Garage Blog

This blog is just a simple write up of my analysis of the first Garage Strength competitor to take on the competition at the Junior World Championships in Uzbekistan, Hayley Reichardt. Hayley came to Uzbekistan in position to potentially bring home a bronze medal in the 48k division.  Heading into the start, there were four girls with a start total of 175k or more, Hayley being one of those girls. Her best total to date was 171k from the 2018 Arnold Classic.

I think almost every athlete has been in this situation before: creeping closer to a major competition, beginning your peak, and yet things just feel slightly off. Your legs aren’t moving as fast as you thought they would, and you aren’t throwing as far or lifting as much as you thought you would. Here, I’m going to explain why this is perfectly fine--and even expected.

As we saw with Hayley, nerves and the mental aspect were the weakest point of her competition in Santo Domingo. Even with this weakness, she was still able to post a fourth place finish in clean and jerk and an 8th place finish overall, contributing to the point system system for next year’s Pan Am Games. So...where can we go with her training?

It is very difficult to approach this meet with high expectations and impressive results. Basically, every athlete involved with the competition should not be focused on this meet as their priority for the yearly block of training. Just about everyone should be focused long term preparation for Junior Worlds or Senior Worlds. On top of those factors, it is very well known that Pan Am competitions are poorly managed, hot, not the greatest living conditions, and generally a poorly executed competition which makes it very difficult to set up for a strong peak.

Many people see elite athletes training with a lot of frequency. Nine, ten, eleven times per week sometimes. I want to address some of my thoughts on training frequency, and some of the important considerations when a coach or athlete is deciding how much frequency is enough.

For this article, I’m going to get into some squat variations: which ones are my favorites, and how I choose to program them for certain people. To start, I’ll just lay out the variations I can think of--Single Leg Squat, Cambered Bar Squat, Duffalo Bar Squat, Safety Squat Bar Squat, and Zombie Squat. Each has their own benefits and I’ll get into them below

Over the past two years, USA Weightlifting has taken a hard stance on the use of performance enhancing drugs (PED’s) inside and out of competition. The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) has done an excellent job enforcing the guidelines for athletes, including strict guidelines for whereabouts reporting and extensive education among coaches and athletes. The case we are about it investigate raises a few question marks on the principles of USAW and USADA.

Perhaps it’s the weird libertarian side of me, but when I first heard the news that USA Weightlifting was getting booted from the OTC, I felt a sweet bit of joy.  No longer would the organization be limited by a small room. No longer would they be controlled by physical constraints and a weight room with a strange set up.  Or maybe it was the business side of me

Garage Strength lifter Jacob Horst didn't hit all personal bests at this weekends Senior National Competition, but his lifts were good enough for

Over the past 8 years I have noticed a dramatic trend…everyone is world about the little stuff.  When I first started lifting weights in 1996, I r...