Dan John » DAN JOHN PRODUCTS

Never Let Go

Laree Draper — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:22:27 +0000

Book by Dan John; This review page by Laree Draper

Introduction by Pavel Tsatsouline; Foreword by Dave Draper

You know how it is when you’re reading an article, you come to the end and even though the author’s points were made — the story’s complete — you just don’t want it to end? That’s how I am when I read one of Dan John’s articles. Just like when I’m reading Dave’s writing, with Dan I just want to sit on the deck and ponder his stuff forever. And that’s why I was so thrilled to be a part of bringing his new book to life.

… which is where we are today, sitting in anticipation of a call from the trucking company to schedule delivery. The books shipped from the printer, and should arrive late next week.

Already the word has slipped out and the eager are lining up to be first to get a copy. And we’d love to add you to the list of enthusiastic readers, too. This is a book I consider a big contribution to our field, Dan John’s Never Let Go: A Philosophy of Lifting, Living and Learning. I am sincerely so thrilled. Thanks for letting me be a part of this, Dan.

In Dan John’s new book, Never Let Go, you’ll learn…

How to get stronger, faster and leaner
Simple steps to great conditioning
What it takes to compete at high-level athletics
Dan John’s top training tips
Effective workouts to carry you through your training seasons
Variations of the classic 5×5 workout
Sample kettlebell and barbell workout combinations
Outdoor cardiovascular training options for athletes
And much more…

Dan John’s deceptively simple training plans cover a great many fitness attributes, safely and quickly, and are always a hit with athletes. When it comes to teaching strength, Dan John has no superiors and only a handful of equals. ~ Pavel Tsatsouline, author of Enter the Kettlebell

You’ll be…

Motivated beyond belief! It’s that simple. Dan’s teaching and his coaching is unique and tremendously educational, but what will touch you the most is how fired up you’ll be at the end of each chapter. Read a section before you head for the gym—your training will be transformed; on those days when you’re dragging, his words will make the difference between a victory at the gym and a trip to the couch!

After listening to Dan John lecture or reading his work, I envy his athletes not only for the good fortune of receiving his coaching expertise, but also for the lessons that will carry them along through life. Dan is a common man, but an uncommon motivator. ~ Dave Tate, CEO elitefts.com

In Never Let Go, Coach Dan John breaks down the most complicated concepts of strength training and high-performance athletics in a no-nonsense, yet clever and motivating manner. Workout routines, Olympic lifting guidance, Highland Games, track and field and Strongman events are all covered, in addition to weight training philosophy for the general public.

Coach Dan John is one of the premier instructors in the world of movement, strength and athleticism. His lectures on athletic training have revolutionized the thinking of thousands, and his new text, Never Let Go, will set the standard in safer, smarter, more productive training methods. ~ Dr. Mark Cheng, L.Ac., Ph.D., RKC Team Leader, Contributing Editor – Black Belt Magazine

Never Let Go, published June 2009, contains 416 pages, includes individual 42 articles revised from T-Nation material, and is carefully indexed to make finding workouts and training ideas an easy task.

If mastery takes 10,000 hours, Dan John has mastered the art of teaching and coaching many times over. He renders the complicated simple, and the simple clear. The hours I have spent learning from him changed my life. ~ Mark Twight, Gym Jones

Inside the book…

Foreword ~ Introduction ~ Preface ~ Free Will and Free Weights ~ The Rule of Five ~ The Velocity Diet Experience ~ The Rest of the Story ~ The One Lift a Day Program ~ The Tabata Method ~ Fat Loss in Four Minutes ~ A History of Dieting ~ The Classic Top 10 Tips ~ Systematic Education for Lifters ~ 5 X 5 Variations ~ Three Mentors, Lifetime Lessons ~ Geezer Wisdom ~ The AIT Formula ~ Self-Evident Truths ~ What You Know Versus What You Do ~ PVC and Presuppositions ~ The Litvinov Workout ~ The Gable Method ~ Strong Eye for the Weak Guy ~ The Best Exercises ~ My Secret Coaching Methods ~ Nautilus, Crossfit and High/High ~ Blood on the Barbell ~ A Religious Studies Professor’s Review of HIT ~ New Associations, New Muscle ~ Coach Pain’s Slosh Pipe ~ Lessons from Southwood ~ Recovery Methods 101 ~ That Guy ~ Are You Making Progress? ~ Disdain Medium ~ The Big Five ~ Secrets to Long-Term Fitness ~ One Hard Thing ~ Principle Lessons ~ Three Basic Concepts ~ Goals and Toilet Seats, A Men’s Room Epiphany ~ Goal-setting for Motivation ~ The One-dumbbell Workout ~ The Journey to Excellence ~ The Philosophy of Physical Capital ~ Improve Your Fitness Literacy ~ Afterword ~ Suggested Reading ~ Index

Extraordinary power, marvelous skill and masterful technique have been earned through years of training and practice and scrutiny, failure and success. A generous servant, a giver of gifts, his words come alive with experience and fact for the reader, the hungry student, the one bound to learn. Dan doesn’t paint by number and help you pick out the colors. He draws a picture and invites you, encourages you, inspires you, to become a part of it.~ Dave Draper, author of Brother Iron, Sister Steel

Did you catch the power behind those endorsements?

Dan’s work in coaching and training others garners the respect of titans in our industry. You can trust them. Let us get this transformative book on the way to you; click here to place your book order.

Utah Workshop 4-DVD set

Laree Draper — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:16:12 +0000

DVD review commentary written by Laree Draper

The first of the four DVDs filmed during our June 2009 IronOnline weekend in Draper, Utah, this two-dvd lecture (2 hrs, 18 min) covers what Dan considers the most important aspects of strength training for the athlete, as well as the general fitness enthusiast. There are a number of video clips from the dvds available at the Videos link above.

Told with humor and great insight, you’ll learn:

The Role of the Strength Coach
Levels of Strength Coaching
How a Home Trainer Becomes His Own Coach
The Influence of Strength Coaching on Performance
Strength and Athletic Performance
How to Narrow Your Training Focus
Systematic vs Systemic Learning
Setting a Non-Competitive Training Goal
Phasic vs Tonic Muscles
How to Stay Youthful while Aging
Movements, Not Muscles
Dan’s Hip Displacement Continuum

Find out why Coach John is considered the go-to guy by top fitness professionals when they want to know what really works in strength and conditioning: It’s because he knows, and he teaches it well.

Also on this dvd, you’ll find his chalkboard slides and seminar handouts via pdf files accessible from your computer. The other DVDs from the workshops, Olympic Lifting Basics, Perfecting Your Kettlebell Form, and Warm-ups, Workouts and Barbell Complexes, will be available this fall.

Click here to order your copy of A Philosophy of Strength Training with Coach Dan John, a two-DVD set for $39.95.

As I think about the new Dan John kettlebell dvd, part two of his four-part weekend seminar series DVD we’re expecting from the replicator late in a few days, I again realize how much information he packed into the weekend. When you’re in the thick of things, it’s hard to comprehend the quantity of new information, or the value we get when guys like he and Dave simplify things to the core. That’s what happened during our weekend in June, bullet by bullet Dan hit the target for our group of IronOnline attendees.

And as you know, we got it all on film.

One thing that will surprise most viewers is the true explosiveness of the ketttlebell swing. It’s much more violent than what most will expect, and as it turns out… Dan was right, and it’s a good thing. I liked my trusty, lazy old form of swings, and had no back pain experience to cause me to search for a new technique. Less than a half-hour into the workshop, I was convinced.

If you need some convincing yourself, you can order the new Dan John kettlebell dvd today.

In part three of the four DVDs from the Utah workshop weekend, we get a taste of Dan John’s instruction for beginning Olympic weightlifting. Our original idea was this would be primarily for adults who’ve never lifted Olympic-style, and it’s certainly that, however one of the attendees is a competitive Olympic lifting, who told me a couple of Dan’s tips changed her lifting forever. So I’m thinking anyone interested in Olympic lifting will get something out of this one.

In this 80-minute DVD, Dan taught:

Olympic lifting overview
Snatch positions
Push jerk
Split jerk
The Jerk
Overhead squat
Goblet squat
Shoulder mobility
Putting weights overhead
Hamstring lengthening
Romanian deadlift stretch
Wrist flexibility

Having been at the event and as an adult with absolutely no Olympic lifting experience, I can tell you I left feeling fairly confident in my ability to snatch and jerk… a short piece of PVC pipe.

Seriously, it left me and the rest of the attendees with plenty of enthusiasm for learning the O lifts, and enough technique tips to give us a start on our own at home. Here’s where to get your copy of Dan’s Olympic Lifting for Beginners DVD, $29.95.

90 minutes of new training ideas!

And now we get to the final DVD of the series, in which he shows us his sample warm-ups, a few workout varieties, and his famous barbell complexes.

One of Dan’s key phrases here was, “The warm-up is the workout,” and as he puts our crew through the paces, you’ll see how he can make that claim! He also uses members of the audience to demonstrate new movements, or to show his corrections when we went astray.

Dan shows his daily favorites:

Gait Warm-up
Goblet Squat & Bootstrapper Squat
Hip Flexor Stretch & RDL Stretch
Plank Series
Horizontal Shrugs
Maxercist and Parked Rows
Crocodile Pushups
Heartbeat Squat
Kalos Sthenos Getup
Ab Circuit
Star Plank
Barbell Complexes
A full warm-up series
Sample workouts, insights and more

Includes pdf handouts of the sample workouts, warmups and barbell complexes

Here’s where to get your copy of Dan’s 90-minute workout samples dvd, $29.95.
Or if you’d like to save $20 on the complete series, here’s the link for the 4-DVD set.

Everything’s Over My Head DVD

Laree Draper — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:15:27 +0000

Dan John’s previous dvds, all in one!

This dvd includes Dan’s training material
Everything’s Over My Head
Plus his From the Ground Up and Carried Away dvds!

The Over My Head collection rounds out what Dan considers his three-part mission to get athletes to drag stuff, pick stuff off the ground and carry stuff overhead.

Simple, right? And with Dan’s collection of insightful and unusual tips, it really can be simple.

For this compilation price of $39.95, let Coach John teach you his one-of-a-kind techniques to blast your training to new levels. You’ll get his new material, plus his two earlier dvds, all on new training dvd!

We all know Dan as the ‘net’s go-to guy for straight-forward hardcore training techniques. Now let him teach and inspire you personally with his video training dvd.

The Everything’s Over My Head section

One of Dan’s primary concerns for his athletes is shoulder health, and in this dvd, Dan offers all his tips for strengthening the rotator cuff and supportive shoulder girdle muscles for ultimate shoulder protection. He’ll also show you his techniques for wrist health and flexibility, and in addition to brute strength, he’s got a
plan on how to make your training just plain fun!

You’ll learn:
Shoulder Raises and odd lockouts
1/2 Get-Ups
Pressouts
Military Press
Press Behind Neck, Bar and Kettlebell
Frog Stance & Push Work
Jerks, 2 styles
Combination Sets, 2 options
Wrist Stretches
Mixed Implement Training
Lift, Throws and Drags
Strongman Moves: Press Walks and Carry Walks

This is an outstanding new addition to Coach John’s video training!

The From the Ground Up section

Years of begging by enthusiastic online readers, athletes, conference and clinic attendees at long last brings us From the Ground Up, Dan John’s35-minute DVD that demonstrates his unique Olympic lifting teaching style.

Learn the simple tips Dan uses to teach Olympic moves to athletes young and old!

You’ll learn:
The top rules of weight lifting
Various squat drills
How to learn the squat
Goblet squats
Front and overhead squats
Warm up variations: dumbbells, pvc pipe and kettlebells
Cleans
Chain work
Power Snatch
Romanian deadlifts and variations
Coach Dan John’s personal teaching tips

The rumor is, Dan can have you cleaning and snatching in 10 minutes — several years faster than most coaches can claim. Worth testing his technique, isn’t it?

One customer wrote about this DVD:
The cost was well worth it for the simple, solid, understandable instruction. Possibly not for the experienced folks, but for the novice who wants to incorporate Olympic lifts into his or her workouts and wants a template to do them easily and effectively, spring for it! This DVD is for you. Multiple viewing is recommended.

Let Dan get you start on your path to aggressive, successful lifting.

The Carried Away Section

Outdoor training, hauling, pushing and pulling –
Dan John is the guy who’ll inspire you to get
Carried Away!

This is a no-frills, no-nonsense demonstration and explanation of the most effective hardcore exercise one guy can dream up.

You’ll learn:
Sled dragging and sprinting
Kettlebell carries
Farmer carry
Suitcase carry
Waiter carry
Rock carry
Crosswalk
Front squat
Back squat
Squat walk
Deadlift walk
Overhead press walk
Duffel bag work
Letvi Sleds

See examples of Dan’s favorite combinations and how to make the most of your implements.

Bonus material includes
3D Discus Throw Stretches

The 35-minute Carried Away section will get you started on your path to aggressive, hardcore training.

Says Dan, “One day you’ll thank me. Today is not that day. And you know, tomorrow doesn’t look that good either.”

*Note: This dvd adds to and replaces Dan’s two earlier dvd releases.*

This one’s jam-packed with gems, each one enough to rev your training into overdrive. Don’t let Dan’s casual style fool you: What you’re getting from Dan is… brilliant.

Writes Byron Chandler, reviewing Dan’s dvd, “Dan’s currently using a modern, competitive style of pulling and lifting, so you may wind up picking and choosing what parts are for you. The thing is, these differences are the fine points — learning how to pull weights off the ground and extend, getting the arms out of the pull, etc., are what you really need instruction to learn, and this DVD is the best thing available to people without a good instructor. There are not that many people who will even attempt to teach the quick lifts, and fewer than half of them are actually qualified. Dan’s the real deal.

Click here to order this $39.95 DVD.