympic lifting athletes is a daily nap. I asked a Russian friend what was the technical term for this afternoon nap and he gave me an odd Russian term: “Siesta.”

So, now let’s look at what I consider the least important concept in rest: the rest period between sets. I am always amazed when I read massive twelve week training programs and the author has given us varied rest periods for every lift and movement for every workout every day of the program. My experience is that rarely do people follow a workout plan for two days, much less 84 days. But there those numbers sit patiently. In the past, rest periods were given in minutes, like “Two Minutes,” but today there is a move to seconds. When I am training hard, my awful math skills degenerate so much that I have no idea how long “240 Seconds” is going to be, so I just wait about four minutes and go.

Here’s the issue and most strong and accomplished people would agree: For an accomplished trainer, rest periods are more fluid. When Vasili Alexeev Clean and Jerked 500 pounds for the first time in Columbus, Ohio in 1970, how long did he rest before he added weight to do another? It’s a crazy statement to even make. A novice trainer doing a set of ten benches on a machine can repeat that performance very quickly.

The genius of measuring rest periods is that one can honestly compare one workout to another. I have found that sets, reps and load only tell part of the story in a standard workout. In my favorite workout scheme, three sets of eight with one minutes rest between sets, I can gauge how I am doing from literally year to year and, in the case of Overhead Squats and Front Squats, from decade to decade. Without the “truth” of the rest period, you are comparing apples to oranges or whatever cliche fits the day.

In some workouts, the rest to work ratio is the workout. Kenneth Jay’s “Viking Warrior” training of mixing 15 seconds of Kettlebell snatches with 15 seconds of active rest for up to forty minutes is an attempt to drive the VO2 Max through the roof. The oft misunderstood “Tabata” protocol is supposed to feel awful and difficult and hard from the first set. It is NOT twenty seconds of hand waving, ten seconds rest, and twenty seconds of something else. In my article, “Fat Loss in Four Minutes,” most people still think the workout is a fun change of pace. The actual 20 seconds on/ten seconds off with Front Squats is a way to ruin several days in a row.

So, when I get emails asking about rest, I get lost in this continuum. From literally death to training for the long haul to the role and relationship of rest in your life to the use of layoffs and vacations to a nice afternoon siesta to the details of a small part of a workout, rest means a lot to me. It should not be considered something to do when you are done, but one should actively think about resting.

To summarize:
1. I’m not against giving advice about rest periods between sets, it’s just that I think there are many other keys to discuss before I tell you that you need 118 seconds between sets of Reverse Sumo Curls with the Smith Machine.
2. Since most of the information concerning rest is free (no one charges you for sleep), there is no market, therefore, you don’t hear much about it.
3. Truly, any balance you bring to your training is going to help. Taking the time and effort to intelligently add rest is going to pay off better than buying a new curl machine.

Don’t take a discus to the head to learn the importance of taking a look at rest and recovery.

I saw it happening, too. A mediocre thrower would suddenly start dominating local and regional competition. In Olympic lifting, a lifter who had been making the usual progress would within months add forty pounds in the snatch and sometimes more in the clean and jerk. You could see the other effects, too, the bloated self-confidence, the terrible skin traumas, and then the injuries. It seemed that everywhere one looked you saw blown biceps, dislocated elbows, and popped ligaments as the body failed to keep up with the increased load and intensity over such a short amount of time.

And, we all denied it.

I listened in shock as a former world record holder in the discus told a group of high school seniors at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs: “I took ‘em and never had any side effects, but I was told I couldn’t tell you to take ‘em, so I won’t.” We watched men go from regional runner ups to national level competitors, then literally disappear from the sport in less than a few years. And, if it could get worse, a father, now a coach at a Salt Lake City high school, provide “‘em” for his own sons. The lying, the deceit, the cheating, …I thought that was the worst of it.

Until I got that phone call that one of my training partners had died. Age 35, three kids, …heart attack. A glorious athlete with all the numbers that stagger people: over 230 in the discus, over 800 in the squat, mid-300 snatch, over ten feet in the standing long jump. We were friends, too. We drove to meets together, trained together, partied together and gave clinics together. My wife, Tiffini, pregnant with my seven-year-old daughter Lindsay, cooked up a huge turkey dinner to celebrate our success at a big meet. After dinner, we talked about training. An injured wrist made him turn to the disc from the shot put. “You know, I have never thrown the discus clean.”

What? “Yes, I started juicing at 16 as a shot-putter, my coach gave them to me, so when I picked up the disc, I was already heavy into them.” No way. “Yes.” When I put the telephone down after hearing about his death, my mind drifted back to that dinner. Since 16. Died at 35. My brother-in-law, Craig Hemingway, was with me when the call came. After I hung up, I told him that my friend had died. Craig answered: “Well, you won.”

It took me weeks to understand that insight. Walking my dog with my wife and two daughters, I understood Craig’s point. I had just finished training; I was focusing on an upcoming weightlifting meet. It was that simple: I won. I was alive, strong, and healthy. I was 42.

Obviously, I am talking about anabolic steroids. They have been the curse of the strength sports since the early 1960′s. “The answer to all questions,” proclaimed one very famous powerlifter. Of course, he forgot to tell his audience that he would have multiple heart surgeries in his thirties. “Die big” proclaims the hoards of wannabe “Mr. Galaxies.” Unfortunately, you just die.

But what else died? Training knowledge was another casualty. Almost two generations of athletes have lost the classic methods of lifting. Drugs allow more volume, so “more” became the rage. More exercises, more days a week, more sets, more reps, more supplements, more, more, more. Isolation exercises became the fashion culminating in the rise of machines that continue to attempt to isolate each muscle from the other. A new problem emerged: if a group of us are all training on machines, how do we measure progress?

The first machines had “weights.” Numbers were stenciled on the weight stacks, ’40,’ ‘50′ and on up to the last plate. Soon, the ordinary numbers replaced the weight numbers. Now, it is usually the letters of the alphabet. How do we measure progress? Well, I began with ‘E,” but now I am doing ‘J’ for the same number of reps. I hear there is a Russian who does ‘Q.” NO WAY! Way.

So, how do you measure progress? In the pre-drug era, you could look at your bench, squat, clean, snatch or press bests and compare those numbers to people lifting in meets or articles about athletes in the magazine. A 200 pound snatch for a 200 pound man seems like a good measuring stick. But, how do you compare plates on a machine. You can’t. Let’s look in the mirror. Now, pick up the soft-core porn bodybuilding magazine and compare yourself to this month’s champ.

With the mirror and magazine as the only standard, what can you fall back on? Two things: go to the gym pusher and get signed up for a felony transaction or blame mom and dad. Mom and dad? Yes, blame your genetics. The third option is to do both: take drugs and blame genetics.

Of course, there are those willing to take enough drugs to make it work. Does it work? Flip through any bodybuilding magazine over two years old and look at the competitors. Besides those who have died, see if you can see a name that would be in a bodybuilding competition next month. Go to a magazine five years old. Do you even recognize the names?

Compare these may flies with the careers of Davis, Kono and Schemansky. These men all had careers that spanned decades; Skee was still stalking national titles into his mid-forties. Why the long careers? I argue that the slow and steady progress of using fundamental training principles is the key to long term success. It can be stated in a thousand different ways, but I like “Go Hard, Go Heavy and Go Home. Repeat.”

Yet, a larger question still haunts me. How we stop the deaths, the injuries, and the destruction of this plague of steroids. I can’t enforce the crystal clear Federal laws when police officers in many areas are regular steroid users. As a citizen of Salt Lake City, I doubt the Olympic committee will do anything in the area of drug use after the widespread and unapologetic corruption of the leaders of “the movement.” I can’t compete with the muscle rags that promote pornography, questionable lifestyles, and “secret” mumbo jumbo that keeps adolescent boys shelling out their allowances for the next issue.

Let me give some simple ideas that may slow (I pray we stop) the progress of the steroid pushers: 1. Use poundage on the bar as a standard and use standard lifts. Compare progress by looking at what other lifters at the same weight and age lifted. Use the standards: press, snatch, clean and jerk, squat, deadlift and bench press. Maybe one or two other lifts would make this list, but stick with the standards.

2. Use a mirror when you comb your hair and brush your teeth. Don’t use it to measure progress as an athlete. True, before and after pictures have their value in fat loss programs or prepping for a bodybuilding contest. But, if you are not on a fat loss program or getting ready for Mr. Vermont, why use them? Mirrors, on the other hand, lead to vanity, a classic deadly sin. Vanity leads to …

3. Convince yourself, and others, that success is the steps one takes towards a worthy goal. First, determine a goal. As a high school athlete, I wanted a college scholarship. I had to go to a Junior College first, but I got my goal. Is a college degree a worthy goal? I think most people would agree it is. Is a fuller pec a worthy goal? Next, determine the steps you will need to take. If you need help on the steps, read Dino Training again. But, remember, be sure you have those other goals listed, too. The professional, personal, social, and other worthy things you wish to achieve in your life.

4. Redefine “winning.” Take a moment with my brother-in-law’s insight. “Well, you won.”

I’m still lifting. I’m still throwing. I’m still walking with my wife and girls. I’m alive and I’m still trying to help others climb the mountain. I miss my friends and I don’t want to bury anymore needlessly.

Ideally, I hope to organize Dick’s pointers. For the record, I noticed that Dick and I both seem to enjoy the “story” as much as the “point of the story.” Unfortunately for me, I was then faced with pages of notes to reread and attempt to connect point “a” to point “b.”

So, forgive me, if you will if a point seems lost or a principle forgotten. However, three overriding principles dominated our conversations and Dick’s insights:

Not overtraining!
Motivation (The mind of a champion)
Flexibility

Dick still laments the loss of isometric work in the USA. Simply, most people, including Bob Hoffman, just didn’t get it. Why? Isometrics didn’t make you feel tired. So, people would start to add in more work…a few sets here, a few sets there. “You did plenty, but you didn’t get the blood pump…no lactic acid in the muscles, yet I could prove, with the Isotron machine, that your muscles were fatigued!”

The Isotron machine was designed by the “master,” Doctor John Ziegler. It measured, with a short electric stimulus, muscle fatigue. Bill St. John still owns one of the original ones made by Doc Ziegler. Once Dick could get a ‘base’ on a guy, he could nearly instantly tell whether or not he was overtrained. 75 milliamps was a “normal” reading. If Dick could get a contraction at this level, the athlete was within limits. Over 100, trouble started to show. Dick had an enlightening story about Russ Knipp who had trained for three hours a day. Dick finally got him to try the Isotron. Bob Bednarski got a solid contraction at 75, after only doing one lift a day for half an hour or so, five days a week. Knipp couldn’t contract until 175!!!

On a personal note, I checked this with a stimulator my chiropractor uses. He noted that, yes, people without problems or stress seem to need a lower stimulus to contract, in fact, you can watch their muscles jump when it gets too high. Injured people almost CAN’T contract in some instances. In other words, overtraining and auto injuries have some interesting parallels. I don’t know what this all means, but I found my chiropractor, Dr. Tom Malin, to intuitively understand Dick’s concept and agree with it 100%.

The problem, according to Dick, is that people train isometrically at their weak point and hold it for six seconds. “How many reps does that equal? I don’t know, but most people just float through through their weak points. With isometrics, you focus there.” This kind of workout doesn’t feel like much, but it is putting a huge load on recovery ability.

“It faded out because it wasn’t understood. With a curl at 90 degrees, if you hold for 8 or 10 seconds with a max weight, how many reps and sets is it equal to? It was so simple, people abused it!”

Lou Riecke had the “mind” for pure isometrics. He was a pure isometric lifter and didn’t go heavy very often in training. He and Bill March both worked with Doc Ziegler on various kinds of hypnosis and self-hypnosis. We will discuss this in greater detail in another article. Dick found that 3 Squat positions, 3 Pull Positions, 3 Press Positions and the Shoulder Shrug were the best combination. Hoffman discussed his “Super 8,” but going high, low and “sticking point” seemed to work well for most guys. For more insights about this idea, go to the deadstop front squat. (This little introduction into the the “Bulgarian Twist” started my relationship with Dick.) Bill March , however, liked to see the weights move. Work up to two sets of twenty and then tell me if they warm your core up!

Part of the great insights of Dick Smith revolved around one core concept: Trying to catch up leads to overtraining. In fact, big guys need less not more. When you begin to see overtraining, look towards getting more rest, (read my notes on this at my diet questions and answers for my experiment working on more sleep. It works, by the way) and see if you are assimilating your food. Increased protein helps, yes, but not if you can’t digest it. The harder you train in the rack, the more you will need protein and supplements, but, as Dick cautions, “it is the REST TIME that builds!” The message, Dick warns, is to train hard in the racks. But, nobody listened to how simple it could be and Functional Isometric Contraction was considered a worthless training method.

It is interesting to note in Mike Metzger’s first edition of his lifting book that Bill March was his hero. Dick noted that the Metzger brothers both spent a lot of time with Doc Ziegler and learned a lot about “abbreviated training” from the Doctor. It is interesting that some bodybuilders reaped the benefits of this method, while lifters ignored it.

Dick has a million stories, some are funny. Like the one time they used well water in the isotron machine. Well water was filled with minerals which then shocked the lifters rather than measure their contractions. “It got the muscles going, we noticed,” said Dick. It was during this story that Dick dropped the real isometric bomb…

“Yeah, Bill just picked it off the pins and held it a fraction off the bottom pin.” ‘Didn’t he drive it into another pin?’ “NO! I don’t know who started that idea, but we never did it. Theoretically, you can’t move maximum weights, the closest is STATIC. If the weight is moving, it is not maximum.” (I heard my brain yell: duh. That is so true!) March quarter squatted 1500 and overhead locked out 750 pounds. That is some maximum weights! These were six second isometrics and the workouts just flew by, in terms of time.

A Typical Workout
25 Hanging Frog Kicks
Stretch Out

Just go over to the rack and load up to your max and do the exercises: 3 Pulls, 3 Press, 3 Squat, and Shoulder Shrug (Ten “singles” of 6 seconds, change the bar position, adjust the weight and go again.)

Hang and slowly Twist the hips to decompress the spine. Go Home!

I asked Dick what the modern lifter should do and he felt that two days a week in the rack and two days a week with the bar (maybe a bunch of singles with 70-75 percent in the snatch one day and the clean and jerk the other) would suffice.

Dick also recommended that a fifth day of simply challenging each other to a game of Standing High Jumps would have a value. Lee James went 4’8″ while March jumped over 5’2″. With twenty pound dumbbells in each hand, March could still standing jump over four feet!!!

Does it work? Well, the conversations that I have been having the past few years all seem to point to one thing: Trying to catch up leads to overtraining. The rack training targets weak points, while really exhausting the system. Does it work? Have you looked at the pictures of March? I can vouch for deadstop front squats curing my clean recoveries, but I am no expert. As I continue developing this series, perhaps more answers will come forth.

It was January in Utah and as I looked out my garage door, I saw another blanket of snow layer my driveway. As soon as I finished lifting, I would march back into the house, change shoes and scrap the path clean again.

I have been banging plates and lifting weights since the first Nixon administration. When I started lifting, the sport of Olympic lifting was king and all the other lifting sports were snickered at for attracting “oddballs.” Then came the machine age and these expensive and profit heavy behemoths slowly elbowed out barbells and dumbbells out of the gyms (now spas, fitness centers, and “heavens”) and into the cellars and garages. So, that is why, in snowstorms, my neighbors peer out their frosted windows, look at the steam roaring out of my nose, shake their heads, and go back to watching “Must See TV.”

What Are The Advantages Of Olympic Lifting?

Why do the Clean and Press, variations of the Snatch, and the Clean and Jerk provide not only a complete workout but complement any training program?

Let’s Look At Four Reasons:

First, the most surprising aspect of Olympic Lifting is its effect on the cardiovascular system. A few years ago, Doctor Michael Stone studied the cardiovascular benefits of Olympic Lifting. He was shocked to find the improvements made by this form of training. But why? It is a simple matter of the length of the movement of the bar.

In a wrist curl, the bar may move four inches. In a Clean and Jerk, the bar moves from the floor to overhead, upwards of seven and a half feet! Every muscle in the body is used, including all the support system. A tough set of Snatches leaves the lifter heaving for breath, sweating in streams, and the heart racing. All this without even having to go the track!

Second, the human body is built in one piece. By lifting the bar from the ground to overhead, the entire body is called into act. As one begins the slow process of adding weights to the Olympic Lifts, the entire body compensates by getting bigger and stronger.

One of the first areas most novices to Olympic Lifting discover is the whole chain of muscles from the gluteus and the spinal erectors to the trapezius. Shirts begin to fit funny as the muscles of the upper back grow to accommodate the pulling movements. What muscles do the Olympic Lifts build? All of them.

Third, it is difficult to overtrain or go too heavy on the Olympic Lifts. Certainly, it is possible, but because of the movement from floor to overhead, there is little room for forced reps, overload techniques, or any form of cheating. There is no bench, no rack, no supports. A lifting partner can’t stick his hand on the bar and make you squeeze out an extra rep.

Olympic Lifting demands discipline in choosing weights within your abilities. But, the payoff is worth it. The feeling of hoisting bodyweight from floor to overhead for the first time remains a treasured memory years later.

Learn more about intensity building techniques.

Fourth, Olympic Lifting workouts don’t take very long. A solid workout of 5-4-3-2-1 or twenty singles can take less than half an hour. Working the entire body, as well as the cardiovascular system, the Olympic Lifts are very taxing. It would be hard to imagine ten sets of ten with bodyweight in the Olympic Lifts. It is hard to imagine one set.

If time is pressing, take a warm up weight and Clean and Press it for ten. Add some weight, and do five. Add some more and do three. Then, keep adding smaller plates and knock off as many singles as you can, until you can’t. Workout over.

When your garage is warming up to freezing because of the steam off your body, you will understand the importance of short, quick workouts. When you can do bodyweight in all three of the lifts, look in the mirror. You will understand the importance of the Olympic Lifts.

It happens every time I write an article or give a workshop. Someone asks me, “So, uh, Dan, do you think I should do it five times a week or should I do it twice a day?” It doesn’t matter what “it” is — one-arm lifts, Tabata front squats, Olympic lifts — I always get the same perplexing response.

I understand perplexity. As the father of two teenagers, being perplexed defines most of my life. Only recently have I understood the issue from both sides of the question. Responses like the above mystify me because I’ve been training since 1967, and I can therefore discern whether or not something works. Perhaps more importantly, I understand the steps needed to take to add something (an exercise, a training protocol, a supplement) to my training.

Some people have no idea how to do this. If you’re one of those, let me give you a hint: You must begin by understanding how we learn.

Imagine asking a five-year-old to figure out how many square yards of burnt-orange shag carpet would be needed in a room.

Issue One: This five-year-old still counts “one-two-free-four-five-uh?”

Issue Two: Not only does this young scholar not know what a yard is, but he thinks a foot is only made for kicking a ball.

Issue Three: Sure, it’s a simple issue of length times width. Says the kiddo, “What’s ‘times’?”

To learn math, we follow a progression we call systematic education. Math skills are based on first learning the numbers in the correct sequence. (This doesn’t apply to me when I’m doing high-rep squats. I count by fives when I get tired.) Next, we might approach adding two numbers together to get a sum. I have thirty-three-inch arms, for example.

After learning addition, we learn subtraction, then multiplication. Finally, we learn about feet and yards so we can figure out our carpet problem: Take the width and multiply it by the length to discover they no longer sell burnt-orange shag. However, they do have a lovely lime green on sale.

See, systematic education is the best way to learn anything. But how the heck does this relate to chunking weight around in the gym?

Pick up a bodybuilding magazine off the rack in any grocery store. Open it and find Mr. Great Galaxy’s official training program and supplement schedule. Let me say this for you: Yeah, right. Having said that, let’s move on.

So, young Billy, who wants to impress his fourteen-year-old female classmates, buys this magazine, takes it home, drags his older brother’s weights out from under the bed and tries to follow Mr. Great Galaxy’s training program. In a few years, he’s done every curl imaginable and performed so many skull crushers that his I.Q. has dropped. (Note to Billy: These aren’t designed to be a bouncing, ballistic exercise.)

He then joins the local fitness center and discovers bench pressing five days a week, and the indisputable fact that squats hurt the knees, which, of course, is quite disputable. By this time, Billy has also joined an internet forum and is an expert on biochemical reactions inside the human body, trash-talking beginners’ questions, and making fun of old guys who Olympic lift.

Then, Billy goes to a workshop or, worse, reads one of my articles. You see, Billy doesn’t have a systematic education. He never learned to squat correctly, deadlift correctly, nor learned the basics of the sport. He doesn’t eat breakfast because he’s on the Warrior Diet; he drinks five Super Huge Gulps of cola a day because he heard that was the best way to get creatine to work; and he thinks the only way to get a bodyweight bench press is to be on drugs.

At the workshop, he hears someone like Mike Burgener discuss the Olympic lifts. Mike breaks down the lifts to the key points and hammers them over and over while the group does the lifts with PVC pipes. The next presenter might be someone like Coach Christopher Sommer discussing the one-hour warm-up he has his young elite gymnasts perform each workout. Each drill is amazing, and certainly would fit into any athlete’s program.

And maybe they ask me to speak at this workshop and I explain the joys of sprinting with heavy boulders, tossing long wooden poles end-over-end, and mixing chains, rocks, thick bars, kettlebells and isometrics into one exercise. Young Billy stares up at the ceiling after the workshop. He just doesn’t have the time to train on the Olympic lifts two hours a day, train to be an Olympic gymnast, train to become a Highland athlete and a terror in the neighborhood, and continue training for the Mr. Great Galaxy contest.

You see, Billy doesn’t have the background to discern what to do and when to do it. He “knows” a lot, but he can’t sift through the process. Billy is right: He doesn’t have the time to do all the things he learned at the workshop, nor should he attempt it. What should he do?

The problem with systematic education is it takes a long time. Now, the fact that you can read this shows the value of the process, but unless you had an extraordinary elementary physical education teacher, opportunities to train in a wide variety of sports, an elite-level high school program, and the finest coaching in the world in college, it can be difficult to pick up all this information in the typical gym.

For the adult learner, especially those who use my articles as their on-going lifting education (college credit should be given, by the way), I propose another method.

Systemic education is based on understanding a simple model. You can use the image of a ladder as a basic model, but as the cliché goes, be careful when you get to the top of the ladder because you might have it on the wrong wall. In systemic education, we use the image of a tree. If you don’t know what a tree is, move out of the city.

You are the tree. The seed you came from is your genetic inheritance. Some of you are oaks, others are cedars, and a few of you are Bonsais and for that I am sorry. The soil can be considered the environment in which you grew up. If you grew up in a town with phenomenal success in wrestling, you might be a wrestler.

I don’t want to beat the model to death, but the tree rings represent your years of experience. Like many of us, I have some thin years and some thick years, years that went bad and years that went well. The key to this model is this: Your continued growth relies on the previous rings!

Let me cut to the point: You go to a workshop and hear about a wonderful new supplement. What do you do? This is the core of systemic education. When you add something to the soil, you need to test it by the fruit it bears. The problem? When you go to a workshop you tend to add fifty new things to your training and you can’t measure what worked and what didn’t work.

When young Billy reads an article or goes to a workshop, he’s enthused beyond anything he’s felt in years. He begins to take twenty fish oil capsules an hour, depth-jumps off the boxes with the bar in the overhead squat position, sprints like a Canadian Olympian, performs ring work, eats extra chocolate protein Wizzbangs, and snorts six hits of sugar-free psyllium every hour. Within days, he’s a mess. What happened?

If you have a tree and add ten ingredients to your soil, nine of them good for the tree and the tenth poison, how will you figure out which one is which? That, my friends, is the issue. When I’m learning all these wonderful new things and ideas, how do I discern what works and what’s killing me? You need to do it systematically!

This is how I approach new training ideas. First, I immediately fall back on one of two workouts. I have two basic workout models I’ve used over and over and in which I have a feel for what’s going on with the balance of training load and recovery over a few weeks.

The first standard workout I use is the Transformation Program. Don’t worry about the name; basically, it’s three days a week of lifting, with one day devoted to pulling movements, one day to pushing movements, and one leg day. I only do two exercises, and keep the rest period at strict one-minute intervals.

Generally, I like three sets of eight, but any reasonable rep-and-set combination will work. One other day a week, I do a few hill sprints (very few) and on another day I do a fun activity like hike, bike or a team sport. This is an easy program to manage and I know my joints will feel good; I’ll have a lot of energy and I generally look okay doing this program. The other standard workout I may do is the One Lift a Day Program. I might even simplify the workout a bit by just doing a push day, pull day, squat day, and whole-body day, say, snatch and clean and jerk.

By choosing to train in a program that basically covers everything at a very-easy-to-moderate level, I’m pretty sure I’m ready for the experiment. The experiment? Yes, now I add the new groovy thing I learned at the workshop. If, after two weeks, my knees hurt so bad I can’t use the gas pedal, deem this a failure. If, after three weeks young supermodels are throwing themselves at me (again), something good is going on and I’ll keep doing this new thing.

You know, it sounds so logical, so simple, but very few people do this. If you learn five new things, it might take a few months to run these through your training program to figure out whether or not they work for you. Keep testing the fruits of your labors, not the hype in the advertisements.

Let’s review.

Number One

Set yourself up with a basic training routine you can count on to keep yourself fresh, but in shape. What in shape means to you might be different than what it means to your training partner, but I like basic lifting measurements or throwing distances. It could be a ratio of upper-arm measurement to waist measurement. My long-term plan is to have a one-to-two ratio in the arm to waist. I just need to get my arms to twenty-seven inches.

Number Two

Add new lifts, variations, or ideas to your training program one at a time. I bought a set of chains a year ago and I only used them with front squats for the first month. The next month, after discovering how excellent these chains were for acceleration, I tried them with deadlifts. Now I use them for all squats, deadlifts and presses, but I might not have realized their benefit if I’d added a bunch of things at the same time.

The next idea is this: Some things only work for a short period of time. I use the word quiver to describe all the lifts, exercises and routines I can draw on through a training year. For example, thick-bar deadlifts have a real value sometimes. Still, you don’t want to constantly train with oversized bars because even though your grip gets better and better, you never truly push your posterior chain.

Number Three

Some great ideas work sometimes, but not all the time. In fact, I keep a chart of all the training tools at my disposal and reread this list anytime I feel like having a little instant variation.

In nutrition, the formula is a little harder. I live by this two-part mantra: If it works immediately, it’s illegal. If it works quickly, it’s banned. Again, I’d recommend setting up a standard eating plan. These days, you have the advice of lots of people brighter than me, so read up on diet. A couple of things I insist upon for the standard diet:

• I like my athletes to eat three meals before they train with me: breakfast, lunch and a snack. This almost instantly helps most modern teens.
• Eat protein at every meal. I like the simple rule of at least a fistful.
• Water should be your base beverage.

Once you’re doing this consistently, try to add the magic food. I did this a few years ago with fish oil capsules, and became an instant missionary for this cheap, wonderful supplement. Again though, think systematically.

In dietary changes, you may not notice any difference. I look for improvements in blood profiles (I get an expansive, yet inexpensive blood profile done once or twice a year), skin health (less acne, more glow, better elasticity) and, sometime a hard one to recognize, moods. Ask your friends about your moods. If they all smile and back toward the exit, it isn’t a good sign.

You have to learn what works for you through personal experience. It’s not perfect, but find a basic training regime you can count on for a few weeks and a basic approach to diet you can live with for a month or so. Then, add the magic, add only one new thing at a time, and see what happens.

After that, of course, you can pester me with questions about whether doing the clean and jerk with 400 pounds will build your biceps.

This is an excerpt from my book, Never Let Go—click here to order the book, or click here to read the incoming book reviews.

On our way to Montana for the National Weight Pentathlon, my wife Tiffini and I pulled over for a break. It’s a beautiful drive, but I drink a lot of coffee and I’m 49, so we have to pull over for a lot of “breaks.”

As I went into the men’s room, I noticed a funny thing: some time in the past few weeks, a young gangster decided that the men’s room toilet seat was the place to write his name. This is called “tagging” and I guess, “You’re it.”

So, since that day, this young man’s name has had a variety of sweaty, car-seat wrinkled, flabby old man buttcheeks stretched over the second gift his parents gave him after the gift of life. As a bonus, his name proudly sits inches from drying fecal material and a stench that even gagged me… and I’ve used dry toilets in the Middle East (“dry” as in 120 degrees, no water, and mummified poop).

I began wondering about “all this.”

And what is “all this?” You know, all this: the names, the mottos, and the posturing that makes up so much of the Internet and general society today. I’ve been wondering if we should take a step back and rethink our goals through the lens of what we actually believe.

“What?”

I know that’s the question going through your mind. I’ve written about goal setting here at T-Nation before and I tend to ask the question “What are your goals?” more than any person giving advice on the Internet. That is, of course, if my writing “What are your goals?” counts as actual advice.

No matter what I write about or talk about in a workshop, people always ask me questions that need to be answered only through the lens of their goals. Yet there’s always one important element missing in goal setting, and this is what I want to discuss here.

The Missing Element

First, we have to rehash some moth eaten concepts about goals. I like to encourage my charges to assess things through a term that I repeat over and over and over again: Look for your answers through the lens of your goals.

“Dear Dan, should I do the snatch, the Litvinov Workout, the Velocity Diet, the Tabata front squat workout, and the One Lift a Day program to win this year’s Mr. Olympia? I am a 16 year old from Assdrop, Iowa, and I can’t decide whether to lean out or bulk up. Please help me!”

What? Okay, if you want to be Mr. Olympia, you don’t need to listen to my discussion on the Olympic lifts. Sure, Arnold and Franco and Zane did them, but you don’t need to anymore. The sport has moved on. Oh, and don’t be very tall either. And if you want to be in the NBA, don’t ask me about sled pulling. Oh, and don’t be very short either.

In fact, if you want to Mr. Olympia, I’m probably not the best person to ask for advice. I simply don’t know how to help you. Sorry. But, I can help you discern your goals.

The One Minute Manager said it best:

Look at your goals.

Look at your behaviors.

Does your behavior match your goals?

It’s the million dollar question for those of us in the strength world: Does your behavior match your goals? As I write this, I’m deep in the Velocity Diet. My friends, both here in Utah and the Internet, continually ask me, “How does this help you?” Craving both Scotch and steak, let me think about this…

Hmm, one of my long-term goals is to live long-term. I looked down at my belt recently and noticed that I’d pushed it down to fit under my belly. “Under belly” belts are a sure sign that one is starting down the road to the morbid kind of fat that lives under the abdomen and, statistically, kills you. In other words, belly fat kills.

My mom wasn’t much older than me when she died and she never had a chance to see me as a normal human. I’d like to see my two daughters as mature adults, mainly so I can move in with them and walk around the house complaining “it’s too cold,” “now it’s too hot,” “there’s no food,” and “who stole my underwear?”

But I have other goals, too. One of my goals is to continue to throw farther and farther yet remain healthy. Healthy, in my definition, is the optimal functioning of the organs. So, if I can’t climb a flight of stairs without a rest, or my pancreas doesn’t do whatever a pancreas does, it isn’t worth the tradeoff of throwing farther. Carrying a bunch of body fat not only decreases performance, but I have to toss my lard off the ground as I move in addition to what I’m throwing. It has to impact my health.

But the real reason I went on the Velocity Diet? Well, when you become famous for your Scotch drinking, one day you have to honestly ask, “How did I become so good at drinking?” Well, it’s training. So, can I take off 28 days and not drink? If I become even more of a lunatic and stare at pictures of single malt Scotch the way my officemates stare at the girls in Powerful Images, well, I need to really stop drinking and soon.

So, does the Velocity Diet fit my goals? Yes. Do all my behaviors fit my goals? Nope. So either I change my goals or change my behaviors. Either one will do.

It’s like the advice Ben Franklin gave about becoming rich: either increase the amount of money you take in or decrease the amount of money you spend. Either one will do, but both are better.

So, here we are at the great crossroads of success: what are your goals and what are your behaviors? Old Ben Franklin had it right. In fact, I think you can achieve your goals simply by setting them at a very low level.

• I want to sit around and play on the Internet all day and look at women’s pictures in various stages of undress.

• I wish to gain a lot of weight around my midsection… mostly fat, if possible.

• I want to go to the gym with my buddies sometimes and talk about stuff that isn’t related to the gym.

• I’m willing to change my diet to only things that are really easy to eat and taste good to me.

See? Thank you, nobody else has the courage to state this but me: To reach your goals, simply really lower your expectations and standards! Now, why the networks don’t have me on television daily is a mystery to me, too.

You may be one of those people who settle for slightly higher goals. Now, my first question is always this: Can you tell me exactly what they are? As I review the list of goals in my life that I’ve achieved, one of the great insights (truly a moment of absolute clarity) is that I could tell you precisely the goal.

A quick example: After my freshman year of high school, my brother Richard drove me down to the old Track and Field News headquarters. I was a burly 118 pound freshman football player and discus thrower and I wanted to learn more. I bought a book: J. K. Doherty’s Track and Field Omnibook and the discus section talked about Coach Ralph Maughan at Utah State University.

On the ride home from Los Gatos, California, in the backseat of my brother’s car, I decided to get a full-ride scholarship to Utah State University and throw the discus there. A few years later, Coach Maughan was on the telephone offering me a full-ride scholarship to throw the discus for Utah State University.

Don’t you love these “Oh, how wonderful I am” stories? Well, here’s the thing: I changed my behaviors, too. I spent the better part of a year doing odd jobs around the neighborhood and community earning money for an adjustable bench press. (I’d stolen all my neighbor’s weights already… )

I started reading Strength and Health magazine like it had all the answers, I trained every day on weights, I didn’t go to dances, parties, or prom, I drank those horrific soy shakes from the 1970s, and sought out the best coaches I could find. You see, it’s one thing to have a goal. It’s quite another to line your behaviors up with your goals.

Dilemmas and Perceived Rewards

Now, having said all of this, the most important thing I can teach is this: You need to solve an important dilemma… probably by yourself, too. But I can give you a few hints. What is this dilemma? Simply this (and don’t ignore the importance here): What are your perceived rewards for getting your goals?

Now, we have to be very careful here. Here’s the trap: Your mother and father and your grandfathers and grandmothers had some level of impact on your life’s goals. “Get a good job with a good company and they’ll take care of you” was actually once good advice. A good life to some is a good job with a good company.

We have to come to grips with something (at least I do) and it’s this: We probably have three, perhaps four, generations of people reading this article, and we might all share goals, but we probably don’t share the rewards that accompany these goals.

Five years ago, the government realized that much of its workforce was on the verge of retirement. What soon became apparent in many agencies is that the “new hires” had a radically different outlook on, well, everything. For our purposes, let’s summarize some of the studies.

Boomers, X’ers, and Nexters

My generation, the Baby Boomers, that post-WWII generation born from 1945 to 1965, really has some interesting issues. Generally, there’s a mistrust of bureaucracies, save to get what you can from them. I’m a master of working systems. How do you make a Boomer happy? Give them a title. I’m sure that the day I’m made Chief Senior Writer in Charge of Weightlifting Philosophy at Testosterone, my life will be perfect.

My wife’s generation, the X’ers, seem to be a little different. (Consider yourself an X’er if you were born 1965ish to 1980-85ish) For one thing, they grew up watching their parent’s lose those cushy lifelong jobs, lose their pensions, and lose some of the freebies that we all used to expect.

X’ers are an interesting group and the bulk of them (according to the research) have begun retirement savings before the age of 25-30. I have friends in their late forties who don’t have money set aside for their retirement! X’ers understand money, even if they don’t have any at the moment.

The next generation, called “Nexters” by some, are a generation that probably used a computer about the same time they learned to write with a pen. It might be the most asynchronic generation ever, literally. Time means something quite radically different to someone who carries on long Internet discussions with people around the world while text messaging on one phone and talking on another. My daughters do this multitasking with ease… and I can’t figure out how to answer my damn cell phone.

So, how does this relate to goals, goal setting, and rewards? You can see it here in the forums of Testosterone. Baby Boomer’s will want to do specific challenges on a specific day. My goal to win the Greater Mr. Murray Open Novice Masters Class B Over 225 Born in August Contest will be a specific event on a specific day with a clear title. I want to do this, on this day, and win this or that or whatever.

Now, X’ers will ask a good question: How much do I get? What’s the payoff? Now, it can go beyond money, of course, but the follow-up question with these good people usually involves the “why” of things: “Why do you want to throw a big telephone pole over end?” If I tell them I want to be the Loch Aidle Highland Games Champ, they shrug. If I tell them I get $100,000 per turn, they get it.

Nexters are even more fun. When you read that many of the Testosterone forum posters want to “look good nekkid,” the first thing that runs through my Baby Boomer brain is “When? What day?” Yet to this generation, time is flexible.

This isn’t a knock, but someone of my years has to acknowledge that someone who lives literally multitasking “24-7″ isn’t going to worry about the fact that something as inconsequential as the Mr. Greater Murray Open Whatever starts at ten in the morning on a Saturday. Looking good enough to win might be enough!

The Big Question

So, what does this all mean? Simply this: We spend a lot of time talking about goals. Many of us understand that our goals are linked to our behaviors. That alone is a million dollar concept, and you should be sure to take some time reviewing your life through the idea of linking your behaviors to your goals. The great leap that understanding generational influence is that you tie what you expect to be rewarded into your goal setting process.

When I was young, standing on the Olympic podium with USA on my chest was my goal. Greg LeMond reportedly trained as a young man with a large dollar sign on his handlebars. Sure, winning the Tour de France was important, but more important to him was the money. Today, many cyclists use their GPS hookups on their bikes to compare workouts and heart rate monitor information with people all over the web.

There is nothing right or wrong about these approaches, but they’re all different. So, when discussing goals in this light:

Look at the rewards.

Look at your behaviors.

Does your behavior match your rewards?

By the way, I’d like to know how one is rewarded for writing his name on a toilet seat. I left him a little trophy anyway…

This was an excerpt from my book, Never Let Go.