Grab your pre workout and turn up that volume. It is time for a new episode of the Power Lifters Den with your host Cam Smith. Hello everybody, Welcome back to another episode of the Power Lifters Den. I'm your host Cam Smith and today I want to bring on someone who's sort of a legend in the multiply space powerlifting, Dr. Derek Wilcox. Why don't you introduce yourself? Well I don't think I've heard legend before, so thanks for that. Not sure it's justified, but I'll.
I'll take it for today. Yeah. Derek Wilcox, North Carolina. I competed in the pro ranks for low over decade. 15 years total experience in powerlifting before I retired several years ago. I was born with joint dysplasia. That kind of cut my career short. So if I wanted to be able to walk and do anything else, I kind of had to stop lifting weights with commas in them. Mostly known for being the
lightest guy to squat 1000 lbs. You know, about a decade or so ago now and former world record squat 935 lbs at 181. And yeah, got a PhD in sport Physiology and performance. Sport scientist by trade. I'm a coach with Renaissance Superior ization. Have been also for about 10 years. Married another coach from Renaissance. She's pretty amazing herself with a bunch of jiu jitsu World Championships and MMA World Championships and championships of kicking my ass.
Yeah. So that's, that's we'll get started a little bit about your your educational background. I know you have like the PhD and you've been competing for years. So I kind of want to know kind of when those two things kind of align to kind of become what you are.
Well, honestly, the academic side of everything that I went through in my career was completely self-serving because I wanted to learn as much as I could about Physiology and anatomy and bio mechanics that I could become the best strength athlete that I could. And I was primarily in powerlifting. I did compete in some strongman shows and Olympic weightlifting and Highland games still to this day off and on. So I I enjoy all of it. But powerlifting is really where I excelled that.
So I focused on that more and that was also where my goals were when I was a kid. I was in high school carrying around an all time world's records list, and you know that that world records list from Michael Soon was void of any excuses. It was the body weights and the heaviest weights lifted for each lift. There didn't matter. The Federation didn't matter the circumstances didn't matter what their mother's maiden name was.
It was just a number. And that's what I really loved about it. And that's the whole reason I chased the numbers that I did. It didn't make any sense for me to to compete unequipped. I did that once just for fun because I got got to lifting the meat for free. And but I mean, I, I had heavy unequipped and numbers are minimally equipped. I usually say if you put a belt on, you're equipped. Sorry, unless you're completely butt naked with a bar that was made in 1937, you're you're
equipped. But but yeah, I finished exercise science courses and my undergrad ended up graduating with a religious studies degree, but I still got all the prerequisites to go get my masters in sport kinesiology, which was the East Tennessee state. And then I went on to get my PhD there as well as sport Physiology, an amazing sport science program. I could never say enough good things about that program.
They are there to fix the big issues and strength and conditioning that most of us who have experience in the way room see in strength and conditioning, especially on the collegial level and and youth athletes as well. So shout out to them. Yeah, that's great. So kind of going into your PHDA little bit, I know obviously a lot of them are research driven. You have to spend time with a lot of other PHC members and things like that.
Maybe tell us a little bit about what your PhD studies entailed. Well, the biggest thing, I guess, for powerlifting relations is my dissertation. I worked with a disabled powerlifter, did a case study on him a couple times actually, and it was measuring the effects of waving intensities during
mesocycles or blocks. And we measured his bench press velocity because that's the only event they have in the same powerlifting or pair of powerlifting, which is coming up soon in France. Everybody go check out that the the numbers lifted there, especially in the lower weight class categories are astronomical. But we were able to get him in really good shape. And we monitored his bench press velocities before every push
day, which was twice a week. And we also measured his grip strength on a grip dynamometer and before every single session the exact same way, the same warm ups every single time, the same everything just for reliability purposes. And we were able to find really consistent trends on his ability to perform going down after heavier weeks. And then also the recovery timeline after the heaviest weeks of the block. It was it always took longer
than most people realize. It would take up to two weeks for him to come back actually to baseline after a really hard training. Excuse me, but yeah, he, he dropped 30 lbs. He increased his bench press. His range of motion increased just because of the weight loss. So he was moving the same weight farther. And in bench press that makes a really huge difference. It was, it was really successful in general. It was it was a cool deal. Yeah.
That's a really cool study. And I think with kind of the scope of powerlifting and kind of if you kind of translate into like a clinical trial or maybe like a case study, like you said, they're very few and far between in the war. The powerlifting, there's a lot of Sports Studies and just different sports and things like that and even like weightlifting. But I feel like powerlifting is one of those areas that's often neglected in that field.
Yeah, there's just not a giant market for, it's not an Olympic sports kind of a niche thing. So I had the resources and the time and a wonderful team around me that really was into that. So I was, I was very blessed with those people, especially because I was competing during grad, grad school. That lightest 1000 LB squat that I did was during my master's program, and I was competing all the way through up until about the last year of my PhD. Yeah, they they were really
cool. It's great to be in a sports science program as an athlete because they respect what you're doing and they support it. Yeah, definitely. I feel like for me, like I did my masters in bio mechanics and luckily enough for me, it wasn't, it was actually probably the easiest year of college for me. So it didn't really get in the way of anything. And at the time, I was still playing football. So powerlifting wasn't necessarily in my like big
scope. Like I was still starting to compete and I was training hard because I mean, every football player's favorite part of football is actually lifting. And if they tell you otherwise, they're lying. But yeah, so I do know people who have continued on further education, have done their PhD, and I just know that it can be intense and long hours and it could be stressful.
So maybe what were some of the things that helped you be able to compete at such a high level with balancing that sort of? Program. Well, I tried to to do my best to pick competitions that were in the less busy season, the beginning and the end of all the semesters. Masters and PhD were absolutely madness because we had athlete monitoring projects going on with every single team that our program worked with, which was over a dozen. So we've got people coming in for pre and post semester
athlete monitoring assessment. So we bring all those teams in and they all go through our lab doing isometric mid thigh pull testing and jump testing. And we have to have people doing hydration and it's, it's a giant team effort. And on top of all those end of semester projects that you have to finish up, you also have to go and go into the lab at 5:00 AM to start calibrating for those lab tests as well.
Yeah. And now I guess my, my next question would be from, from that point from once you had your PhD, maybe from just freshly out of school to kind of now, what are some of the biggest things that you've applied to your coaching and your powerlifting career itself from school? It's a really good question. Most of it is taking the knowledge from the education, understanding the nuts and bolts and how the gears turn in the In the background. It's a white box approach.
If you've heard the white and black box approaches, the black box approach for those who are listening is basically what I call old ball coach syndrome, where we have an input of, well this is what my coach did in 1978 and we won the state championship. And if we do that now, we should win a state championship on the other side of this and don't know why it works. It just works. And then the white box approach is actually, it's not white.
It's transparent to where you can actually understand what's going on during that process and you can make more educated decisions and informed decisions, hopefully that still result in the state championship, but you can maybe save some injuries or maybe enhance the process to be more efficient, things like that. So the education side of that
was absolutely vital. And with my experiences of training at a high level for powerlifting and, and trying to do all kinds of other things, I understood primarily what it felt like. That is such a huge, huge benefit for any coach. When you have actually walked the walk and you know what to tell your clients, your athletes or whoever you're working with what to expect to feel, that's when you get really good buy in because they're like, OK, this
guy is for real. Because I'm, I'm feeling this. And not only did he tell me I was going to feel like this, he's telling me why exactly I'm feeling like this and when it'll go away. So, so I think that's, that was the biggest attribute because you have to bridge the gap is what we always talked about in our program, bridging the gap between wisdom and knowledge. And you put those things together because most people only got one if they're lucky.
I think the, the wisdom is something that only comes with time. Obviously, I'm in the sport time, being around the sport time. If you're not at an elite level, if you're surrounding yourself with elite athletes, you can pick up that wisdom and, and kind of use that for your own. And that's something that I personally do because I mean, I've been in the sport for only about four years, which is basically nothing compared to some of these people who've been doing it 20-30 years.
And I think what kind of not sound arrogant, but what kind of separates me apart from maybe other coaches quote, UN quote that are in this space that are my age, that they're not around some of these people who have done these crazy lifts and have been around other people who have set world records. And I think that's the wisdom aspect of it.
And I think another thing that makes a great coach is obviously the knowledge, having the background, the education, because just because you can total 2400 doesn't mean you know how to teach someone to do that. Very, very true. Like some of the greatest sprinters in the world, they they just have genetic gifts. You can't teach that for sure. But funny enough what you're doing with doing all the interviews in your podcast I was doing, but in private for a
long, long, long, long time. The first thing I did when I came to East Tennessee State was, you know, I was surrounded by incredible professors, but most of those professors were coaches at really high levels internationally, like Olympic level coaches. And not just once or twice, but many times over. Meg Stone still has the NCAA record for shot, but from 1976. I mean, that is as elite as it gets. She was in the Olympics twice.
So the first thing I did was I sat down and I interviewed all of them. And I wanted. It's not just to understand them because I really want to get to know them in general. Yeah, You know, that's just fun because you get to meet really cool people. But as an athlete looking for competitive advantage, as a coach looking for competitive advantage, I wanted to see what parallels all went with their methodology and their experiences. So when you can do that, you get
exposed to more and more people. It's kind of, it's almost like a filter because the more you're exposed to, the more parallels that you can find in successful people. And that's where the truth really lies and how to succeed in life. Yeah, absolutely. And that's kind of you basically just kind of put words onto my mindset of why I started this podcast. It wasn't just, I mean, it was just something that I randomly one day said this would be interesting.
And then kind of as I started going through, I was like, this is really good to pick up on wisdom, knowledge, obviously meet new people, but also get to share some of the thoughts of some of these people who have put different totals and information and different areas of the sport. And I think that's one of my favorite parts about this podcast in general is being able to learn from these interviews and more than just getting my name out there. Sure, Yeah. And hopefully all the people
that are listening as well. Exactly. So let's dive a little bit into your actual career during powerlifting. I know you had the world record squad at 181 right at 9:35, and then we're the lightest to squat 1000 at 198, correct? Yeah, weighed in 194 for that one. Just just an extra couple pounds to to stick it to Jason Coker from a buddy from First Pro meet back in the day. I love that guy to death.
So I I do know the the person who was able to kind of chip that Tony Creatura, He he did that. I was actually at that meet. So that was pretty cool to explain. Oh, no way. Yeah. He. That's why I honestly had no idea that that had happened. I've been out of the circles for a while. Yeah, so he did it at 181. And I was like, that's just insane. Really. Yeah. Holy crap. And but yeah, so let's talk about maybe you said you are primarily, primarily multiply and I looked on open pile of
things. So you had a few single ply and a couple raw. But maybe what was the draw to you for multiply with someone that kind of studies the body so much that, you know, I feel like from my point of view, if I were to guess, seeing what your qualifications on paper would be, I would think, oh, that's a raw guy for sure. That's funny. Well, first, the the environment was very, very much multiply when I started.
I mean, I graduated high school in 2005 and I started really paying attention to powerlifting and probably 2003 or so, the biggest game in town was the WPO. And that's all multiply. That was as extreme as it got. I mean, people were cutting weight and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I mean, the culture was insane and there's still plenty of that going on today. But that was, there was no raw division.
Like if you signed up for, especially for an APF meet there, there wasn't a raw anything. That was just kind of the tradition of powerlifting. You could go to a meet and lift without stuff, but you were losing competitive advantage. But yeah, another thing outside of my education, anatomy and all that stuff, I love Motorsports. I grew up in North Carolina. I moved back here recently in the last few years and that's always been kind of ingrained in
the culture down here. I especially love drag racing, but any motorsport and if you, if you look at interviews or stories and all that stuff, they were always trying to find different mechanical advantages. And I looked at powerlifting in the same way. I'm not just learning how to train my body, I'm competing in a sport. A sport has specific tasks that are included in it, and there are parameters in that rule book. So I looked at it like I was a NASCAR crew chief or any kind of
crew chief. I was looking for every advantage that I could find, and that's part of where all the sports specific techniques that I used when I was competing came from. It wasn't. So, you know, I could post a video on the Internet and have everybody be happy at my squats. No, it was complete fucking opposite. Yeah. Like I, if people looked at my squat is like that shouldn't account. It was like I just did my job really well. Yeah.
Because they think it's unfair. And you know what, I hope it fucking is. Fairness is something that's it's an absolute illusion. There's no such thing as a training level playing field in any sport or anything in life. So you need to get over that quickly if the whole purpose of training is to make things unfair because you'll be better prepared than your opponents. You can start with the the same rule set and all that, all that stuff.
But there's looking for fairness is completely insane to me. Nothing should be fair. Yeah. And that's kind of, I kind of like that analogy that almost to me, the first thing I could think of is like when you're playing just pick any sport, but the better the equipment is, like you get a better pair of cleats, it's going to help you. Why? Why wouldn't you use it if it's allowed? Exactly.
And to me, it was multiply powerlifting because there's so many extra variables tossed in. There's so much more to learn. There's so much more to tweak. There's so many different things to adjust. And not just in your technique, but how you wear the stuff. You can turn it around backwards. You can do all kinds of wild stuff, but you have to have the mind to do it. You can go through, you know, trial and error, which most of
us do and did. But if you have a specific understanding of how it all works, and I mean that, that takes a high level of intelligence. And I've traveled around to lift with as many people that I could that had all kinds of crazy experiences and tried all kinds of crazy stuff, and I was able to learn from them. You know, Brian Carroll, Laura Phelps, a lot of guys from West Side, and so many other people around North Carolina. I learned what worked for me and what didn't work.
And that's the other thing, because everything's so specific because of my joint problems that were born with, I couldn't wear my equipment the way a lot of other people did, like bench shirts. They basically just didn't work very much for me because my shoulders were so trash and I couldn't like Jack the shirt down or or do anything like that. My shoulders literally come out of place. So we all kind of have the cards that were dealt, you know, and you have to figure out how to
play that the best you can. And that's, that was the whole process. So figuring all those things out and finding your competitive advantage of things that you're good at, accentuating them, that's what sport is. That's the beauty of it in any sport, but especially with multiply powerlifter. Yeah. And specifically with multiply, like the biggest thing you can do to get better is be in it more. And for, for me, like I'm doing my first multiply meet in about
3 weeks. And I mean everything, it's been going great because I mean, I have a decent base, which I think is another thing that we could talk about and that's very important. But I think a prime example with the whole limiting variables and different variables is yesterday I was going for a bench PR and I was, I, my, one of my first attempts was 465 just to match what I did previously at the beginning of prep and I almost missed it.
And then fix, fix the shirt a little bit, threw on 20 lbs and literally launched it. It just shows that the one little tweak, one small thing and one little adjustment can change the whole game. And I think learning to be able to do that on meet day is probably one of the most difficult things. Definitely, yeah, absolutely. Because every time you put on equipment, it's just a little bit different than the last time you did it. Yep. So you never know exactly what
you're going to get. But when you get the experience and you pay attention to how you put things on, like if you put on your your bench shirt with your palms up or palms facing each other, palms down, all these other different things, there's those are all variables that go into. Drastic changes in how all that stuff operates. So it it's no longer just, I didn't feel strong today. Where I feel real strong today is like, doesn't really matter
that you feel great. If you don't have everything set up, if you're not intelligent about the process, you're not going to be consistently good. You might be good every once in a while because you get lucky. Yeah, but it takes a whole lot more than just being strong. Yeah. So what are some of those things for you that was maybe some pointers or some things that you kind of stuck with that helped you limit the variables on whether a day-to-day basis or
the meet day itself? Well, one was managing body weight, especially with equipment. If your body weights all over the place. And I know the the ends or leviathans now are kind of adjustable and there's a few other suits that are probably adjustable now that helps a lot. But I mean the suit that I squatted my first 1000 LB squat in. I had about a 6 LB window that if if I was below that the suit was way too loose and I couldn't hardly squat anything.
If it was above that, my legs were numb and I couldn't squat anything. So I hadn't have that nailed. Perfect. Cut all the weight and then rehydrate to exactly the right place. And then making sure that you are consciously putting on your equipment the same way every time, but try different things farther away from competition, like putting, you know, like the the hand position when you're putting on your bench.
Sure, you can try all that stuff away from competition time, but when you get close to competition time, everything needs to be exactly the same every single time. So you know exactly what's coming and then managing your warmups and how to put the equipment on, when to put the equipment on. How are you? Are you watching the attempts of the flight ahead of you? Are they equipped? Are they unequipped?
Unequipped flights go exponentially faster than equipped flights because there's no knee wraps or whatever's going on. So you have to to manage all that stuff. So it's way, way, way, way more complicated because there's so many more variables at play. But that's what I loved about it. If you if you could get a handle on those things and you were intelligent about it, you had an advantage. It's not fair. Yeah, Yeah, if you could.
Yeah, Like you just said, if you can nail those things down and there's nothing from those variables that's stopping you, then it you're in for a great day. And there's, there's so many multiplied meets of people just going either 3 for 9:00 or or bombing out. And it probably comes down to just the variables. It's not the strength. I mean, obviously there's sometimes there's the conditions with maybe you didn't rehydrate well enough or the meat's too hot and or there's just things
like that. But I think the the people that succeed and get to 3rd attempts and successfully is the people that can control those variables to almost not be a factor. Yeah, definitely. And that consistency was something I was super proud of, especially with my squats because if you watch my squats on video, they they never look like they're at depth, but that's because the videos are from the front. Yep, if you look at them from the side, it actually looks a lot different.
I had judges, multiple judges in my career, and this is one of the biggest compliments I ever got. They were excited to give me Reds on depth because they'd seen my lifts on the Internet before and they said May. I could not believe that you were actually getting to parallel from the side when I was actually looking at it up close. And I'm like, how about that? It's a weird deal. I never, I bought, actually, I can't say never. I bombed out once in my entire
career. I don't know how many meets I did on squad depth. And that was a really awkward deal where a guy that who was running the meet had never competed, didn't lift weights and he didn't know me. I, I came in to weigh in, I made weight and I told him what I was opening with on squat and he's like, I think you should lower that. I was like, what? You don't why? Why are you saying this to me? This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. We've just met. You've never seen me lift.
And he said I think you should probably lower that by about 100 lbs. And I was just losing my mind and guess what? He was a side judge the next day and he told me I was 1/4 of an inch high on my squats. But aside from that really weird experience, I never, I never bombed out on squats because of depth. So and I probably more than those record squats, I'm more proud that I had the number one ranked squat in my weight class for five different years internationally.
Yeah, to me, to me, that was really cool. Yeah. And it's I'm glad that you said that too because you can never judge a multiply squat from the front. I mean, we like to post our videos from the front, but I mean, just knowing how physics and camera angles work, if you watch vertical shin, you're not going to be able to tell because that angle is just so different and you can see it in person, but oh, that's good. And then you watch a backup video and you're like, was it
good? So if you're not there to experience it, then you can't really comment on that. And I think that's kind of one of the biggest. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of high squats out there still. But. You can't just all these Internet warriors and just judging all this equipped stuff when they have probably never even seen one in person. It's just mind boggling to me.
Yeah. And especially with multiply stuff, particularly canvas suits, they are so thick that there's, you know, at least an inch of material in it. When you're wearing briefs and a canvas suit that's raising that crease up off of your hip. And if you have an X-ray, you could actually see where the femur is in real life. But that really throws off the perception, especially from the front. But is what it is. So I guess we'll talk about the meat that you squatted, the
thousand. Maybe tell us a little bit about the prep going into it kind of when you decided like, hey, I wanted to be the lightest 1 to squat 1000 kind of what what the thought process behind that was? Sure. Yeah. That thought was actually something that happened around 2006, I think. So that was eight years before I did it. I had just seen Sam Byrd take that title, and I don't remember who who had that before him, but there was a lineage going all the way back. I mean, of course.
Oh man, The guy that did it the first time in a meet, Why am I spacing on his name anyway? Back in the 80s. I can't think of it either. Yeah, but the first time I remember hearing an early name of someone being the lightest to squat 1000 lbs was Fred Hatfield. He did it that I think at 264. And then it took a long time and eventually with Chuck Vogel, Paul, maybe that's who Sam took that from, I'm not sure. But then it was Sam. Kurt Kowalski did it as well. And single pie, which was
bonkers. He was 275 or so. But there was a super cool lineage and Jason and Coker was in there for sure. Can't, can't forget to mention him. But to be in any list with those people, people I really looked up to a ton was super cool.
And then I I was just able to think, you know, if I stay healthy, if I do this right, with the way I'm progressing with, you know, hopefully not being delusional, it just seemed like something that I could do. And and my buddy will flattery was like, yeah, I think you're right. And he was damn near the only person that thought so. But that was just enough to help me really go after it. So that meet day was a really, really hot day in Bristol, TN. We're in a National Guard Armory.
There's no air conditioning. We had the doors open and it was like 90° and training had gone really well. Had an overkill squat suit. It was custom made. That was the one with the the like 6 LB window of body weight that I could be in. I was a little bit lighter than I wanted to be, but it felt good enough. And that 1000 LB squat was actually the second attempt.
I opened at like a low 900 I think, and then jumped up to 1000. And with how training had been going, I thought it was going to fly. And I start to come up out of the bottom and it feels like the ground is splitting beneath me and it's because my shoe blew out and the carpet was stretching under my feet. So I'm having to try and finesse 1000 LB squat and slowly come up and not push too hard to where my shoes just going to come apart, where the the carpets going to rip or whatever.
And I'm just kind of like gradually sliding up into lockout. And my whole plan that day was to go after the 198 record, but I wanted to get that 1000 LB squat out of the way. So I loaded up 1060 on the third attempt and I I tried to go up there and I couldn't even take it out of the rack because my shoe was split around the heel and, and that was that. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's crazy that you're still able to pull
that off. And I would have been terrified if I saw the the ground split like that. Yeah. That it, it was one of the things that was very unique to me, which sounds weird to say. So I feel like a douche all the time when I'm talking about stuff like that. But nobody squatted as wide as I did aside from Laura Phelps. That I knew of because I was almost touching the sides of the monoliths. And I'm 57. When I have all that weight on me, I'm five feet. Laura started off closer to five
feet when she was there. But, you know, the heaviest I ever saw on her back was like 800 lbs when she attempted it. Yeah. And it's it's just a different dynamic when you have a good bit more weight on your back. So I didn't have anybody to go ask like, hey, when this happened to you, what did you do? Yeah, there was because nobody had ever done it before. So you're, you're just kind of stuck there, left to, to figure
things out. So I eventually, you know, had to ditch the Chuck Taylors, which are the ones that split, and I had to go get metal squash shoes. There's those $200.00 shoes, and they were finally justified to spend $200.00 on them because I couldn't live with anything else. Yeah, they they worked out really good and I still have them today.
That's cool. So the, I guess the training going into it and maybe over the years, what kind of modalities or kind of different influences that you use for like your setup of your, your training blocks and things and maybe how that's evolved over the years? So much training it seemed like got simpler and simpler over the years. I trained less and less the stronger it got.
And that was from learning lessons by reading things that they've put out, talking about Chuck Vogel, Poles training and all the guys at West Side and all the injuries that they had and how crazy they were going all the time. So it's great to have people out there on the, the cutting edge, you know, pushing the envelope and doing all the crazy stuff so you can learn from it. You know, hats off to those
guys. And getting the to meet Dave Tate on the his Table Talk podcast was pretty awesome. Yeah, we got to talk about a lot of stories off camera that, you know, it's stuff that I'd heard growing up in the sport and, and, and sharing a lot of commonalities with people that we knew, but it was, it was super cool. But as far as my training, I, I started off like most folks in powerlifting. I was doing all the West side
stuff. I read all the articles doing circum boxes, using the bands, chains, the box squats, absolutely everything that I could do. And I built up a really good base with that. The bands specifically, I think have a really cool training effect because it's, I don't, I honestly don't think it's for the reasons that they were said to have been done. Because we talked about over speed eccentrics and that's an interesting concept, kind of like depth drops and
plyometrics. That's that's another form of over speed eccentrics where you're having to contract to absorb force in the muscle to where you can stimulate more type 2X type muscle fibers. But the the more important thing to me with band training is that it turns off the inhibition to slow down at the top of a Rep for fear of taking flight on things like a squat or losing the bar, like pushing the bar so hard that it will come out of your hands at the top of a bench
press. And when you take away that inhibition and the bands keep everything anchored, you can accelerate all the way through a squat or anything else, just like you're going to try and throw it or push it as far up into the air as you can. And I think the accumulated training effect of that over time has a massive, massive benefit. But I did start to stall a little bit with my actual unequipped strength by doing
that. And I started doing higher volume training and I would take periods of time where I'm doing 10s and fifteens and then I'd come back and I'd be a little bit stronger. And then the stronger I got and more advanced I got, I noticed that there was more of a lag between doing high volume work and then eventually being stronger on those higher intensities, the twos and threes
and fives and things like that. And that was around the time that I started becoming more familiar with Doctor Mike Stones research block periodization in the Western model of that Yuri Verkashansky. Dr. Yuri Verkashansky from the Soviet Union was doing the exact same thing in Soviet Russia, but
in a different language. So you had kind of this double-blind research thing going on with probably the coolest thing that I think has ever happened in sports science because you had two guys that were working with tons of athletes and developing these training programs and training studies and finding almost the exact same thing.
They had different words for like the phases and mesocycles or blocks or your transmutation phase or competition phase, specificity or specialization phases, accumulation or general preparation phases. All these things were super, super similar, but they were the same, You know, it's and they didn't know about each other until I think the 90s and they were doing this from the 70s on, but I digress.
I was learning more about how those training programs went and I was like, wait a minute, I've been doing kind of a really dumb version of this for quite a while and seeing some progress. If I really organize my training, look at my endpoint of my meet day plan backwards, I can go through all this and hopefully have some predictable results. And that's really what started to happen.
And the more in depth I got into that, the more I was able to increase the the effectiveness of planning training. Yeah. And that's when I started learning. OK, well, if I'm actually monitoring myself and understanding my fatigue and how that plays in the performance and recovery and all those things, everything started getting really easy to make progress. And that was, that's not the way
that's supposed to go, right? Like the, the higher level you, you get, you're supposed to work harder and harder and harder. And if you're winning, you work harder. If you're losing, you need to work harder. And that's, that's always the mindset. But if you're not a beginner, that doesn't apply anymore. You have to figure out what the smartest way to go about things does. And that a lot of times it means not training as much. Anybody can train hard.
Honestly, everybody can flip that switch on if they're going to go anywhere in life and do something really hard because you get a big endorphin rush and then adrenaline rush from that. You get all the reward things from your from your endocrine system. But nobody wants to sit around and do research. Yeah, nobody wants to be hardcore about reading a fucking book, you know? But that's the stuff that really sets you apart if you're, especially if you're, you're coaching yourself.
And I think another point on that too is it kind of in a, in a shortened way, it's almost like obviously once you get to an elite level, like if you can just be recovered and be injury free, there's nothing stopping you. Yeah, yeah. And you only need enough of a training dose. Now say dose intentionally is just like a medicine dose. You only need enough to make progress. You don't need to Max out the dosage and then be mentally tough and fight through fatigue
all the time. Like, you just need to get create enough of a stimulus to make progress. And if you're staying on that conservative side, you minimize your injury risk. And it's very much tortoise in the hair. You'll eventually pass a whole lot of people because they're going to start popping things off that should have stayed attached to where they were. Yeah. That's a great point, but
tortoise in the hair. I like that because I think the biggest thing in powerlifting is longevity and that goes for all strength sports. I mean, you look at strong men and some of the best athletes are almost 40 years old and right, 20 years ago you'd say a 40 year old is an old person. They're not an athlete, they're not competing in sports, but those are the people that are lifting the heaviest weights on the planet, so. Yep, definitely that.
That accumulated training effect, if they can stay relatively injury free, is absolutely massive. And by the time you get to 40, you do start to have what's called the the old man strength kick in and everybody talks about that little man shake my hand really hard and, you know, crazy grip strength. There's physiological reasons for that, like your connective tissue actually becomes more
efficient in transferring force. Your muscle can be exactly the same strength as far as contractile force. But if you are more efficient with a stronger tendon between your muscle and the joint that it's moving, you exude more force. Yeah. So that's that's where old main strength kind of kicks in.
Yeah, that's, that's pretty cool to think about because I mean, like you said, if it's you can have a very strong muscle, but if the the supporting tendons and tissues around it aren't going to allow it to maximally transfer the weight, then it's what what you got to just do it with time. Yeah, definitely. And you, you can't, you can't skate by that in the least, Yeah. So I think one of the the last topics I want to talk about was kind of how I found out about you.
One of my friends, Connor Boyle, he used. Oh, cool. Yeah. So he was obviously like a a 198 savant. Like he loves trying to be in that weight class, trying to get the highest deadlift and all those things. But I found out about you through him using you for a water cut. So I kind of wanted to maybe talk a little bit about what kind of got you involved in that and maybe how that operates for you? With water cutting in general, yeah, yeah, sure. I've given lots of talks on that for sure.
And I think it's it's getting better. But there's some of the worst misinformation that's out there on water cutting protocols can most of it ends up coming from different sports. People used to cut like bodybuilders back in the day. And the timing was all off. The electrolyte balances were all off. People would start water loading like a month out and like, Jesus
Christ, what what is going on? And I tried some some silly stuff early on, like if you're going to coach water cutting, you better fucking done it a lot and you better screwed up a lot of things over time because you need to know. What's wrong and what's right? Not just by what's in a book,
but by the feel. If you're feeling specific things during a specific portion of the water cut process, you need to be able to point that out and with your communications with the client slash athlete and prevent them from having anything catastrophic happen first and foremost. But also you can change the approach. And every single water cut that I've done for anybody has always been different, The timings different, the circumstances are different, the environments different.
People retain water in different ways just from genetic variability and their environment. The tap water that they have wherever they live is going to change the variables there and lots of other things on top of that, just for example. But again, I learned how to do that and I studied the, the endocrine system related to water and sodium regulation specifically for competitive advantage. That's where all this came from.
I, I heard and had been taught by, you know, Brian Carroll, who wrote a really good book on it, Laura Phelps, Al Castle, A lot of people that I was around when I was competing, especially early on in the, in the pro ranks of powerlifting. And I, I learned all the different methods that they recommended doing and they were all pretty different. They had commonalities, which were those parallels that I talked about earlier. So I really stuck to that.
And then I started studying the Physiology of it a lot deeper and I started trying to figure out, OK, so if we're going to start loading water, what's the best time? How long does it actually take for the hormones in your body to respond And actually be stimulated by the water loading? And how long does it take for when you cut that water off or if you taper it to actually recognize that that's happening? Because all those timing aspects are incredibly important.
And then the same thing goes to sodium. But when should you add in sodium and when should you cut it out? How fast is the reaction of your aldosterone and your kidneys going to recognize that that's there and not there? So playing with that over the years and then understanding like you don't really need more than five or six days maximum to have a huge water cut and and saving people from, you know, water loading for two weeks and
not having sodium for a month. And like all these horrible things that only increase your injury risk and help may even give you a seizure or a stroke, like people do it that badly. So that's why I started talking more about it. The talks that I give, I always start with this is an incredibly bad idea. Don't do it. But when you do it, try to use these guidelines because I don't
want you to die. Yeah. Or, you know, go into kidney failure and have to go to the ER because a lot of people have done that too. So going through all those scenarios and it's always different for 24 hour weigh insurance, 2 hour weigh insurance, mat side weigh insurance, like for jiu jitsu, like you literally go weigh in, then you walk out to go fight. Yeah, all, all those things change the variable so much because of the timing aspects. Those hormones are changing over
the course of hours, not days. And it's you, you kind of have to to call everything on the fly, especially in the last couple days of a water cut because everybody's different. But it's always high stress. And if you can avoid it, I definitely recommend it. Yeah.
So I, I do have a few questions, maybe specific questions, like I guess one of the first ones is with it, if you're doing it online and kind of obviously you need to know a little bit about the athlete, but do you use previous data from other athletes that you've done to kind of guide you? Do you have like AI guess like a database and of sorts to kind of give you the the markers and things like that that can help you correctly guide them? Not specific data points.
I have the experiences, I understand the process. It's more I don't know. I've done this with so many people at this point I couldn't even like pull out specific examples. But it's definitely the experience part. So being exposed to different trends and I pay attention to people's language a lot. If I think people are missing food or changing water intake or their the timing of that's not right. It all all effects things differently.
So it gives me more insights on what to ask them directly. I have them my my water cut clients checking in at the very, very least once in the morning, once at night, and then the day before, basically talking all day because it's a very, very sensitive procedure and you need to stay on top of everything. Like I can't say that I'm taking data points from previous people, but I understand the human aspect. That's the art of coaching. It's just like anything else.
Yeah, for sure. And I guess another thing would be kind of what what's like your your limit. Like it doesn't necessarily have to be a poundage because everyone, like you said, everyone works differently, but maybe sometimes where someone's wanted to go hire you, but you're like, this is just not doable. Like what are? What are some things that
signify that? Well, that that's kind of, it's kind of about those like the seminar talks that I give, I tell people this is a terrible idea, don't do it. But when you do do it this way, or at least don't do it these other horrible ways, I try to at least help people not make terrible mistakes For two hour weigh insurance. My basic guidelines are don't cut more than 5% body weight. That seems to be a, a pretty moderate.
I mean that that's still risky in general, but I've seen it succeed plenty of times versus not succeed. And it's so silly because the, the success rate that I've had with these people and going to competitions and the leading up to it, I'm like, there's no way this person's going to have a good day. There's just no way. And then they send me a message back and like most of the time they hit PR somehow, like 3/4 of the time. And like that shouldn't have happened.
You got lucky somehow. But for 24 hour weigh insurance, I'm usually OK with doing 10% or less body weight. Like that's, that's kind of a standard number. I've gone all the way up to 15 or 16. I didn't want to do it, but they were going to do it anyway, so I tried to keep them from dying. Format side weigh insurance, like 2 1/2 is usually recommended because you can kind of chug some water and some some electrolyte supplements after that to make up for it. And you're doing OK because that
that up takes super fast. So those are just general guidelines, but everybody's very, very different. Yeah, I think it's, it's really cool to kind of be the the different like aspects of it, the different type of signs and the different strategies that kind of go into putting on a best day, like kind of just with multiply and being able to change variables and give yourself a competitive advantage. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's that's what it's all about, right?
And the, the culture in jiu jitsu and grappling sports in general is cut crazy. I mean, just insane stuff. And that's where you find some of the mentally most mentally tough people that there are. But that's it's almost like you have an inhibition to being smart about the process, like you're just going to tough through it because and that's really admirable, but there are better ways to go about it. Some of the fighters that I've worked with over the years have
been kind of along those lines. You have to pull them back. It's like, no, no, no, you're, you're three or four days out. Don't go running 10 miles in your Sonic gear. Like we, we have a timing aspect of this. You'll you'll be fine. Well, I think, I think we can kind of wrap things up here. So I'll ask you my final question. If you could give a new power lifter or someone going into their first meet a word of
advice, what would that be? Have fun, enjoy the people, take a conservative attempts, get in the meat and then pass that. Enjoy it because everybody's nervous, everybody wants to do well, and if you can't enjoy the process then you're not going to last. So have fun. Well, I wanted to thank you again for taking the time to come on. It was my pleasure. Oh, it's an honor, man. I appreciate it.