Revelation: Strength should be Easy
“For me, now 27 years into my coaching career, I have seen, read, and tried a lot of different ideas and training concepts. The information in Easy Strength is concrete and useful. Easy Strength should be required reading for all strength and conditioning professionals.” —Chip Morton, Strength and Conditioning Coach, Cincinnati Bengals
The mark of a pro is getting more results out of less work. Pavel and Dan’s “Easy Strength” shows you why that’s true and a whole of slew of ways how to do it. I was expecting that when I got the e-book.
Here’s what I did not expect. This book gives the best overall view of training and health and movement (not corrective movement mind you), from little kid to elite professional athlete that I’ve read.
The template for easy strength has been going around for a long time. Dan’s 40 day program has been around for years as has Pavel’s low rep, medium/high intensity, don’t go to failure, stay fresh approach to strength. I’ve seen several programming templates published in the book before. I thought that’s what this book would be about, and it certainly is.
I thought I could sit down and browse through this in one sitting like I did with Convict Conditioning 2. Ah, no. Dan mentioned on the forum that this is a “textbook.” Have you ever consumed water from a fire hose? This book goes WAY beyond the Easy Strength program, so much so that I question the title of the book but at the same time can see how it works both ways.
For this review, I want to briefly go through Dan’s rather brilliant invention: “the Quadrants” and explain why understanding them will help anyone from high level athlete to the casual, yet highly engaged, trainee who is interested in possessing health and athletic attributes. If you are interested in sludging through exercise or doing as many as you can so you can look pretty, then this won’t interest you.
The Quadrants outline the life of physical activity, starting from the most general movements, embodied best by children’s play. As you ascend up the quadrants (it’s more like a ladder), you move from general activity (pushing, pulling, squatting, rolloing, tumbling, rotating, etc.) to more refined, precise athletic movements. As the intention changes, therefore so does the training.
Here’s a philosophy lesson for you: the more general we are in our knowlege, the more certain we are of it. Yes that knowledge is vague or “hazy.” The more precise we get in our knowledge, the less certain things are. What am I drinking? A liquid. A beverage. Wine. Red Wine. Cabernet. Cabernet with Italian grapes grown in Barolo harvested in 2006. What is most certain? What is most precise? As I read through the quadrants, this teaching of the general and the precise kept ringing in the background. Just as we all have general, certain knowledge about things so to do we exercise and move around (unless you are completely lethargic). Highly precise knowledge is rare. Highly precise movement (which equates to athletic excellence) is rare. General is what everyone does, precision is what people who put 10,000 hours into one thing do.
The movement from our general movements, activities, “health” (and this is important: “fun”) to the highest level of physical excellence that is often less healthy and fun follows this pattern. This book brilliantly takes you through this progression, while feeding you what to do at each quadrant.
Easy Strength starts at the beginning with the first quadrant. Dan posts some timeless “beginning” quotes that stress the importance of a solid foundation such as Virgil and Lewis Carroll. Dan’s Fulbright Scholarness shines through at moments like those. The first quadrant has the greatest variety of movement and the least amount of precision. He points out that problems arise in childhood athletics when parents try to cram the upper “quadrant 4,” ie hyper-specialized athletic protocols down the poor throats of the children who best thrive at the beginning of all physical activity, quadrant 1. Dan makes a convincing case that childhood activity and “Quadrant 1″ is a natural connection. Very good things happen if you respect and use it, very bad things happen if you ignore it.
Pavel chimes in here and tells us about his mother and her unfortunate experience with athletics as a child. She was into ballet at a young age. Unfortunately, she was trained at the level of a specialist or professional and not a child. She was forced to do only ballet and was not exposed to other activities and movements. She therefore abandoned the practice when she had the chance and dislikes physical activity to this day. This is why the first quadrant is the foundation for Easy Strength. There’s almost a moral lesson here: if you treat children like elite athletes, that is, you mistake the beginning process with the end process, then disaster can and usually does arise. You certainly won’t end up with the NFL or MLB athlete you were hoping for. Some cases might work, for a time (Tiger Woods had a nice run).
The second quadrant moves up a rung. Dan outlines the general excellence required for sports like football, the athletic attributes: agility, balance, speed, power, endurance, raw strength, etc. Pavel and Dan then discuss how to achieve these qualities. I envision myself in this level. I’m not training for a specific sport, but these are qualities I want to have in my back pocket in case I ever do. For general fitness enthusiasts, quadrants 1 and 2 will give you all you need. And there is a lot of it. There are breakdowns of the kettlebell swing and one I’d never seen – The “batwing” to stretch your rhomboids. Kettlebell carries are in there. There’s several pictures from Andrea’s new book “The Ageless Body” – these are movements that will give you good all around strength and health. There is low potential for injury, high potential for athleticism but athletic immortality will not be found in this quadrant.
The movement to the third quadrant is where the general fitness enthusiast gets left behind, but if you are like me and just want to know how to train yourself or someone else who is more engaged in a specific athletic activity, then you get the answer. Dan quips “this is where the champions prowl.” Pavel agrees. This section lays out how to balance your strength training with your specialized activity and why almost everyone gets it wrong. Remember, as we get precise we get less certain: fewer get it right. This is why the book is so highly acclaimed by professional level strength and conditioning coaches (and rightly so).
Both quadrants 2 and 3 discuss how to balance strength and endurance and train both optimally for the task at hand. Pavel has a section on how time is relative in sports that I found powerful as well as some tangential sports psychology lessons. I was happy to see an endorsement of jogging and running. I was under the impression Pavel “frowned” on this basic movement for whatever reason but here he finally gives you his thoughts on running and the right way to do it, using Gray Cook and Chris McDougall (“Movement” and “Born to Run,” respectively). The book is so general that you’ll read Pavel discuss topics he seldom does. For Pavel fans like me, this is gold.
The fourth quadrant is about excelling in the most highly specialized sports that hone in on a very few number of athletic attributes, like powerlifting or sprinting. We have completely left the land of general activity and are now focusing everything we have on one precise thing. This is where you find the guy who can pick up 1000 pounds but get winded going up a flight of stairs and whose faces turn red when they tie their shoes. I’m not too interested in this and I don’t think many of my readers are either, so I will skip this. You can see though from the sketch of the four quadrants that knowing how these very precise activities fit in with all movements and athleticism, starting with child’s play. The entire spectrum of physical activity is made intelligible and ordered in this book.
The layout of this book is a discussion between Dan and Pavel, two of arguably the best strength coaches in the world, at least in their ability to share the knowledge of the elite with us mere mortals. I wasn’t sure what to expect with this rarely used “dialogue” method but the more I think about it, the more I wonder why there aren’t more books written using this style. The reason it works so well in this particular book is the totally opposite backgrounds that Dan and Pavel have. Dan is constantly calling on his experience as an American football and track and field coach and Pavel his affiliation with the great Russian sports scientists. So whenever a topic comes up, you get both perspectives, or even better you get Dan answering a question and then Pavel bringing something up (or vice versa) that adds value to the topic. This method is a shield against “I forgot to mention that.” Dan and Pavel have forgotten more than most in their profession will ever know.
The second part of the book gets into programming, lifting heavy, hypertrophy (needed for some sports), specificity in your training, and some general lessons to end the book. Again, this is gold if you are an athlete, but for the weekend warriors like us it is not required reading but can be of interest.
Overall: if you are an athlete, I find no reason why you shouldn’t get this book and read it religiously.
If you are a weekend warrior, the value is in getting the overall perspective of physical activity as well as a proven list for building up above average athletic attributes using various training methods.
The first two quadrants were worth the investment, the perspective and the big picture, presented in a way perhaps unprecedented – made the e-book worth easily 5 times what I paid for it. If you are a strength enthusiast who likes to dig deeper than your neighbor, you will be happy with this “textbook.”
If you are a fitness enthusiast but are looking for a program for fat loss or a list of workouts and don’t care much for the overall reasons and how to-s of optimal movement and athleticism, then skip it.
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Get Your Easy Strength E-Book HERE