"You Are Here" Part 1 by Dan John
"You Are Here" Part 1 by Dan John
The Guardian Academy has three sins:
Dull
Distracted
Delusional
All of them creep in to derail our health, fitness and wellness journey. The solution to dull? Do something. The solution to distracted? Commit to the thing you pick. Simple. Not necessarily, easily. But simple.
However, to pick the best thing for you, you need to break the delusion.
Delusion isn’t so simple.
Delusion is not being clear and/or honest about where you’re at or what you’re capable of. It’s like having a false sense of “your current location” when trying to use Google Maps. Dan John is one of the most well respected coaches and educators in the fitness industry - and he’s put together a comprehensive process for breaking the delusion to help you and/or your clients get an accurate “you are here” reading.
Below is part 1 of a multi-part series,
It’s written as a coach to other other coaches and trainers. If you have a coach or trainer, you should be making sure they are applying the principles below. If you do not have one, but are trying to make progress…you are your own coach or trainer so this applied directly to you.
The 1-2-3-4 Assessment Part 1
By Dan John
In the past few years, I have come up with a simple method of assessing clients to get right to this core question:
What do we NEED to do? What is Enough?
The 1-2-3-4 Assessment will answer this question efficiently and quickly.
This assessment also answers the most difficult question facing coaches and trainers: What do we do next? We will answer this question with the Five Tools of fitness and nutrition. The assessment is simple and repeatable. It can be done with one person or hundreds. It answers the most important question in fitness:
What is Enough?1
If you are just trying to get back into shape, the answer might be obvious. Perhaps you need to get a few workouts combining mobility and strength and increase your vegetable intake.
Now, if you are an athlete and you have an event coming up, we must look you sternly in the eye and ask another question: “Can you go?”
Those three words, “Can you go?,” are the great challenge of sport and life. When your child needs you, you rally up and take care of business even if you have the flu or not a minute to spare. For the athlete, this is the time to step up, step in, grab the ball and go.
Can you go? To answer this question, under the heat of competition, takes years of training, growth, and preparation. The lessons we have learned from athletes help us lead the typical client towards their goals, too.
The first step toward helping our clients achieve their goals in fitness is helping them figure out who they are right here and right now.
In fitness, success comes down to these two “truths”—
Everything works. (Every diet, fad, program, and gimmick “works.”)
Everything works for about six weeks. (Every gimmick usually has the tagline of two weeks or, worse, overnight…then, it stops working. Most people have learned this lesson many times.)
These two truths lead us the question for Week Seven, Day One: “What do I do next?”
With goal setting, a simple assessment and a sense of where we are today (not twenty years ago!), we can answer the question:
“What do I do next?”
It is simple. But it is not easy.
John Powell, the former world-record holder in the discus, has an insightful story about this point. Powell had been training a group of young men how to throw the discus. He was emphasizing how simple the movement is across the ring: 1-2-3. One boy attempted it, crossed his feet and fell to the ground.
“You said it was easy,” he complained to John.
John countered, “I said it was simple, not easy.”
The answer is simple. It may or may not be easy.
Let’s find out where you are first. Then, we address what to do next.
Assessments: Judging Progression and Programs without Hyperbole
There is an important question to ask yourself about everything in life: Did “it” work? Away from the glitch and sparkle of advertising, BS sessions and bravado with friends, did “it” work? Here is how I usually know it worked: I did it.
Fill in anything you want for it: life hacks, gasoline-saving tricks, window-cleaning tips, odd food combinations or exotic training programs. I think peanut butter on a hamburger is excellent. If it works, it works.
I believe in assessment. I often joke that we should be like the character from the Harry Potter series, Mad-Eye Moody. He would yell at the kids, “Constant vigilance!” Replace “vigilance” with “assessment,” and you will be a better coach, teacher and trainer.
Constant assessment!
If there is a must to coaching, it is this: You must assess. Vladimir Janda said this half a century ago: “Time spent in assessments will save time in treatment” –or in our case training. It’s true: If there’s a key to coaching, it is understanding that “here” is a moving target. I hope we established “there” already, the “B” of A-B. “A,” of course is where the goal setter is now. And, let me restate the cliché: If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
We want to be on the road to mastery, even if we don’t make every goal we set. In this, I often quote Cervantes, “The road is always better than the inn.” We should write A-B as A TO B with capital letters screaming out the path. Simply getting on the path to appropriate, legal and worthy goals leads me to places I never imagined. If the road is leading you to a worthy destination (thank you, Earl Nightingale), there are many wonderful stops along the way.
In short, strive for mastery—or, better yet, strive for the road to mastery.2
When someone has a goal that is A–B, things are pretty easy. Attaining a goal is a lot like sailing a boat into the wind. You will tack back and forth with your goal on your right, then on your left, then back on your right. But these are course corrections; you are always advancing forward toward your goal.
Your job as the coach and mentor is to shout out, “Bring it around!” every so often and get your clients back on target.
For those still struggling with an appropriate goal, our A–Z friends, assessments show us progress. The A–Z people often have goals that are so difficult and demand so much time, energy and investment that little steps are going to feel like failure.
The mother of three who wants to look like the cover of a fitness magazine in six weeks is thinking Z, not B. Sometimes, our task is to point to logical, reasonable, attainable goals. This doesn’t mean that Z is impossible; let’s just start with trying to get some movement in the right direction first.
There is another kind of goal that we call A/Not A. Steve Ledbetter came up with this insight; many people don’t know what they want in fitness, body composition or health, but they do know that they don’t want to be “here.”
These people say, “This is how I look today, but this isn’t who I am!” Assessment allows us to reaffirm that they are not where they started. Once they were “here,” but now they can point backward and argue that they aren’t at that “here” anymore—indeed, that old “here” is getting farther away.
Assessment should clue us into one important point: The impact of your training should be obvious: the impact of training should push towards the goal, and it should help achieve the goal. And most people know this. Sadly, most people’s training seems to not do anything at all to support the goals set. Instead, people tend to do what my mom used to call “monkey see, monkey do.” It’s a rare week that I am not asked a question about something on the internet or television that looks fun and interesting in training. It is all fine, but it rarely supports the goals of the person asking the question.
For years, I answered the total impact of strength coach and fitness trainer upon one’s goals as “it depends.” In my book, Intervention, I explained how the Quadrants clarified my understanding of how the coach and trainer can lead one to their goal.
The Basics of the Quadrants
I can’t repeat the Quadrants enough. The Qs are my attempt to answer the question: “What is the impact of a strength coach?” My original answer, “it depends,” wasn’t that enlightening. Over time, I came up with a simple image of four quadrants. A client’s location on the Qs depends first on the number of qualities that client’s goal requires (for example, playing football requires many qualities, but shot putting requires only two: get strong and throw the shot).
Second, the Qs relate to the absolute highest levels at which humanity can perform.
I wish you luck trying to figure out how to train for elite sprinting and elite swimming at the same time.
Usually, when I walk people through the assessment, I tell them they’re in Quadrant III. It’s not laziness; it’s reality. Sure, an NFL player was in Quadrant II, but as a career moves on, training simplifies.
There is a sad, but true moment for everyone I walk through assessment:
You are not in high school—or college—anymore!
Quadrant IV demands the hand of God, as I like to joke. You have to be born a sprinter or elite lifter and be blessed to be in a location that supports sprinting or lifting. A boy born with the genetic gifts to be the greatest lifter of all time and raised in Iowa might end up being an outstanding wrestler. Put that same kid in certain towns in North Dakota, and you have a solid hockey player. Now, if he was born in Bulgaria or China, we have a multiple world-champion lifter.
Quadrant II gets all the press. Collision sports and collision occupations tend to bring out the need to be a superhero.. It takes a special kind of person, in both mental toughness and physical gifts, to be the best of the best, and few have long careers doing these kinds of jobs. Professional football players and Navy SEALs are amazing. Fitness authors sell a lot of books and magazines to people who want to be like SEALs.
To “be a SEAL,” it would make sense to join the US Navy.
I’m going to just say this right now: You aren’t in QII. Usually, if you were at one time, you are not anymore. Nor are most of the clients we will ever train in the gym.
Quadrant I is that wonderful period of youth when we learn movement, games and sports. I hope you learned to swim and ride a bike, as these are harder to learn as you age.
Once we leave the primary and secondary years of school, we leave QI behind too.
Most people are in Quadrant III. There are only a few physical qualities needed to train in this quadrant, and the levels are comparably low. Fat loss can be defined as caloric restriction and inefficient movement. There are only two qualities, and picking the appropriate approach to these qualities can ensure success. This approach might not always be what someone wants to do. A bad dancer burns more calories in a dance class than a good dancer and a crappy bike takes more effort to move than a good bike. Inefficient movement might not be as fun as mastering the sport, but it ensures successful fat loss.
The problem I always had in the past in explaining QIII was that I lumped Olympic athletes into the same group as the person trying to lose five pounds. While they are both QIII, there is enough distinction between the two to break them into smaller groups: active (or aging) athletes and everybody else.
For shorthand, I refer to active athletes as A2 and everybody else as E2.
Active (Aging) Athletes
Training for the QIII A2 is simple: The athlete needs to practice the sport and then do fundamental human movements with the appropriate reps, sets and load in the weight room. The focus in strength training will be to address weaknesses, but we want to compete with our strengths.
Yes, it is that simple.
Some A2 will do complex movements such as the Olympic lifts. Others will find the basic movements (planks and goblet squats, for example) support their goals. If there is lagging movement or joint mobility issues, some specialized training might be valuable for periods of the year. Gaps in training or lack of attaining the basic standards in the fundamentals will become more glaring as the athlete ages. Additionally, these issues will also diminish the chances of achieving the highest goals, as elite performance demands so much from the body.
QIII is where the champions roam. I usually joke that we don’t do much—but that’s okay, as we don’t do it well. In truth, the QIII A2 needs to master the techniques, tactics and strategies necessary to perform at the highest level possible. The strength coach supports this by providing a balanced, strong platform to launch the A2 toward the goal.
So training the QIII A2 is going to be a balancing act. Since lifting weights has become a part of every athlete’s training, we see athletes much bigger and stronger now than ever before. Athletes seem to get bigger every year. In the 1960s, offensive linemen in the NFL were still in the 210–230 pound range and rarely did you see a 300 pounder. Today, many high schools have 300 pounders.
For the QIII A2, one of the hardest things to teach about strength is when enough is enough. Doctor Tom Fahey once studied the strength levels of an elite discus thrower. An athlete thrower needs to be able to do these lifts—
400-pound bench press
450-pound back squat
250-pound snatch
300-pound clean
To the average person, these are big lifts, but to elite throwers, these are almost light—and to some, these are poor lifts! Getting stronger, along with getting more flexible, is one of the easiest things to achieve. Lift weights and you will get stronger. The issue for the QIII A2 is this: As you continue to increase your strength, you must see a corresponding improvement in your sport performance. Lifting is the easy part of the formula for improved performance. To improve or maintain elite levels of performance, the athlete must remain fresh enough to train. And, yes, I know you know that. But applying this truth is hard.
Strength coaches who help QIII A2 must focus on two things—
Are there any gaps in the training program? Are A2 clients doing all the fundamental human movements? Is there a balance in load and volume in these movements?
Is the athlete up to standard in these movements? The levels for track and field are known with a large body of experience and research. Other sports are catching up in this area quickly.
Every other quality that an athlete needs should come from practicing and performing his or her sport. As I always say about being a good head track-and-field coach, “Throwers throw. Jumpers jump. Hurdlers hurdle.”
If you are a soccer player and haven’t kicked a ball in months, but you can deadlift three times your bodyweight, you are missing the point. The point? You should be playing soccer!
With the QIII A2, you must have a laser-beam focus on the goal. The most important key is to cut the options back. Insist on less variety in the weight room, focus on quality reps and apply appropriate load. Enough is enough. As I tell my people, “You are doing the big work here, so get off my back.” One of the most common errors in training is to start questioning the process. This often happens after the athlete reads something or hears something new and exciting. You must trust the process, trust the path. Let the process happen, and—something that doesn’t happen as often as I wish—finish the process.
Even if you or your clients are not athletes, there is a lot of value in listening to the sports world. There are some things we’ve learned the hard way in elite performance, and you might as well enjoy the free knowledge.
For example, traveling as an athlete is always an issue. Many athletes are just built “funny”: too big, too long and too wide for normal seats. The traveling athlete has the same issue as your typical office worker. With prolonged sitting, the body begins to round forward, the hips tighten and we seem to get glued to the screen (computer or television).
So there are three things I recommend for traveling athletes the moment they get into their hotel rooms—
1. Stretch the hip flexors.
2. Work on your thoracic spine mobility.
3. Try a few bird dogs, and test the single-side bird dog to reestablish rotary stability.
Universally, traveling athletes suffer from tight hip flexors, stiff T spines and a loss of rotary stability. So before you step up to the plate with a guy throwing something at your face at ninety-five miles per hour—or doing whatever it is you’ll do—I recommend getting yourself back to “more normal.” As one of my baseball players noted, he was shocked to see how stable he was with bird dogs when at home and how that vanished during plane rides.
I am convinced that everyone needs to do these few correctives every day, unless you walk and move all day without lengthy periods of sitting (commuting, typing, watching shows). So learn from the elites, stretch a bit and test those bird dogs daily.
Athletes can also teach the rest of us that superior performance comes from not trying so hard. In World War II, fighter pilots were having a problem not recognizing friend or foe quickly enough. Among others, Bud Winters was hired to help them deal with this issue. Using his sports background, he discovered that physical relaxation leads to mental relaxation, which in turn brings quicker recognition in the sky.
Years later, he became the head track-and-field coach of the legendary San Jose State teams known as Speed City. His program was better than nearly every national team in the world, and his athletes led the world in sprints, discus throws and pole vaults. He called this method of relaxation, Relax and Win.
He expected his athletes to learn to fall asleep, on demand, anytime and anywhere. He used physical warm-ups to produce more relaxation. He believed that a loose, relaxed effort was superior to trying to “kill yourself” for victory. It works—and not only in sports. You can find these benefits in business, public speaking and normal human interactions.
At the same time, Eastern European sports scientists were discovering that everyone can tense at about the same rate, but that superior athletes can relax the muscle faster. They theorized that relaxation was the secret to elite performance.
So relax. You are doing fine.
The next great lesson we can all learn from elite performance is simple: Getting stronger by lifting weights can improve every aspect of life. Yes, you will throw farther and jump higher, and that is great, thank you very much. But you will also move the couch easier, carry in more groceries and generally be more of a help than a hindrance in daily life. That, by the way, is nicer for the rest of us too.
Can You Go?
I have a sad truth about QIII A2 and assessment. It all comes down to one question:
Can you go?
It’s a phrase we use in American football, a simple question that means “can you play or not?” If you walk up to me on the day of nationals and tell me about the lousy dinner, crappy hotel and rough commute, I will smile and nod and act like I listened to all of that, and then I’ll ask you, “Can you go?”
If you can, then get in your uniform, begin your warm-ups and let’s get going. If you can’t, it’s over—let’s go home. We are finished here today. I hope you learned something from all the preparation but we are through today. I’m sorry. You can go home now. It’s over.
I wish I could be kinder, but athletics can be cruel. So be sure to ask yourself this question often—Can you go?—and don’t wait for the morning of something important to wonder why you started this in the first place.
This leads us to a small, but important, question: Is everyone an athlete? Doctor George Sheehan, the famous writer and runner, once noted: “Being fit is one thing. Being an athlete is another. Fitness is the ability to do work. Being an athlete is something quite different. Fitness is what you pass through on the way to a superior physical and mental and spiritual state.”
As much as I love Sheehan’s work, I have always felt this line made athletes and athletics too important. While fitness, I agree, is the ability to do work or a task, Doctor Phil Maffetone, whom I use for much of my understanding on cardiovascular work, wrote a book called Everyone Is an Athlete, which argues an opposing standpoint.
I, however, will take the middle ground for once and think that both have valid points. But we have to meet people where they are in life. So if I ask you the question, “Can you go?,” and you answer, “Where?,” I need another set of assessment tools.
Everybody Else
It’s time to look at everybody else, or E2.
There’s a joke that has been hanging around education for a few decades. A fish, a bird and a monkey are all standing in line. The guy with a clipboard says, “Okay, it’s time for basic assessment. Let’s see who can climb a tree the fastest.”
The fish says it can’t get out of its bowl or it will die.
“You fail then.”
The bird asks to fly to the top, and the guy responds, “No, the test says climb, not fly. You must follow the protocol.”
The monkey wins by climbing the fastest and gets the job—the job is to climb a tower and look out for enemy ships approaching the land. Of course, this is a job that a flyer or swimmer might have been better at doing.
Somehow, I think this story is a fair warning about assessments and readiness.
The assessments for QIII E2 are based on experience and on the study of both elite athletes and victims of polio. Polio was a feared disease throughout much of the early to middle twentieth century, and two researchers combatting the disease remain relevant today. Progressive resistance exercise, developed by Tom DeLorme, remains the key to understanding strength training. Vladimir Janda’s contributions and insights about certain muscles shrinking with age or disease and other muscles weakening with age and disease continue to be the best approach to total body training.
Elite athletes note that while traveling they lose hip flexor flexibility as well as have issues with T spine mobility and rotary stability. Janda showed us decades ago that the tonics, the muscles that tighten with age or illness, need to be stretched. These are the pectorals, the biceps, the hip flexors and the hamstrings (among others). If you’re sitting in a chair, these are the muscles that you want to stretch back into place as you stand up.
Paul Anderson, a fine weightlifter from the 1950s and 1960s, once noted: “The guy with the biggest butt lifts the biggest weights.” Janda found that the glutes, along with the deltoids, triceps and abdominal wall, were a person’s seat of power. These are the muscles you would use if you had to run down some game for dinner with a stick or rock. As we age, these muscles weaken and need strengthening, and that is another time when the strength coach becomes important.
Finally, the great tradition in lifting from the pre–anabolic steroid age recognized the importance of keeping the rep range for most movements around fifteen to twenty-five. Reg Park, one of history’s great bodybuilders, recommended five sets of five for strength and power. The DeLorme protocols call for about the same number of total reps in a training session per movement. The important thing about these three points is simple: From the elite training halls and the rehab wing, we learn the same basic keys to success in training—
Stretch what is tightening.
Strengthen what is weakening.
Do both with the least amount of work.
Keeping the Goal in Mind
As we begin to discuss the assessment itself, we will measure the standard things like height, weight and waist measurement, but I would like to ask you to actually use these measurements. I call this approach the 1-2-3-4 Assessment.
Mentally, I want you to have two thoughts as you begin an assessment—
No ice cream
Be a “forthteller,” not a fortune teller
A few years ago, Payton Manning would step up to the line of scrimmage and yell out “ice cream.” Now, this wasn’t as famous as “Omaha, Omaha,” but I discovered from one of my trainees who won a Super Bowl ring with the Colts that “ice cream” had a special meaning:
“Everything I am about to say, ignore.”
Manning would then point at the other team and yell lots of words, numbers and colors, and none of it meant anything.
When I get a business card that reads “The World’s Finest Coach,” or “The World’s Finest Personal Trainer,” what I actually see is “ice cream.” Make sure your assessment isn’t just a bunch of ice cream. Don’t just use it as a way to entice clients or to send out the illusion of professionalism.
Assessments can literally save lives. Assessments are the first line of defense against injuries in the gym. Assessments are important. Occasionally, assess what we do in the gym. We ask our people: “Do we do what we say we do, or are we just barking ‘ice cream’?”
The next thought to hold in your head is that you are a forthteller—“this is X; this is Y.” You are not a fortuneteller! When asked, “What does X mean?,” you need to answer “X.” That’s our job. Our job is not to guess that someone’s bones are all pointing to a future filled with back squats. Just assess. Don’t guess. Don’t predict the future.
Besides, as Niels Bohr said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
Illuminate. Project. Point. That is the role of the assessment test.
To be continued….
Next: The 1-2-3-4 Assessment
More From Dan John:
For books, you can see his bookstore here and his Amazon books here.
For socials and more content, Dan’s Instagram and Youtube are updated consistently.
Dan’s favorite Guardian Academy principles are Raising The Floor and What Is Enough? Both are also discussed in Bumpers.