Coach D and Coach Trent are back (finally) with a new episode, broadcasting from THE Wichita Falls Athletic Club, the home of Mark Rippetoe and the birthplace of the Starting Strength model. Today they discuss the role of the power clean for the Masters lifter -- should you be doing it? Should you skip it? What's the point anyway?

While the power clean is a very useful tool for the young athlete, especially in power-based sports such as football, hockey, or track and field sports, it's application to real life for the older lifter is less obvious. Basically, the clean is a fairly simple tool for the lifter to train power, which is a derivative of force production (strength). By training for power, a Masters lifter can not only improve his performance in sport, he can also improve and preserve his coordination, speed, and agility. These other physical skills tend to decline drastically with age unless you do something. Sports may not be in the cards for these lifters, so controlled gym movements such as the power clean can be a useful way of addressing these physical skills without the unpredictable nature of doing explosive sports.

Andy Baker, a fellow SSC, co-author of Practical Programming and The Barbell Prescription, has also spoken at length about dynamic effort training -- adapted from Westside's conjugate method -- can be effectively used to increase power using the basic compound lifts.

Baker Barbell Podcast on Dynamic Effort training: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/baker-barbell-podcast/id1607570442?i=1000555789213

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After a several month hiatus, Darin and Trent are back with 40fit Radio!

Coach Darin has said it before, humans like to "complicate to validate." The bigger, faster, more complex, more "science-y," the better! Right? Likewise, the idea that fitness is an intense, all-in pursuit pervades media and popular training programs. Frankly, it's exhausting!

Health and fitness doesn't come easy, and requires hard physical training to obtain and maintain. On the other hand, longevity and sustainability are also part of the game, and demand that you pay attention to your joint and connective tissue health, and spend time pursuing the things that will improve secondary fitness adaptations like balance, mobility, and accuracy. At some level, you also need to have some fun with your training, at least to the point that training is not adding more stress to your life.

Therefore, we preach the path of moderation for your fitness life. We aren't talking about taking the easy road here -- that leads to nowhere! -- but we recognize that training can't always be about chasing numbers and PR's.

We want to hear from you! Send us an email at the address below and tell us about how you've evolved in your training program to achieve moderation in your health and fitness.

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Darin, Trent, and Charity convene for another coaches corner, this time offering some strategies for lowering systemic stress while programming for the intermediate lifter.

The intermediate lifter with some training history on her belt -- we sometimes refer to these lifters as "middle intermediates" -- has a problem when it comes to programming. On one hand, since they are pretty far along the adaptation curve, they need a large amount of stress in the weight room to drive further strength adaptation. On the other hand, too frequent bouts of high intensity (very heavy) sets as well as too frequent bouts of high volume (lots of reps) sets cause become difficult to recover from. These workouts tend to take a few days, if not longer, to recover from, and if done too frequently the lifter may start to experience joint pain. This is doubly true for the master's lifter, who needs to find the sweet spot between just enough stress but not so much that he feels torched for days after a workout.

In this episode, Trent, Darin, and Charity offer a few different models for programming in this phase of training, with the special needs of Master's lifters in mind.

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Coach D and Trent discuss the most important vitamins you should be getting from your diet and supplements.

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Coach D, Trent, and Charity discuss the tendency of strength coaches and athletes to get hung up chasing PR's on the bar, and missing the forest for the trees -- that is, the greater PR's in life such as raising good families, growing mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

You can find Charity on Instagram at: @charity_silverstrength

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It's January, and that means there are millions of people trying to make good on their New Years' Resolutions. For many, this resolution involves losing weight, cutting body fat, and "leaning up." And predictably many resolutioners first instinct is to hit the cardio machines -- treadmills, ellipticals, exercise bikes, etc.

Losing fat, or rather body recomposition as we like to call it, involves more than just losing weight. It also involves gaining muscle mass. Or, for an already trained person, it involves maintaining muscle mass while losing fat mass. Either way, muscle mass -- lean mass -- is the key to the equation.

Cardiovascular training does little to create new muscle mass. For a completely sedentary, untrained individual, jogging around the block likely will build some initial muscle mass, but the results drop off after a few weeks of training. After that, the force production demands of cardio are simply not enough to stimulate growth of new muscle mass. Moreover, certain forms of cardio, in particular long slow distance (LSD) type training, triggers hormonal mechanisms in your body which prevents you from gaining new muscle mass, and may even cause you to lose it. See Dr. Sullivan's exceptional work The Barbell Prescription for details on the AMPK "switch."

So, what is a resolutioner to do? First, you need to strength train, and/or continue strength training. That will ensure that you build and maintain a high level of lean mass, which in turns drives your metabolism up higher. Secondly, you need to eat in a small caloric deficit. You need to eat less calories than you burn. About 10% reduction in calories is usually as much as you need to get this process started -- that's typically only a couple hundred a day, depending on your baseline.

This can be done without doing any cardio at all! Food and lean mass will be the biggest drivers of fat loss in this process.

However, if you begin to stall with your fat loss and you are continuing with your strength training, you may want to add in one to two conditioning workouts each week. Keep these workouts short and intense, as they will give you the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to fat loss. Tabatas on the echo bike, pushing the prowler, sprints on the rower -- these are all great choices for HIIT cardio training.

But don't be fooled... cardio is not a magic bullet for fat loss!

Muscle cells crash course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktv-CaOt6UQ&feature=youtu.be

You can find Charity on Instagram at: @charity_silverstrength

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Coach Charity Hambrick returns to the show to discuss her experience contracting COVID-19 and her slow road to get back into training afterward. Though she contracted COVID back in October 2020, Charity had lingering fatigue and muscle cramps for weeks, and loss of smell that lasted for over three months. Despite the mental blow of losing her training momentum -- she had been setting PR's just prior to getting COVID -- Charity has consistently hit the gym and is regaining her strength levels.

It was easy, though, and required a lot of mental fortitude. The mental game, she says, was the hardest part of restarting her training regime. To get herself into the gym when she really didn't want to, Charity came up with mantras she would say to herself over and over throughout the day. Her favorite is: "I have the power to start this today." During her training, when things felt hard or grindy, she would remind herself "the hard work will pay off."

She also focused on process-oriented goals. Instead of trying to get back to her previous PR levels, or hit a prescribed weight in a certain period of time, she focused on just consistently going to the gym. In other words, she focused on the "doing" of training, rather than outcome of training. This kept her coming back to the gym consistently and building training momentum, as well as confidence for completing a goal.

You can find Charity on Instagram at: @charity_silverstrength

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The last episode of 2020! Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to keeping the conversation about health and fitness going in the New Year.

In today's episode, Coach D and Coach Trent discuss the concept of selecting appropriate volume and intensity for a Masters athlete. These are two of the main programming variables, and all athletes need a blend of intensity (heavy-ness) and volume (how many reps) to drive adaptation in their desired physical skill: strength, conditioning, hypertrophy, etc. And in general, both intensity and volume must go up over time to increase the amount of stress and therefore drive more adaptation.

The Masters athlete must walk a fine line, however, between continually driving stress and chasing PR's and allowing sufficient space in their training for recovery, joint health, and simply "feeling good." This means that, for most athletes, there must be times of the year where PR's are NOT the goal, and other fitness goals take precedent.

Thanks again for tuning in. Happy New Year!

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In the strength community, the typical advice about warmups is to start warming up with the first barbell lift you will be performing. For many people, especially novices, this will be the squat, so the warm-up would consist of a couple sets of five with the empty bar, then a few progressively heavier sets until the lifter is ready for his or her working sets. It's quick, efficient, and, prepares most lifters for the task at hand -- squatting. Masters athletes, however, may find that they need more than the barbell to get warm before their workout.

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Coach D and Coach Trent continue the discussion on sustainable fitness by diving deeper on the topic of joint health. As the saying goes, "motion is lotion," but what kind of motion should we be doing in training, and is there such thing as too much? As with many things, moderation is key, and periods of strength training with heavy loads followed by periods of lighter loads with perhaps more focus on muscle hypertrophy or conditioning is an intelligent way to stay strong, muscular, and fit without sacrificing your joint health in the process.

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