Barbell Shrugged - The Most Experience Weightlifting Coach In America - Bob Takano - 290

Episode Date: December 6, 2017

Bob Takano is a highly respected weightlifting coach who was inducted into the USA Weightlifting Hall of Fame in 2007 for his contributions to coaching. He has been the coach of four national champions, two national record holders, and 27 top ten nationally ranked lifters. Bob has been on the coaching staffs of 17 U.S. National teams to international competitions, five of those being World Championships and the Summer Olympics. His lifters have competed in seven Olympic Trials with one, Albert Hood, the third American to snatch double bodyweight, earning a berth on the 1984 team. Bob is also on the teaching staff for the USAW Weightlifting Coaching Education program and presents his own seminars as well. He also has his own gym, Takano Athletics, at 6036 Variel Ave., Woodland Hills, CA 91367. He's got a ton of knowledge to share, enjoy! -Mike, Doug and Team Barbell Shrugged ► Download our free 54 page Olympic Weightlifting Training Manual at:   http://www.flightweightlifting.com  ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Barbell Shrugged helps people get better. Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT Weightlifting, Barbell Shredded and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast.. Find Barbell Shrugged here: Website: http://www.BarbellShrugged.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Find Barbell Business Here: Website: http://www.BarbellBusiness.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellbusiness Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellbusiness Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellbusinesspodcast

You cultivate confidence in your coaching on the part of your athletes. And I have most of them to the point where they just say, put whatever you want on the bar and I'll lift it. And you want to get them to the point where they're thinking about, how do I lift the weight and not what's on the bar? Because what's on the bar is a distraction. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson and Andy Galpin. And we're here with Coach Bob Tocano.

We've traveled all the way to Woodland Hills, California. And we're here at at Takano Athletics. Coach Bob is a weightlifting Hall of Famer. So you've been inducted in the USA Weightlifting Hall of Fame, and you've been coaching international athletes at the elite level, probably more than any other coach out there right now. I guess you could say that. Very humble way to say, yeah, I sure have.

And what's really cool about doing this show with you today is Doug, Andy, and I, we all met in weightlifting. We were all weightlifting at the same school, and we found that much before we found CrossFit. So this show is really popular amongst the CrossFitters, but we come from a weightlifting background first. I discovered it about 10 years ago, and Doug and Andy actually discovered it much before me and taught me a lot about it.

Yeah, I'm about 20 years deep in weightlifting at this point. CrossFit's cool because it kind of grew the mark and whatnot, but I've always had a love for weightlifting and strength conditioning specifically. And so we grew up in an environment very similar to how your gym looks. This is very similar to how John Brose's gym looks,

very similar to how the gym was when we were at University of Memphis competing together. So I'm very comfortable in this type of setting. So I'm excited about the show, and I'm happy to talk to you today. I'm probably just a few years behind that, too. I probably started a couple years after you did. And actually, we were talking earlier. Not only did we come from weightlifting, but a large part of the reason we got our college degrees and your master's and my Ph.D. was come from weightlifting, but a large reason, a large part of the reason we got

our college degrees and you're your master's and my PhD was because of weightlifting. It made us so excited about the human body. We want to learn more so we can really, all three of us can thank weightlifting for basically our careers. Yeah. My senior project as an undergrad was actually in the biomechanics of snatching. It was always, my interest was always weightlifting. That's the whole reason I got my first degree and the master's, as you said. Like, it was always weightlifting was the focus, and then everything else kind of got thrown in there just because I was in the environment. Right.

Probably the only reason I stayed in college. Right. That's about it. I'm really interested in today and finding out how you coach coaches. And you have tons of interns here, and you're always putting them out, and I'm really interested in that. You've also coached Sean Waxman. That's one of the things I'd like to get out of today.

Also, just to preface the show, one thing I'd like to get out of the day is that I came from a background, like I said, of weightlifting, but also more specifically when I was younger and I was playing high school and college athletics, football, wrestling, baseball, I was using weightlifting at the time to be a better athlete for these other sports. And I know you coach a lot of weightlifters, certainly, but you also coach, you know, volleyball players and other athletes that aren't in the strength sports. They're not weightlifters, not crossfitters, they're playing, you know, baseball and, you know, hockey or volleyball or what have you,

field sport athletes. And how strength conditioning and weightlifting specifically is making them a better athlete for those sports. So that's one thing that i want to dig into today okay and for me um it's actually goes back to your recent book so your weightlifting programming guy um to me i don't know if any other books that have came out that have been so clear about volume and so i actually bought that book and i use it in all my classes uh as a resource to say this is the first guide i'm aware of that gives you prescriptions for how many reps and sets to get to at the end of the week, the month, and the

year based on your outcome. So that's something I'm super interested in. I remember when you came out that, what, two years ago? 2012. Yeah, a few years ago. But I was like, finally guys, we have numbers. I can tell you something in class. Here's what the total volume should look like.

So I'm very excited to talk to you about that. Okay. We can touch on all those things. Excellent. Coach, how did you get started in the sport? And how long have you been in it? Well, I was a small kid. I was weak.

I was the only Japanese kid in a Mexican neighborhood. I didn't have a good-looking sister. That's key for popularity. Did you have a sister or just have a good-looking sister. That's key for popularity. Did you have a sister or just not a good-looking one? I had a sister. I hope she's not listening. I had to find some way to maintain my status within the school and within the community. And so I was always looking for ways to get bigger and stronger.

And I got attracted to weights. I saw a magazine at the newsstand called Strength and Health. And I looked through it and had a report of the 61 World Championships. And it intrigued me immediately. And so I started exploring the different things that you could do with weights. I went to my first weightlifting meet to watch in 1962, February of 1962. And so I started out as a fan and then ended up being a lifter and then finally a coach. So that's, what is that, 55 years? Doug's good at math.

I'll take your word for it. That's amazing. Did you, so, you know, one of the most famous weightlifters in American history, Tommy Kono, also was Asian American. So was he a big influence on yours? Were you guys friends? Did you train together? I did get to know Tommy because we attended a number of international events together. Tommy made it okay for Asian Americans to be in sports because when I was growing up, there were no Asian Americans in sports. We weren't supposed to be in sports because we were too small and too short. And if you look at baseball or football, there were no Asian Americans in sports at all. And so Tommy kind of said it was okay.

So he kind of gave us permission to do that. Beautiful. You start off as an athlete. What got you into coaching? Well, professionally, I was a teacher. And I think I've always had that instinct to be a teacher. And in so many occasions, I saw people teaching other people how to lift weights I was a teacher and I think I've always had that instinct to be a teacher. And in so many occasions, I saw people teaching other people how to lift weights and not doing it very well.

And I figured I could do this better because I already know how to lift weights. But getting into the head of the athlete and describing things so that they could understand it and turn it into an action in their own body. That was something that I figured I could do better than some of the people that I saw. Did you start off coaching just the people that happened to be around you? Like not as a profession, but just, you know, if you're in the gym and you're in your training, naturally there's going to be other people around you that have similar goals and they're doing similar lists.

Did you naturally just gravitate towards helping those people? A little bit. I was in a gym with a coach and my coach was pretty good. Bob Heiss II. So when I started teaching school, I was teaching middle school, I started a weightlifting club after school and managed to get some equipment and brought in some of my own stuff and started teaching kids how to lift weights. So they were really, they were kind of a lab for me to experiment with some of the ideas

that I had about coaching. And from that time, I've been trying out new ideas with all my athletes. They'll probably tell you this, that they realized at a certain point that they were guinea pigs. What athlete is it? Well, this guinea pigs. What athlete isn't? Well, this is true, but sometimes it isn't always that obvious. I was going to say, sure, you never have it all figured out, and there's always going to be something new to think about

or a new perspective or a little tweak here and there. Are you still experimenting to this day? Yeah, definitely. Is that what keeps it interesting for you after decades of doing this? I get new problems walking in. Every new athlete that comes to you, none of them is perfect. They all have little things to fix. Some of them I've had experience fixing before, but I still get athletes coming in

that I've never had that problem with before, and so I have to figure it out. So it's not just a variation on the same issue? You've seen brand-new issues even after doing this for 40 or more years? Yeah. I'd actually would love to hear if you have an example of any of those. Well, I had one kid coming in for strength and conditioning. He was a football player, a quarterback.

He was very good as a quarterback. He's very good as a quarterback. But whenever he squatted, he would end up on the balls of his feet. His heels couldn't touch the floor. And normally that looks like an ankle problem. But after I worked with him for a while, I saw that it was a hamstring problem. And his hamstrings were so tight that his pelvis was being pulled under, the butt wink. So to counter that, he would then have to bend forward with his torso for him to squat appropriately. And whenever he did that, he would go up on the balls of his feet

with his heels coming off the floor. So he didn't have an ankle mobility problem, although it looked like it. It was a hamstring problem. And then when we went to overhead squats, he leaned forward even more because his pecs were too tight because he'd been bench pressing too much. So we had to straighten that out. And I've had a few people with that problem since then that I've had to work more on stretching out the shoulders.

So they come in, the first thing they do is get on the bench with a bar and do straight arm pullovers. They stretch this out and open up the shoulder joint that way. What about the hamstrings? How did you diagnose that that was actually the problem? How did you go about fixing it? You just watch it after a while and you see whenever they squat down, the butt wink is exceptionally severe. Then I have them go to straight legged good mornings and they have to stretch out the hamstrings that way. So that's how you prefer to stretch hamstrings is to do straight leg good mornings as opposed

to just, you know, quote unquote stretching or, or, you know, static stretching, PNF stretching, et cetera. When you stretch with a weight, you get a fuller stretch. So we do that for hamstrings, yeah. So what does that look like? Is it just high rep sets or is there a pause at the bottom? How do you get enough time and attention, et cetera? It's a wide stance. If they were going to do it on this platform,

most people, I would have their feet on the black rubber, okay, lock the knees and bend forward from the hip with a straight back and go down. We usually do about four sets of five to eight reps. Okay. Do you find that that helps the range of motion stick, so to speak? Like after doing the set, they maintain the new range of motion they got because they added stability and strength throughout the entire range, especially at end range? Yeah, and I think it also helps them feel the stretch.

Like some people have mobility problems because they can't feel what they're doing. So this helps them feel the hamstring stretching out. Is that a maximal 5-set of 5, or is that just like they're throwing on 40 kilos and they're just doing it? We're doing it usually at the end, and it is just a stretching movement. We're not really trying to get them stronger. You can do a lot of things with a barbell. Not always the things that everybody else does. Right.

Is there anything else that you've experimented with recently that you found that you like? Anything jumping out that you've, in the last couple of years, that you're doing differently? I would like to do, and this is something I used to do, but I can't do it because the owner of the building has a problem with the liability issue, but I really like to have people hop up steps on one foot. Oh, right. This develops their athleticism and also their balance. So if, you know, most people can hop up two steps at a time on one foot. My better athletes can go three. I had a triple jumper once that could go up four steps on one foot and just go right up the stairs that way.

It doesn't seem like plyometrics have really infused themselves into the CrossFit world very heavily to date, in my opinion. I used to do a lot of that stuff back when I was doing just weightlifting or just playing football, et cetera. Then when I started to be more immersed in the CrossFit world, I rarely see plyometrics, let alone single leg hops upstairs and things that are a little more specific than just doing jumps across the room. How do you use plyos in addition to the single exercise you just mentioned? Well, I think I'll have people do frog jumps, consecutive frog jumps, going into a full squat on each one.

And if they do them properly, they're going to jump and then take off as soon as their feet hit. So it's kind of like watching a kangaroo go. And that teaches them how to stretch out and then as soon as they hit, contract again and go. And that's what we're looking for. So they're trying to minimize ground contact time? Right, yes. To get a cool stretch shortening cycle, right, Doc? Yeah.

How does that work? Yeah, it does. Big stretch, big contraction. That's how that works. Thank you, Doctor. You got it. That was really specific. I'll see you guys next week.

My job here. Go ahead, dude. How many of your athletes come in for strength and conditioning versus weightlifting? Because that's one of the things you're doing is you're working with a lot of athletes that aren't specifically wanting to be better at weightlifting, but you're using weightlifting to improve them for their sport. Did he just steal your question? He totally did. I was going to say that.

Gosh. Jeez. No, it took you too long. I have nothing to say the rest of the show. A lot of people come in, but they don't know what they're looking for. They think if they come in to train with weights, they're just going to get stronger. But training with weights properly is also going to make them into better athletes. The snatch and the clean and jerk and also split snatches and split cleans

have a great effect on the nervous system. And I think people that have done it understand it and people that haven't done it don't understand it at all. You just said something that might have caught some of the listeners ears and it did when you said that earlier to me, you said you're actually doing split snatches and split cleans right so can you kind of explain what that is for people that are just listening and have never heard of that and then why do you why in the world are you doing something that people stopped doing in the 50s i thought well they stopped doing it in the 50s because it was not the most efficient way to lift weights right but it's still a good exercise and it requires you to catch the weight with one foot in

front and one foot behind in a lunge position. And if you're going to be very good at it, you have to move both feet very quickly. So it enhances foot speed. It also teaches you how to break under load with your feet apart, which is one of the things I think that's helped a lot with my volleyball players and female basketball players in avoiding ACL injuries because they're always learning how to, or they're always being forced to break under load with their feet apart. All right. And you said you've been doing volleyball since 92, you said? Yes.

And how many ACL injuries have you had? Zero. Right. Yeah. Which is really unusual for anyone that doesn't know those stats. Like volleyball, ACL injuries, soccer ACL injuries, especially for females, is incredibly high. So to not have any is a testament to the fact that they actually are strong. The last stat that I saw, that was 37,000 a year in the U.S.

Yeah. So it's a very common injury. You contributed zero. Yes. I'm not helping that stat at all. Fantastic. Yeah, so they get those injuries a lot of times from landing in a position where their knees are diving together, what have you, and that's a big debate in weightlifting with the knees out versus knees collapsing into that valgus position, et cetera. But when you're doing a split

snatch or a split clean or just catching in a power position, how is that helping, in this case, a female volleyball player, maybe high school-age volleyball player, become strong in a way that they won't tear their ACL? Well, there's two things. There's the lateral muscle, muscular development, and medial muscular development. And if you're doing power cleans and power snatches or split snatches or split cleans, those are being forced to work together to balance the leg. So you're not having people with their legs collapsing in or splaying out too much.

That's one thing. The other thing is the knee injuries take place when people are breaking under load and they don't know how to cushion that impact. Now, one of the things that I noticed, and this is just something that I saw and I haven't seen anybody talk too much about it. I had a girl that was 13 years old. She was 6'4". Whoa. And I watched her walk around the gym picking up weights to load on the bar.

And she never bent her knees. She always bent from the hips. And that's because she's got such long femurs she didn't have the leverage to squat down and pick up the weight. So for her whole young life, she had been bending from the hip and picking up weights. So as a result, there was never much development of the musculature of the thighs or the hips and limited mobility at the ankle.

Oh, sure. So when you take that kind of person and then ask them to jump, they're not going to cushion by bending their legs. They're just going to land with fairly stiff legs, and that's what leads to a lot of the stress on the knee for the ACL injury. Wow. So in that case, the knees are absorbing a lot more of the force than they should be. Right.

Especially if they're out of position. Right. And this is going to happen a lot more with girls that are very tall, especially if they're very tall young. And that's who volleyball coaches look for. Volleyball coaches are always looking at height. They don't care if it can move. They don't care if it's athletic.

They don't even care if it's interested. They just want to get tall girls in there to play volleyball. And there's really a lot of preconditioning that those girls should be doing if they're going to want to really be successful volleyball players. So do you generally prefer power snatches and power cleans to full snatches and full cleans for the youth athlete? Yeah, I don't have them do full snatches and power cleans to full snatches and full cleans for the youth athlete? I don't have them do full snatches and full cleans unless they're going to be in a sport where they have to have a prodigious amount of strength.

So if we're talking about somebody who's going to be a wrestler or a thrower or a lineman in football where they need to have a lot of strength and overpower somebody else who's very strong, then they don't need to do full snatches and full cleans. What about squats? They still do full depth squats? Everybody needs to do squats. Oh, so you get the depth out of the squat and you save it.

Yeah. Got it. Well, the thing is, ligaments and tendons get stronger by being stretched. And when you squat, if you squat partially, you only stretch the ligament or tendon partially. So it's not strengthened throughout the entire length of the, of the structure. You go all the way down, you're putting stress on it throughout the entire structure and then strengthening it consequently. How about for, cause you work with college athletes too, occasionally and, and a little bit older ones.

How about, is the programming the same for them relative to the younger athletes or different? Well, in a way, it has to be individualized to a great extent. You can get a great college athlete that's never trained with weights. And they come in and they have to be not only trained in how to perform the lifts but they need to get into condition to train with weights right or you could have a high school kid that's a 10th grader that's that's already been training and they're ready to go on to more sophisticated training so you kind of have to see what you've got before you actually move forward. So the first couple of weeks really is diagnostic. So when I get people in, we find out what they can do, what they're capable of doing.

And part of that also involves explaining to them why they're doing it. Because if they understand why they're doing it and how it's going to benefit them, then there's going to be more of a buy-in. And if you're working with youth athletes, sometimes you have to sell the parents as well. Oh, right. Totally. Or the school, if you're working with a team.

Yeah. You really, you need to sell the sport coach on it. And a lot of sport coaches don't understand what good strength and conditioning can do for their athletes. And so a lot of them have strength and conditioning programs because they think they have to. And they think they'll be perceived as being less serious than a program that does. So if you're in high level athletics, even at the high school level, and you're recruiting talent, you don't want to be perceived as having a

sort of good program as opposed to a very good program. So they'll have a strength and conditioning program. They don't know what for. They may not know if it's any good, but they know they have to have it for recruiting. And that goes on at university level as well. So in that case, if they don't really know why they need it and you are trying to explain to them why they might need it, what seems to work the best? Is it injury prevention? Is it strength? Is it speed? Speed seems to sell, especially for field sports. A lot of sport coaches don't know

what they're seeing. So I found the best thing is go to the game with them and show them what their athletes are doing that they weren't doing before. All right? And let them know that, see that guy, he's a lot quicker than he was before. Or you notice your athletes are still jumping really high in the fourth quarter. All right? Take a look at and see what your scores are. How many of your games are you winning late in the game?

Okay? What's your injury rate been this season and you can you can point these things out and then after a while after they've learned how to see them then then they may begin to understand the value of good strength and conditioning the athletes can feel it the athletes can feel it but the coach not always. Because what you have to do as a coach, if you're at an institution, you're largely concerned with recruitment and improving skills and maybe working on strategies and then scheduling opponents and all these things that do not have to do with the physical development of the athlete.

You mentioned earlier that when an athlete comes in, you're going to have to see them first before you can identify or individualize their program. Right. Do you have a very strict diagnostic or intro thing that you do with every athlete? Or any exercises you like to use? How do you address that? If they've been doing snatches and cleans,

I'll have them do snatches and cleans and jerks. Otherwise, I'll have them do or I'll also have them do presses and squats and maybe some good mornings to just see if they have mobility issues. And then I may ask them to sprint or I may

ask them to jump just to find out whether or not they're in control of the car they're driving. So I've looked at a variety of your programming, and basically what you just said, it's very basic. Snatch, clean and jerk, squat, overhead press, RDLs, good mornings. And that's not all that it is, but that's kind of the basic template that people view weightlifting under. And for your volleyball players, as an an example are they still following very weightlifting centric uh programming or is it does still look radically different uh if i have volleyball

players and they're in three days a week we're gonna do some kind of snatching or cleaning and squatting and overhead work every day. So the amount that they do, and whether it's a power snatch or a split snatch, whether it's a power jerk or a push press or just a press, or whether it's a front squat or a back squat or a lunge, those things vary. But basically you're trying to get an athlete to be stronger in a coordinated fashion in the areas that they're going to be using to play their sport so what about other

things for just structural balance or just hypertrophy reasons you pull up spent rows you know direct core work we can add those after a while depending on what the problems of the athlete is. Some of them don't really need a lot. You have to keep in mind that if I have a volleyball player or if I have a track and field athlete, they're spending a lot of time playing volleyball or training for track and field. Your training has to be supplemental to what they do. You might training has to be supplemental to what they do. You might be able to make greater changes in the off season, but for the most part,

you have to be supplementing what their training regimen is. And it's interesting. Sometimes you do those things. Like I'll have a club athlete or a high school athlete from track and field, and they come in and I'll train them and they'll make great improvement and then their coach will think that it's something that they did. What do you do in that case? You just slough it off and you just let them believe it or you go get in a big fight? You kind of have to let them believe it. I'd imagine if you keep that relationship stronger by just kind of letting it go, then they're going to keep their athletes training with you that much longer.

After a while, they begin to see the ones that are training with me are making great gains. So all the gains that they're causing just happen to be with your athletes? Right. That's interesting. They might get there one day. Let's take a break real quick. When we come back, I want to dig

into the sport of weightlifting. OK. All right. And we're back. Got Doug with us, Dr. Andy Galpin, and Coach Bob Tucano. On the first half of the episode, we definitely talked about strength and conditioning, how to train athletes in strength and conditioning

with weightlifting. So we're going to dig into more of the sport of weightlifting in the second half. Great. Real quick before we dig into that, I'm curious. One of the first things I saw when I walked in was that photo over there on the wall where Arnold Schwarzenegger is handing you some type of an award. What's the deal with that?

That was my Hall of Fame induction. Okay. Arnold Schwarzenegger gave you your Hall of Fame induction? Yes. That's pretty cool. What was that like? It was, as expected, it was thrilling to get into the Hall of Fame, and then to get it from Arnold was icing on the cake, so to speak. Absolutely.

But it's been shorter than I thought. Who did you look up to most? Who did you idolize in weightlifting or powerlifting or was it arnold or is there anybody else in weightlifting i i don't know there were a number of athletes along the way that that were i thought were inspirational um i especially like David Riegert, the Soviet 90 kilo. And just because he was so fearless in that he would attempt world records all the time, whether he was in shape for them or not. Right, right.

He had a photo of him on the wall in Memphis. He was like the first CrossFitter. Yeah, but he was courageous and he was a warrior. And I think he embodied the spirit of what weightlifters should be. Nice. So I think he was an important figure for me to be aware of. He was not afraid of taking heavy weights. If you're in a gym and you hear weightlifters talking, sometimes there's some bravado going on. But if you get to talk to them on a very personal level, sometimes they'll tell you that they are a little scared of this weight or they're nervous about this competition coming up.

And then you have a Riegert who's not afraid of anything. And I saw, I was at one competition where I was back in the warm-up room, and Riegert, everybody else was warming up. Riegert was laying on a cot smoking a cigarette. Sounds about right. And then he did a snatch with 60 in the warm-up room, and then he did one with 120. And he went out and started with 165, and then he attempted a world record. He was that kind of a guy.

He was a bigger-than-life guy. And I think a lot of the lifters in my generation that came up following David Riegert were inspired by him that way. That seems to be something that would be very hard to teach. If that person was a role model to you growing up or someone that you just potentially aspired to be like, how do you instill that in your athletes, that fearlessness or that courage, however you want to look at it? There's really only a certain amount that you can do as a coach. You can steer them in that direction.

A lot of athletes are young and impressionable, and they've gotten a lot of their ideas of what sports are about by watching movies or TV. And sometimes you can just tell them stories about people that you knew that did exceptional things. And they're sponge-like enough where they'll assimilate that and actually try to put it into practice. But you do what you can.

Some people it's not going to work with. I trained with a guy named Jack Hill. And Jack was just one of these people that in training he could maybe clean and jerk 300 on a good day. And then I've seen him do 340 in a meet. So he was a guy that he would just bring it for the competition. And he was very inspirational to me. That's how you want a bar fight.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I mean, it's just one of those things where you're like, oh, that's how you do it. How do you coach somebody like that, especially in competition? You're like, yeah, I guess we're going to open up at 320. I'm like, I mean, how do you do that? I don't know that you can specifically.

What you have to do, you cultivate confidence in your coaching on the part of your athletes. And I have most of them to the point where they just say, put whatever you want on the bar and I'll lift it. And you want to get them to the point where they're thinking about how do I lift the weight and not what's on the bar. Because what's on the bar is a distraction. The meat is a distraction. Your competition is a distraction.

Where you're going to place in the meat is a distraction. The only thing that's going to help you lift the weight is thinking about lifting the weight. So they leave all the distractions to me. So I worry about what weight they're going to lift and they trust my judgment as far as what they're potentially capable of on that day. So a lot of times they lift weights that are PRs and don't even know it because I just, I call the weight, I sent them out there. Their job was to lift the weight and that's what they did. Is that hard for some people to maintain that level of focus? Like that would be very hard for me to not know how much weight was on the bar. Well, it's a matter of giving up control.

Okay. If you can call the weights then you have control if you give that up to your coach then you're giving up that control so it has to be somebody you trust uh and so my job all the time in the gym here is to develop their trust and then then they're willing to give that control over to me that seems to be one of the most important things you could do as a coach is develop that rapport and develop that trust. You can teach them technique, you can do programming, but that's one level

of coaching. Developing trust and developing a relationship where they allow you to take over is another level that most coaches may not ever get to. Yeah, but sometimes it's just small things like being on time. If you're on time all the time, they trust you. They know you're going to be there.

And a lot of coaches don't think that those little things are that important. If you say, I'm going to take care of this registration for you, you take care of it. And then after a while, they get comfortable with letting you have the control on those things. This is really good advice for coaches. And you are in the business of also developing coaches. Right. We interviewed one of the guys that you've trained, Sean Waxman, and then we've also found out that you have how many interns here right now?

Well, over the course of three years, I've had 39. 39. And I just finished off with two of them. I've got another one coming in next week. We used to have interns like one or two at a time. Like per year? Yeah. Yeah.

They like stressed us out. That seems like a lot. The interns were great. You're great, folks. No, but how do you – what do you do to develop the coaches? Because that's what you're talking – you've developed yourself as a coach. Yeah. And these are the practices you put in place to develop trust.

How do you pass that down to your coaches? I think they get it just by seeing how it functions. I like them to go to meets with me and see what I'm doing and how I deal with the athletes. Part of it has to do with the respect that you give to the athlete so that the athlete knows that they're being appreciated for what they do. And interns are going to pick up on that by watching how you do that. It's not something that you go and say, all right, this is what you do. You don't have a checklist. Right. You just have

to exemplify it. And I think part of the reason that my interns have been successful is the questionnaire that I have them fill out beforehand. I think it gives them an idea of how serious they need to be. And then I ask them things about their background, whether or not they've coached a sport. And I need them to understand when they're coming in here, they're coming in here to learn how a sport is coached, both in the gym and on the platform. So how is that different? What changes on the platform than in the gym? Well, if you're very good at doing it on the platform, you can use the force. Okay, so you're calling on instincts that you've developed over a long time. So how much of an increase that you make from a first attempt that's successful, depending on how it looked, how much you go to the second attempt, those are instinctive things that come over a long period of time.

And that's why you have to have the trust of the athlete because you can say we're going to start at 70 kilos and then we're going to go to 75 and then we're going to go to 78. But 70 might not look so good, so you might have to go to 73 or 74. And the athlete, if they have complete trust in you, they'll go out and they'll perform well. The whole idea of the competition being to lift the most weight that you possibly can on the third attempt. OK, and to do that in both the snatch and the clean and jerk on that day.

Do you have a strategy for first, second, third attempt? Yeah. What is that strategy? Well, it starts actually in the warm-up room. So the warm-ups are going to be taken. We're going to take one at 60%, one at 70%, one at 80%, one at 85%, one at 90%. The first attempt on the platform is at 94%. Okay. The second attempt is at 97%, 98%, and then 100%.

That's the goal weight that we've picked for this competition. You start with that, and you work back. Are those percentages of their 100 max ever in the gym or competition? No. You pick a competition goal weight. That's what you're going to take on the third attempt, and then you work backwards. It's 100% of that number.

You spend 12 or 16 weeks knowing that's the number you're going for? I want them training for that weight with that weight in mind. It may not work out that we always get close enough where we actually can take that. But in any case, no matter where we end up the training with, we usually end up with a PR in the meet. How far out is this being considered? Is it four weeks, eight weeks?

For most of the athletes I have now, we're doing 12 weeks. So 12 weeks out, I know that I've got a meet in 12 weeks, and I already know what I want to hit on my snatch and my clean and jerk. Yes. And if you have that in your head, then you can focus on that, and that is a motivation in your training. Okay? So you keep that in mind when you're getting to the last rep in the set and it's grueling and it's just beating you up.

The goal weight can be inspirational. Okay? But then when you get to the meet, then you don't think about that anymore. You just think about the performance. So if I remember correctly, you said the attempts were 94, 97, and 100%? Yeah. So if you miss the first attempt, then how does the structure change for two and three? It depends.

For most people that are not very experienced, you repeat. So you repeat the same weight. If there's very good competitors and you have a long relationship, sometimes you just go to the second attempt weight anyway. Does that depend how they missed the first attempt? Yeah. If it looks like they pulled it plenty high, they just didn't lock their elbow, or it was something minor?

Usually, they're not there. Psychologically, they're not there. Psychologically, they're not there. So, like, you kind of have to figuratively slap them around a little bit and wake them up and tell them, hey, we're here to meet. So, physically, they were capable of hitting it, but psychologically, they just weren't quite focused as well as they need to be. You put them back out there and say, okay, go ahead and hit the higher attempt, potentially. Yeah, and sometimes, you know go ahead and hit the higher attempt potentially. Yeah. And sometimes, you know, even they miss a second.

And you can also go up from that second that they missed because you're going to need that for the total that you want. Like let's say you're trying to qualify for something. Sometimes you take a gamble. And if you're a good competitive athlete, you should be a bit of a gambler. How do you handle it when they say I know the feeling. Wrist pulling around here.

I remember doing a weightlifting meet and I don't remember the numbers, but I had a PR in the cleaning jerk and I went back and I was talking to you guys. I remember this. I was like, what should we go up to? And it was like, go to 132 or something. And we talked and we were like, be conservative. 131 or something. I was like to you guys. Yeah. I remember this. I was like, what should we go up to? And it was like, go to 132 or something. And we talked, and we were like, be conservative, 131 or something. I was like, great.

I was like, what's your PR? And you were like, oh, yeah, 132. And I was like, I don't know, just 133, 134. And you were like, 150. It's not 150, but you threw out a number that was like eight kilos higher than what I was saying. I was like, all right. I don't know why you asked me anyway. It was great.

I was just like, I don't know. I was totally, I remember being mentally being like, that's a great decision, I'll get a one kilo PR, that's great. And then as I walked up to the booth, because we didn't have coaches, to put my number in, I was like, something hit me, it was like 140. I was like, done, put it on the bar, like 140. So how do you handle that when a coach or when an athlete comes up to you and says, like, coach, I know we're supposed to be at 100 today, but like I want 120 or even 103. And they want a number higher.

Well, you tell them that you're the one that makes decisions. I'm making the decision. I'll make the call. Gotcha. And usually we don't ever get to that point. They just they just know that I'm going to call the best weight for them. Gotcha. And I want them to go away if they missed

taking responsibility for the miss. It wasn't because I called the wrong weight. It's because they didn't execute. And when they own that failure, then they're going to do something about it in the next training cycle or the next meet. This microphone is falling down just a little bit.

Let's put it over there. After someone misses a weight, they miss their first attempt, their second attempt, what do you do with that athlete? Do you go back there and you speak with them or you've already hashed it out and they know what to do or how do you interact with that person? Not too much. Not too much to say. They should understand the gravity of the situation, that they need to make that lift to stay in the meet. So you can over-talk it. And most athletes need a certain amount of time to recycle after the miss and then think about what they have to go.

And then when they're ready to go, they need to go out there. There's a readiness period during which you can make that lift. And too many coaches say, oh, you know, wait till the clock's running down or wait a little bit longer. And the athlete is like, I want to go now. And you have to understand that if you've got an athlete that's had some experience, when they get, I want to go now, you've got to let them go. Right.

It sounds like any athlete you take to a competition you already have a really established relationship with. And because a lot of the questions that we're throwing at you is, it's like, well, we don't get there. And it sounds like that's because you already have an established relationship. Yeah. When somebody comes to you and wants to compete in weightlifting, when do you take them to their first competition?

When I decide they're ready. What's typical for that? Are some athletes ready in 12 weeks? Their technique is very consistent. Their training has been going well, and they're getting stronger. And then right during the last two weeks before the meet, their speed picks up, and they're ready to go. How long does that normally take?

Or is it just that highly varied it's hard to say? It depends. If they don't have good speed talent, then you can use that method pretty well. If they're talented as far as their speed goes, they're fast all the time. So then you've got to go to some other factors before you make that decision. So how, and this may be impossible to answer, but how technically good should they be before they do their first competition? Do you have a threshold or any kind of, anything besides arbitrary like,

well, not good enough. I mean, it sounds really kind of simple, but, you know, when they have sound biomechanics. Yeah, okay. When they won't embarrass you. Or themselves. And I tell them, if you go out on the platform, you're not going to embarrass me or yourself. Nice.

Okay? And that's another way of getting them to buy in on it, that we in it together that the performance is for both of us yeah yeah it's same relationship actually that you're mentioning right now that that sounds like you have with the other coaches that you're coaching and the interns in fact it's funny the girl she just walked away but she's been in the background with the purple pants what was her name lou lou she came here to intern with you from the czech republic right which struck me as odd because like somebody from somebody from Eastern Europe coming to America to learn weightlifting sounded about as back-ass words as you get. Yeah. So I asked her, like, why did you do that?

Surely somebody in Poland or somebody was better. And she said because of what she had heard of how you take care of your assistant coaches and your interns. Well, the Eastern European system kind of closed down after the fall of communism. And then it's been reinvigorated to varying degrees depending on what the countries are. And so the Czech Republic was not a major player before. And so they may not have brought it back to the level it was. Right. But what, if someone were to come and intern with you, like what, I mean, they're going to learn the reps and the sets and that's actually,

I want to get into that volume here in a second, but what are maybe some of the other things or the way that you approach them? Because I know when my students generally intern at like the big Division I schools, the Pac-12 schools, they come back a lot of times and they're like, well, yeah, I spent 12 weeks doing laundry. And then one time he let me out on the floor, but then I couldn't say anything to anybody. What is that experience like for the interns that come and work with you? The first day they've got to follow me around and watch how I work with people. And then after that, I actually put them to coaching people. I will start them with beginners.

And I'll watch sometimes from a distance. Other times, I'll walk up and I'll ask them questions. You know, did you see where he put his feet on that lift? Did you notice that they went under the bar very slowly? Did you see that the balance was not on the balls of the feet on that one? And then other times I'll just listen in to what they're saying to the athlete. And then if I have to, I'll intercede and explain to them, you're talking too much. The athlete can't assimilate everything that you're telling them.

You need to tell them one thing to work on, and if that gets better, then you can work on a second thing. Is that extremely common with new coaches? It's getting to be less common. It was more common at one time when people came in and they wanted to show off how much they knew. And I have to explain to them, that's not what you're here for. You're here to provide a service.

So you have to teach somebody and you have to teach them at the rate that they can assimilate what you're teaching them. Yeah. You're attracting a lot of weightlifting coaches and weightlifting has gotten much more popular over the last decade or so, say five years. Why were you in weightlifting? What attracted you to weightlifting has gotten much more popular over the last decade or so, say five years. Why were you in weightlifting? What attracted you to weightlifting before that? Why were you so passionate about what kept you in the game and before there was money in it? I wouldn't say there's like massive amounts of money now,

but there was even less then. Well, the fact that it made so much sense was very addictive. Okay. And, I mean, when I was an athlete, performing the movements is addictive. And we don't talk about that. USA Weightlifting doesn't want to talk about it. A lot of people don't want to talk about it. But I always consider everybody that comes in here and gets started and gets going,

they get addicted to the sport and they want to do it all the time. Yeah. And there's some people I actually have to tell them, don't come in this week. This week we're only training four days, so don't come in on those off days because they don't know where else to go. And so they come in. I quit all my friends.

Yeah. They don't have any more friends that don't lift weights. But they get addicted to the sport. And then once they're addicted addicted once i've got them you know then i know they're always going to be coming around and part of it is the fact that it makes sense that if you work at it properly you will continue to make progress and i think a lot of people that have come in from a lot of gyms or fitness situations, they were doing a lot of stuff and they never saw a recognizable progress. Or they didn't have goals established that they could work toward. And if they're the type of individual that needs goals, then weightlifting is much more compatible with their psyche.

How soon into working with an athlete do you set performance goals? Oh, I don't know. That's hard to say. It depends on who they are. Some people, you look at them and you just find they're not competitive people. So we'll just keep training, we'll keep getting better, and we'll see what you do. And then sometimes they start to make progress and then all of a sudden they figure, ah, I want to really see how good I can get at this.

So you've got to wait for that moment. Some people come in and they want to be good right from the start. And on those people, sometimes you've got to put a little bit of a damper on because they want to go too fast. So it is really case by case. And you have the room split in two. On one side you have, is this right? I think I heard you earlier. You have more competitive athletes on one side and the people who are more.

No, not necessarily. I really like to see the two groups intermingle. Okay. Yeah. But you have both in the room. Yeah, you were saying some just the switch goes off one day. Oh, I'll compete now. Well, eventually what you want to do, you want to build up a community that has its own culture.

And then you as a coach don't have to explain a lot of things. People will come in and they'll get enculturated by talking to the other people. And they understand what the values are. So then I don't have to fool around. Like eating after training is really important. And I don't have to keep nattering at people about that. Because the ones that have been here for a while, they talk about what they're going to eat after they train. I don't think you've been on Instagram lately because I think a lot of people train just for the sake of eating.

I'm just going to train so I can eat this food. Yeah, why not? So we had mentioned briefly post-workout nutrition. I'm wondering just globally, how do you advise your athletes on nutrition specifically for the sport of weightlifting? Most of the calories have got to come from carbohydrates and a significant portion from high biological value proteins and then a certain amount from fats, just because you can't get enough calories eating just carbs and proteins. So they have to get some from fats also.

And I find that the timing of it is usually more critical than anything else. Oh, yeah? Yeah, and that you need to eat a certain number of times per day. And I want my athletes to eat at least twice, at least two meals before they come in to train. And a lot of people think that for some reason that if you train early in the morning, you're a wonderful person, but you're also a starved person. So people need to make sure they've got enough calories in their body and they've got enough amino acids ready to go to help the body recuperate after training. Do you find telling people to simply eat more meals, you know, eat five meals a day,

eat six meals a day or what have you is an easy way to actually get them to consume enough calories that way they're not under eating? Yeah. And if they're training hard enough, they will crave the nutrients they need. So it's not that difficult. And then usually if they're training in a group, they'll go eat together and They'll trade eating secrets together. What they like to carry with them is snacks and that sort of stuff. That's why having a culture within a weightlifting gym is important. Then I don't have to worry about a lot of that stuff. Some people have taken over the role of the eating coach. So they kind of bug the other people about their eating too.

Right. I'm generally a morning person. So I wake up very early naturally. But I found when we were actually doing a lot of weightlifting, I don't weightlift. I don't do anything heavy or powerful or fast good in the morning at all. Most people don't. I can do a conditioning workout. I can do just a sweat workout, a hypertrophy workout, and those are fine. But any time it was that last 5% or 10%, it just wasn't there for me in the morning.

So I stopped doing any of those power workouts early in the morning for that exact reason. But when you have athletes that still want to do it, do you just try to push them away as much as you can? No, eventually they figure it out. Things that you figure out on your own stick with you a lot better than stuff that people tell you. Very much. Definitely seen that at play. I don't listen to anybody. I have to learn the hard way all the time.

One of the things you mentioned, Sean Waxman, one of the things that he was doing when he was training with me was he would keep a sandwich next to his bed when he went to sleep. And then he would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and then eat the sandwich and then go back to sleep. This is actually not that far off from Doug's strategy in college. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I used to do that in college, but not with a sandwich.

We used to powder oatmeal in a coffee grinder. So we'd have powdered oatmeal, powdered flax seeds, and then also just regular protein powder and some cinnamon. We'd just put it in a shaker bottle next to our bed and just wake up in the middle of the night, put some water in it, shake it up, suck it down, and you'd be back to sleep in two minutes. It worked great. Doug also slept until 10. Well, I didn't go to bed until 2, but yeah.

That was pretty common. Unlike Andy, I'm not a morning person at all, but it's much easier for me to just stay up until midnight or 2 in the morning and then sleep until 8 or 10. I don't do that anymore. Now I get up at 5.30 whether I want to or not. I love my kids. According to my 8-month-old.

I want to actually get to the volume question. So you break up your athletes into six categories, right, based on experience. Yeah. So let's start there. What are those categories? And then how is the programming different depending on which category you're in? Well, if you're a class three, you're still doing supplemental work for your technique, and you're doing exercises to strengthen parts of your body that you're going to need for lifting, but it haven't been developed

so far. So it could be extra pressing work, or it could be extra leg work, or it could be hip extension work. So we're doing, basically, we're doing technique and remediation. When we get up to class two, we're then trying to increase the ability of the athlete to train harder and more frequently. So the training then becomes larger, the volumes become larger. There's not so much emphasis placed on technique,

but we make sure that we're doing technical exercises all the time. And then when we go to class one, then those training sessions are more like what you would take if you were a competitive athlete. Okay, and then what are the other categories? So those are your first three. Then we go up to where you're really more or less a lifestyle athlete. So candidate for master of sport, master of sport, and then the jump between master of sport to international master of sport is where you're going up to being a full-time professional.

Right. Okay. So most people need to be concerning themselves with being a class three or class two athlete, I imagine. Yeah, and they want to move up through that. And then when you get up to candidate for master of sport, then you're doing things like you're determining where you live in relationship to your gym, or you make sure that you're taking a job that doesn't require a lot of physical activity. Or you begin to lose your friends that are not weightlifters.

Right. Okay. Yeah. And your daily schedule is based around when you eat and when you nap. I know some class three lifters that are also masters. You're talking about? I see. You're talking about masters in terms of age?

No, no, no. I'm talking about people who should be training as a class three athlete, but they're also making all the lifestyle changes. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like I've never met ever a beginner weightlifter. Everyone automatically starts at medium or intermediate to higher. It's funny there. Um, but yeah, again, that's why if you're in a weightlifting gym and you come in and you're brand new, you get a chance to see what the more proficient people look like and realize that

you're not there yet. Right. I think in your book, you outlined, uh, what kind of weights per weight class you'd be lifting to fall into different categories. Yes. Yeah. And so I think that's a really great way of letting somebody know exactly where they stand because a lot of times when I talk to somebody who's been weightlifting and I go, you know, how long, where do you think you're at? Oh, I'm an intermediate type weightlifter. Oh, how long have you been lifting? They're like six months.

And I'm like, I'm not sure I'm really buying this. They don't really have the training history to be considered that. But I like the weights being set. If you're a 77-kilo weightlifter, then this needs to be your snatch or clean and jerk. It's a very objective thing. It's like it's a yes or no. Are you this or are you not? Yeah.

Do you happen to remember any of those numbers? It's okay if you don't. That's a lot of numbers to remember. No, I don't. I have a table. Yeah, and probably another question you can't answer, but again, in your book, and clarify if I messed this up, but you give them an idea based on which category they're in,

how many reps they should get to at the end of the week and month in a year, right? Yeah, well, I write them out. But yeah, like you were saying earlier, no one cares about the theory of the week and month and year, right? Yeah, well, I write them out. But yeah, like you were saying earlier, no one cares about the theory of programming. They just want the program. Yeah. So you put it in there, right? Uh-huh, yeah.

How close to those actual numbers in the book do you follow? And how did you come up with those numbers to begin with? I got most of them just by reading a lot of stuff about the training of elite level athletes and then working out how they would be varied if you were working with less elite athletes. Okay. So some of them were already in the Russian literature, but some of them I had to modify because some people are just not ready to do that. You feel like people generally do too much volume or too little?

Well, you can do... Most people don't balance out their workouts well. It's what I call the character of the workout, which exercises you include. And most people, if you leave them alone, will put in either too many exercises they like and not enough of what they need, or they'll work too much on their weak points and ignore what they're already good but needs to be reinforced. So that said, how do you give someone enough of what they need but keep them motivated

by giving them enough of what they want? Well, what they want is not really relevant. Not to you, I suppose. Maybe to them. Great answer. Phenomenal. It's how they end up. Okay. And if they train for a while with you and they find out that they're getting the result that they want,

then they're willing to do things that they don't necessarily want to do. It's a trust issue. Yeah. I'm hearing a lot of trust when it comes to coaching well it's i mean that's good it sounds like you've really developed a way to do that well if you talk to people from a lot of conventional sports they they talk about a coach as being a patriarchal figure or matriarchal figure and that's because they've developed that trust relationship and gone forward

with it and it worked for them. Are there any exercises in weightlifting that you jump out to you as either overused or underused? No. What I find out is that you've got a lot of new coaches and then they find an exercise that isn't commonly used by everybody. And then they act like they invented it and put their name on it.

I've never seen it before. Too much into training. And there are no new exercises. These exercises have been done for a long time. Yeah. And so that's kind of the situation that, you know, it's like, oh, I've got this great exercise. I'm going to stick it in whether people need it or not.

And if you want to look at that, there was a, when Romanian deadlifts first started getting popular back in the early 90s, you could read some articles in the NSCA journal, and people were putting it in for training programs for golfers who really don't need that kind of strength at all and don't really use hip extension that much. Right. So you have all your athletes do Takano squats where they put the bar on their

back and they go up and down. You invented that one? No. I can't back that up. Can't do that. Coach, I really appreciate you joining us today and having us here at your place. Where can people find out more about you?

They can go to my website, www.tucanowaitlifting.com. And I've also got a Facebook page, Tucano Weightlifting, on Facebook. Or they can stop by the gym, 6036 Variel Avenue in Woodland Hills, California. You have a newsletter as well, right, that you put out? I did, but we're probably going to restart the newsletter. Oh, shit. Oops. Oh, no. You brought it up. You brought it up. And then what about the book? Is that up on Amazon?

The book is on Amazon, yes. What's the name of it exactly? Weightlifting Programming. There you go. Simple. That's the way it should be? Weightlifting Programming. There you go. Simple. That's the way it should be. I thought it was an accurate title. It wasn't very flashy.

That's the way it should be. I think every weightlifting coach should pick it up for sure. Yeah, it's an excellent resource. Well, I think it has value for coaches in other sports too because it exemplifies how periodization is done with concrete examples. And you could take that information and you can apply it to a number of other sports. The hard part is figuring out the parameters of other sports. It's how do you measure things.

That's why so much is known about weightlifting training. Sports scientists love weightlifting because it was easy to measure everything in it. Definitely. You didn't have to take a video camera and you know run around hill and dale photographing somebody or trying to figure out what is this many steps mean in the training right yeah i love the concrete measurable aspects of weightlifting in fact like one of my favorite parts of the show is earlier when you're talking about like someone leading up to competition that when they're doing their warm-ups and then they have their their attempts like. Even hearing the very specific percentages

someone's going to do, 40, 60, 80, 85, 90, and then doing 94, 97, and 100 out on the platform. Hearing that level of specificity is very cool for me. I like hearing the details like that. That was actually one of my favorite parts of the whole show, so thank you for telling me that. Okay. Well, I just used to do it by feeling, but I decided to write it down so that people could get a better idea. Have you been tracking and writing down all your training programs since you started? You keep those records? Many of them.

And can I steal all of them and sell them? Sorry. They're going to be made available on a membership site soon. Okay. So that's the next big thing. Great to know. That's good to know. In the meantime.

Everything I've written and all the videos I've made and all the audio interviews, I'm going to put it all on the membership site. Perfect. And can you tell them about the program that they can get from you on Breaking Muscle? Yeah. We have beginner, intermediate, and advanced programming on BreakingMuscle.com. Yeah, I'm sure if they just search that for you, they can find that. Right, yes.

Coach, thanks for having us. Hey, thanks for coming by. Thanks, Bob. Appreciate it. Hey, take care. You bet.