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Your PR Is Dying on the Way Down
by- Josh Bryant Jeremy Hoornstra is a clinic in precision. Everybody loves romanticizing old school gyms like they were some big happy brotherhood handing out free advice. As they say in Southern Russian, bullski shitski, y’all. You walked in green and stayed invisible until you earned your keep. Show up. Shut up. Move iron. After…
What the Trenches Knew First
by- Josh Bryant From the Trenches: Bands & Deadlifts at Metroflex (2009) The best sushi I ever had was at some shithole gas station in Okinawa, and the best Japanese barbecue I ever ate was in China. Truth shows up in rough places more often than polished ones. Most of you do not come here…
Popeye Mike’s Forearms: The Old-School Secret to Building Arms That Command Respect
by- Josh Bryant Growing up there was a guy down the street we all called Popeye Mike. Single dude. Jacked. Always had different girlfriends coming and going who looked like they had just rolled in from a late night at the Wrangler’s Club in Antlers, Oklahoma. Tight jeans, beehive hair, and enough lipstick and rouge…
The Same Math Can Build You… or Bury You
by- Josh Bryant Colored cones everywhere. Bands pulling athletes in five directions. BOSU balls wobbling like Big Randy after a baker’s dozen cans of Pearl at the volunteer fire department fish fry. Some jacked dude running the show while his dad-bod assistant films it for TikTok. Five followers and his mama hitting the like button.…
PHYSICALLY FORTIFIED – STRENGTH PROGRAM
Coaches- Josh Bryant and Tom Haviland PHYSICALLY FORTIFIED – STRENGTH – ONE-A-DAY Physically Fortified – STRENGTH is a focused strength-development phase. You cannot train everything with equal emphasis at all times. This phase prioritizes absolute strength, force production, and structural fortification. The goal: Carry the strength of someone fifty pounds heavier, while maintaining the movement capacity and…
Bench Press With Authority: Priming the Nervous System the Right Way
by- Josh Bryant Tom Haviland getting ready to explode up. You ever walk into a bench press workout knowing damn well you’re strong enough to smoke the weight? Setup locked in. Hands tight. Back driven into the pad. If this were Golden Corral on steak night, you’d swear you could bulldoze straight to the front…
Prime to Perform
by- Josh Bryant Before we talk performance, let’s talk availability. Availability is what your body can do right now. Cold. Minimal warm up. No ritual. Just you and the task. If you are too beat up to train, compete, deploy, or answer the call, performance is just noise. You cannot win from the sideline. For…
When the Setup Tells the Truth
Block pulls done right helped Brandon Cass set multiple Masters world records. Targeted. Specific. A couple decades ago I trained for a strongman contest with Odd Haugen, back when strongman was the Wild West. There was no standardization and no real concern for objective strength. Events matched the promoter, not the sport. Weak presser? No…
Environment Beats Personality.
by- Josh Bryant In 1969, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo ran a $13 experiment that still explains most human behavior better than a thousand self-help books. Two identical cars. Same model. Same condition. Night white 1959 Oldsmobiles with no plates, hoods popped and left open. One was parked in wealthy Palo Alto near Stanford. The other…
When Training More Stops Working: Why frequency rewards discipline and punishes ego
by- Josh Bryant Orlando Maximus Green: Deadlift style and mindset don’t need frequent exposure. Ten to twelve years ago, #SquatEveryDay was everywhere. It was the cool kid at the lunch table. Now the hashtag is gone, and so are a lot of the people who pushed it the hardest. Some lifters absolutely got results from…