Beast over Burden powered by Barbell Logic

Jordan Stanton, the President of the United States Strengthlifting Federation (USSF) joins Matt & Scott to discuss the differences between USSF & other federations. 3 things stand out with USSF: weigh-outs vs weigh-ins, press not bench press, and no judging commands.  Immediately following your third deadlift attempt, you are escorted by someone of the same-sex to a private room where they take yo...

We understand that some people don't train strength just for general health or quality of life, but to improve their performance in a sport or physical activity. How do you both train strength and improve sports performance? Right now, hyper-specific training is in fashion. For example, throwing an extra heavy shot or doing half squats with a narrow stance because it mimicks the football player's...

Despite the fact that meets are fun and help give more purpose to our training, they can be a long, stressful day, and we recommend having a coach or handler who can worry about the administrative and logistical things (when are you up, get you food and drinks, etc.). There are many common pitfalls that people tend to do their first meet. Don't stay amped the whole day. Relax when it's time to rel...

You signed up for your first meet: what do you do now? Scott & Matt discuss what to do now. A huge part of preparing for a meet is realizing the purpose of the meet. The purpose of the meet is to set PRs, give your training a purpose, have some fun, meet some people, and leave feeling encouraged about lifting. Nobody cares who wins. You should change as little as possible leading up to the meet if...

Training while traveling presents challenges, whether your a frequent business traveler or someone who only travels to visit family or for vacation. Either way, we have to decide to train or not to train and then how to adjust training before, during, and after to best meet our goals.  If you are someone who rarely travels and NEVER misses a workout and you finally go on a vacation, it's not impor...

Noah Hayden continues his discussion with Niki & Matt, now laying out & discussing his proposed exercise selection criteria and programming criteria.  Below are his proposed exercise selection criteria.  train the most muscle mass in normal, predictable movement patterns requiring normal coordination when possible over the longest effective range of motion to lift the most weight that is structura...

Noah Hayden joins Matt & Niki to reexamine the exercise selection criteria.  Noah first pitched these ideas in episode 3 of the  Barbell Health Series  & then Noah Hayden refined them in an  article for Barbell Logic . As coaches, we likely love lifting, and this passion helped motivate us to pursue a career in helping others lift and experience the benefits of strength. Many of our clients, howev...

Time is your most valuable resource, and you don't know how much of it you have on this earth. Because of this, protecting time, being efficient, and knowing when to trade money for time is important. Its importance heightens if you find yourself in a situation where you make enough money that you can make more money on your work than completing a menial task, such as mowing the lawn or cleaning t...

Chris & Matt Reynolds like to wake up early and GET AFTER IT. If you don't, that's okay, but you might try before you write this off and it's super important to have a consistent sleep schedule regardless of when you go to bed and wake up. You can't make up for lack of sleep on the weekend, and your body will learn and adjust to a regular sleep schedule and be better off for it, as opposed to inco...

Let's talk about focus. This is something people don't do well these days. Focus has atrophied due to smartphones, social media, the internet, TV, etc. Focus, however, is critical to productivity, success, happiness, and getting done deep work.  Something that can help both improve focus but show you how hard it is to focus and how easily you get distracted is meditation. The practice of bringing...

Matt & Chris share a technique they use all the time, called the Pomodoro Technique. This technique is perfect for both knocking out urgent tasks or carving out time to dedicate to deeper, important work.  The original approach is to dedicated 25 minutes to totally uninterrupted work followed by a 5 minute break. You can string together multiple blocks as you get better at this. Also, if you strin...

We all have things we think are important, we want to get done, but we continue to put off. This occurs because of the difference between urgent tasks and important tasks and the 4 different types of actions that occur (as an action can be urgent & important, neither urgent nor important, urgent but not important, or not urgent but important). We tend to put off the important but not urgent things...

As advocates of strength training, we encourage people to add strength training as a habit. Many of the most important things we need to do to live a more fulfilling, productive life, however, involve breaking bad habits.  Bad habits don't have to be bad in a moral sense. They ultimately don't provide us value and bring us closer to our goals. They might waste time or money. They might prevent us...

Scott & Matt share some of their productivity tips: what to do, what to not do, and what equipment or apps help them. When it comes to equipment and apps, both of them find having one huge monitor, 2 monitors, or 3 monitors helps, as one monitor simply adds time to tasks on the computer. Scott has also found value in having a scanner to digitize documents. He puts these on Evernote and finds this...

We have a model for the proper performance of the lifts and we understand programming principles and how to drive progress over time, but we have to acknowledge that for lots of people lots of the time, they can't train optimally. And, honestly, at some point everyone--every single person--will be unable to train optimally. In these cases, we have to do the best we can. Life comes up and presents...

Matt & Niki discuss their pre-workout routines, from when they train, how they plan for training on the road, food, water, clothes: everything about how to properly prepare for training--physically & mentally. Rituals both help prepare us for training specifically (e.g. laying out our clothes the night before or making some overnight oats ensures our outfit or pre-workout nutrition are ready). Bey...

Jason McCarthy of GORUCK discusses rucking, his Army service, & building community through voluntary hardship & shared suffering. He shares his story of how we went from US Army Special Forces (Green Beret) to founding and running a company that--similar to Barbell Logic--believe in voluntary hardship and building community. If you're interested in GORUCK or their gear, go to  http://goruck.go2clo...

Matt, Niki & Andrew answer your lifting & life questions. Topics include best pants, jeans, & shorts (for men & women lifters), forearm pain from lifting, what to do between sets, and best song to rally at a dance party.   0:00 Intro 1:20 What to Do if Can't Press Standard Bar? aluminum bars are worth it--can use it for accessory lifts 3:01 What Should I Do Between Sets? should I sit, stand, pace,...

Matt & Scott discuss fear of the lifts, especially heavy, PR attempts. Different people have different fears of different lifts based on history (repeated failure or past injury) and simply how they feel about the lift. Lots of people, for example, are afraid of heavy squats. There's something about a heavy bar on your back and that you're folded over in the bottom and--even with properly set safe...

Men's style coach Tanner Guzy joins the show to share some tips for improving your style and making sure you are highlighting the physical gains you've worked so hard to make in the gym. Tanner offers an online style course for men as well as one-on-one coaching (he even helped Matt frame his baby blues). You can also take a free quiz on his site to determine your style archetype. https://masculin...

If you're failing early in LP, you have to ask yourself: are you working hard enough? Some symptoms of not working hard enough might be not uploading your failed sets to your coach & failing reps early in LP (like the first 6 weeks). This often occurs with people who think a lot in their work. No thought will help you move from the bottom of a squat to the top of a squat besides a simple cue.  As...

It is popular these days to laud discipline and the ability to endure suffering. The problem with this is that it ignores people's values and preferences. Some people can bear more hardships, but others are drawn to certain types of hardships. Some people--gasp--like running, and many lifters do not.  Matt, for example, enjoys waking up early and getting things done. He's done this since he was yo...

One of strength training's biggest benefits is CONFIDENCE. As people grow stronger, overcome difficult things, and build a more capable body, they tend to carry themselves differently and bring confidence to other areas of their lives. Increased capability lends itself to more confidence. You know your body and do more and meet physical challenges better than it did before. You know that you can d...

This is a throwback to the early days of the podcast. Matt and Scott discuss the concept of voluntary hardship: what is it and how does it refine us? Life will undoubtedly present difficulties. This is involuntary hardship. Choosing to go through something difficult, however, seems to provide benefits.  Essentially, this is delayed gratification: do something hard now to delay the benefit to a fut...

Life comes with difficulties, no matter what we do. Hardship comes voluntarily or involuntarily, but for any hardship our mindset before, during, and after matters: how we approach and process challenging events matter.  Hardship--voluntary or involuntary--can refine us and improve our relationships, or it can beat us down and weaken social ties. Our relationship with the event--which we define wi...