Experimental ATG Programs | 4 New Programs For ATG Coaches

One of the roles I see for ATG coaches community is to experiment with programs and projects that may not fit well within the current ATG structure.

It's very clear where ATG is going and it works very very well to spend a significant amount of time on zero to move into dense, to go to standards, this sequence makes a lot of sense because in zero you take all the ego out of everything, you keep it very safe and you really put a massive emphasis on building from the ground up and we need strength from the ground up like there's no doubt about that and that philosophy is missing from every strength program I’ve ever seen. Building full range of motion, developing the muscles, athletic range, outer range, inner range, for the tibialis, for the soleus, for the gastrocs and then really building that strength around the knee is what zero does.

It rebalances and it puts all that stuff back on track so that we can begin to put significant amount of volume into the body in the dense program and expect a good result with that.

Once you've built that ability then to tolerate volume it's really an accumulation phase in technical speak for coaches.

We go into an accumulation phase where we learn to tolerate a lot higher quality volume.

I guess the zero is lower intensity, while you can progress the single leg movements and the sissy squats are too much intensity for most people to handle in those ranges because you can be extremely strong in something like a bicep curl but then you go and do lying bench curls and you may only be able to handle two and a half or five kilos.

I’ve seen that with professional athletes that can bench 140, 150 kilos and 5-kilo curls are difficult for them on the lying bench curl.

You can get a lot of work and you can get a lot of adaptation out of zero because you're doing things that you haven't done before but relatively for the central nervous system, the amount of actual tonnage that you're lifting, the physical work being done per session, it's pretty low in zero relative to what you're going to do in dense.

Dense is a bit of a shock to the system for most people.

It's very time efficient. You get a lot of work done and you really grease the groove on the movements.

That is something that I think CrossFit has done really well.

You do a lot of practice of the movements and people can progress really quickly.

I think that some of the exercise selection there could be done better and I think that we're going to have a lot of influence on that with ATG.

I think that they're going to be some changes made to the way a lot of boxers are programming their strength and I’m in touch with quite a few CrossFit coaches through the ATG for coaches network who are seeing amazing results and their members are actually loving the addition of ATG into the CrossFit system whether it's because of injuries, whether it's because of specific weaknesses.

I think the two systems go really really well hand in hand and I think a lot of CrossFit boxers are going to be super happy, to be able to get people back to doing CrossFit and to be able to compete in that games in the open and all these sorts of things with less fuss, get back to it without having to outsource and send them away to physios and massage therapists and surgeons and whatnot.

If those things can be avoided and dealt with in-house by just strength training which fits within the ideology of CrossFit from the start.

That's a great place for us to do this.

We've got these things.

We've got zero, dense, we've got standards then where we start to get serious about achieving some really good strength numbers.

With that accumulation base, we should be able to tolerate the intensity that we want within the standards program and then we can either go on to athletic muscle or athletic potential.

Athletic muscle is in release at the moment.

You've done all this work.

You've seen where you get to with standards. Let's build again.

If we want more muscle, athletic muscle is really important for most junior athletes need to add more muscle.

The difference between the 14-year-old and the 16-year-old and the 16-year-old and the 18-year-old is often muscle mass. The difference between the female athlete and the male athlete to a large extent is muscle mass as well.

If we can improve that anabolic profile then we're likely to get improvements.

At some point, we don't need more muscle mass whether that is, some people will never reach that point actually and but it doesn't mean you shouldn't be training for maximum muscle mass all the time because it requires a specific diet, requires a lot of work and if you're in season, there's certain times where that is not the best thing to be doing.

If it's not the time for that but it is the time to improve athletic performance then athletic potential is going to take performance to another level and that's really the next program that you're going to see released but what's going to come after that?

What are we missing?

What else needs to be within this system?

I’m thinking of a couple of options here and I'd love your feedback on what should we experiment within ATG for Coaches.

One thing I’m thinking about is ATG for arms.

I know that we want to build from the ground up but wanting arms doesn't make you a bad person either.

At some point you might get to the stage where it's like “my legs are really bulletproof, I’m jumping really well and I’m skinny up top and I don't want to be skinny anymore” and it doesn't make you a bad person if you want to make an improvement on that.

Maybe it's a two-week phase of improving your arms.

In the Poliquin method there was the one-day arm cure which people had a lot of fun with.

It's kind of risky to put so much volume into the body in a short period of time but sometimes we just got to have fun as well.

I guess that's what CrossFit events and such extreme volume and extreme volume over a short period of time, even the local competitions and such.

Should we experiment with an ATG for arms?

That's one option, another option, another thing I’m thinking about putting a program together with you guys.

Let's build these programs.

Another one I’m thinking about is, in-season for athletes.

Talking about what are we going to do early in the week?

What are we going to do midweek?

What are we going to do later in the week for sports that are on a seven-day turnaround like rugby league, which is my background.

What could, would, should we be doing with these athletes and that'll probably blend itself and lend itself to what you might do with an English Premier League team that might have more frequent games but some players miss games.

That's one thing that we could also work on, programming for them and how it all fits together that's another idea.

The third one I’m thinking about is athletic range as a specialization.

Thinking probably more so about long range but we'll use the short-range within that as well.

Sometimes it's not really time to develop a lot of strength or the strength program is kind of being imposed.

A lot of athletes have been in that situation.

I’ve been the dictator in that situation where there isn't enough additional training volume for an athlete.

If an athlete in my team wanted to do ATG on the side which they should have wanted to do and they would have wanted to do and I know a lot of athletes at the moment are in that situation where they're trying to do ATG on the side of what they're doing with their team and because they know that it's better and they feel the difference and they know that there's a gap in the other program.

It's not because the other coaches are bad people it's just new technologies arrived and not everybody has seen it yet.

Like most people don't own any bitcoin.

A lot of people were resistant to getting a smartphone or whatnot.

It's just the natural evolution of things.

I do believe that this is the next generation of sort of human engineering, human building, human ability, and development.

Everyone's entitled to their opinion but if the athlete knows I feel better when I do this, I really want to be doing this but they don't have the training volume left to be able to really push out the strength programs then an option could be to work on athletic range.

Just working on the specific positions to improve range of motion and to be able to get into positions, to be strong in positions that are previously weakened but to really just focus on those positions and not cause as much overall fatigue and muscle damage and those sorts of things by mostly using isometrics and smaller range of motion movements in the end positions.

That is the third option of something that we could explore.

Together with that I guess is a fourth one of just topping up the strength exercises that require very little amount of CNS energy, central nervous system energy.

How can we in the minimum dose, if someone is you know forced into a squat bench dead, clean kind of program and it's taking a lot of their energy, how can they top that up without necessarily disturbing the team equilibrium.

Doing some extra little bits of work to achieve the standards on things like the tibialis and things like the soleus and the gastrocs, hip flexors, some of that work can be done and basically be passed as “I’m just warming up for the field session, don't mind me” and I think that there's definitely a role for that.

We could potentially piece together a program that you guys could use in that way as well.

Does this change what ATG is and the juggernaut that's rolling on that Joe Rogan's talking about and he's using the program.

It doesn't change anything.

What we're doing is experimenting with ideas and evolving things.

Ben and I are speaking every day about evolving the ATG system, the language that we're using around it, how we understand things, how it's delivered.

It's constantly evolving so I would like to speed up that evolution together with ATG coaches and create feedback loops around things where we're bringing ideas together.

That open source idea, I’m a fan of cryptocurrencies and in the crypto world there's a lot of the projects are open source.

You can literally look at every single thing that's inside of a project. Something might be really successful and everybody can see what it is.

It's happened with exchanges, which are basically like banks, where someone copies the whole bank and makes some sort of little change. I don't even know.

There's an example with uni swap and sushi swap they copied the whole thing and the other project became really big and they copied the whole thing.

But that's kind of the ideology that ATG has taken.

It's $50 to get access to absolutely everything and there's so much of it already on Youtube.

It is basically this open source technology where people are making a small donation to be able to use the service.

I understand it's not a small donation for everybody but for a coach, the sort of six hundred dollars a year or twelve hundred dollars a year for the ATG for Coaches, it's very very cheap relative to what you might invest for the best of the best in training and you're seeing major league baseball players, NFL players, NRL players, EPL teams, AFL in Australia there's people adopting this in every sport I know international cricketers that are using this program and they're paying peanuts, they're paying nothing and that's fine because the goal is to change the way the world trains. That's why this is on Youtube.

That's why we're going fully open source with our education.

There is an extra level of service and support and if you want to be endorsed as an ATG Coach, you have to make an investment but the investment is tiny compared to what Ben and I have invested and I do believe that the education that you're going to receive is beyond anything that you might receive elsewhere or at least different.

Not beyond is the wrong word, it's different right, it's stuff that you're not going to see anywhere else and it's going to challenge the way you look at strength and I’m seeing experienced coaches come in and look at the content and go “wow” like “where did you get this from?” like “I haven't seen this anywhere, why doesn't anyone talk about this?” like “where did it come from” and I think that's a good thing because the results that we've been getting in strength and conditioning, if you just look at surgeries, injuries etc and across the population, we can question what we're doing in athletic populations say well look athletics is hard, collisions are tough, maybe we can't do much about this.

I disagree with that, I think it's disempowering to think in that way, but then if you look at society then there's really no argument that we're getting it right.

Whether it's just because people won't do what we're telling them to do or whether what we're actually telling them to do, what we're learning in the standard education maybe it's just wrong, maybe it's just not getting a result and people instinctively don't want to do it because they know it's making their bodies worse and that is the reality of a lot of strength training.

It actually makes you worse at a lot of aspects of life.

That's coming from 20 years of experience in as a strength coach, working with strength and it's coming from nearly 30 years of musculoskeletal pain.

I had my first overused injury, I think I was 10 when I had the heel overuse injury, but I had orthotics and went to different people and basically had pain with every step as a ten-year-old and it's sort of continued on since then but I’ve learned a lot along the way and that's the fun of it.

I wouldn't trade it for anything because being quite temperamental in this way, there's canaries and there's cockroaches and I’ve been a little bit more of a canary as far as physical development goes and even health in general.

I’ve experienced more challenges than the majority of the population and that has given me unique insight into what makes my body feel better and my musculoskeletal system function and I think that's why we've formed such a great partnership.

Ben and I have been kind of the downtrodden unwanted athletes.

He's gone a lot further with his athleticism.

I’ve got a lot of work to do to really truly embody the ATG system.

What I have done is tirelessly research strength and look for this solution. When I saw it with Ben's work in 2018, I knew that he was onto something.

I knew that he had cracked the code or the thing that Charles Poliquin never wanted to share for whatever reason.

I think he knew and I don't think he wanted to tell everybody about athletic range and what he didn't do that he could have done that I think he should have done is to take it a little further.

We needed extreme long range movements and extreme short-range movements and if you watch the long and short-range lectures, then you'll know what I’m talking about with those but these concepts, they don't exist in the strength training world and you simply cannot get optimal results from my understanding.

You can't get optimal results without understanding that technology especially when things go wrong.

When things go right, it's fine.

If you just are very careful with loading and you're very consistent with strength training, you may never need this technology but if you push things and if you play a chaotic sport or if you ever happen to get an injury or a niggle which is 99% of people who use their bodies a lot then this technology and understanding, from my understanding is much superior to anything else that's out there and I’m open to be challenged on that.

Drop the links of all the stuff that I’m missing and all the things that I should be thinking about.

The hardware versus software approach is a key one.

There are lots of like polishing techniques with software.

The interesting stuff and I would say, “yeah, that's really interesting.”

That probably does give one percent, that probably does work with highly developed professional athletes who are really healthy but is it going to turn someone who's extremely unathletic to athletic is it going to get a 60-year old from pain walking up and down the stairs, to being able to run a marathon until being able to run 100 meters flat out, to being able to jump.

Is it going to work for that 60-year-old?

Is it going to work for the 15-year-old kid who's too weak, too slow, to be any chance of playing college football?

Is he going to put the size on them?

Is it going to put the athleticism on them?

Is it going to transform their future, to turn the terrible athlete into one that can get out there and get the job done?

If all athletes start using this then the competitive edge potentially disappears and it's just the genetic freaks, still they get the work done but you can see with Ben, it's very very unlikely that you could call him a genetic freak and he's nearly hitting his head on the ring, he's throwing down windmill dunks when he could barely touch the ring and they laughed at him calling the old man.

If someone with seemingly low athletic potential can do what he's done to run a 4-4, to have a 40-inch plus vertical jump, then what's going to happen to these top-end athletes.

We have seen this already. We are seeing this.

It's not purely hypothetical, theoretical.

I’ve run this experiment with the highest profile rugby player in the world, Sony Bill Williams.

We did a month-long camp and we saw massive improvements.

He said it was the best he'd run in years, “I ran the best I’ve run in a very long time.”

That was one of my experiments, lots and lots of them with people that I’ve worked with, Sevens players and everyday Joe’s.

Ben's now working with NBA, Major League Baseball, NFL, lots of different athletes.

We've got guys in the EPL that are using this English Premier League with their players etc.

It's not a theoretical thing, it's in practice whether when and where the research is going to focus on some of these new concepts and ideas, who cares, it really doesn't matter too much.

Those processes are really slow and bureaucratic.

Usually it's a decade or two behind to reach a consensus about things and it'll be like novel research that's done in 2040 and who cares.

It's cool if people want to do that I’m not like, there is great research that's being done and it's just that this stuff hasn't been researched for the most part and it doesn't really matter too much whether someone in the lab tries to work it out.

They don't really have access to the best athletes and the right conditions to really do great studies.

To be honest, studying human engineering, it's not easy, like human nutrition studies, engineers just laugh at nutrition science with the poor quality of the science, and some engineers that come into nutrition make some really good inroads.

If you look at the work of Ivor Cummins, super interesting.

There are great doctors out there Bickman, there are a few that have questioned the status quo and are doing amazing things with that but I think the same thing has to happen with training and the incentive has just been all towards Olympic sports basically and a little bit towards powerlifting and bodybuilding.

But where's the incentive to invent new technology, new better methods for everyday people that incentive hasn't been there, no state-funded projects have been focusing on that, and therefore it hasn't been addressed but all Ben wanted to do was to be able to play, he didn't want to be head-butting the ring and throwing down Wimbledon.

He wanted to be able to play and in getting back to being able to play, he got himself to be able to run a 4-4 40 instead of a six-second 40.

It just so happened that in learning how to just be able to play, it also unlocked athleticism that was way beyond what he could have imagined. Let's get back to it.

Which of these programs are we going to run with?

What would you like to experiment with?

Let's get working on some of this.

If you want to bring ideas forward as well, programs that you think run using this technology are going to have the impact that we want.

Let's throw some ideas out there around this.

I hope that today's discussion sparked some creativity in you.

That's what I’m really looking for.

How can I bring the best out in coaches around the world to be inspired, to bring ideas forward?

First is to be a great student and to apply and over time there will be a place.

First, you really want to just copy and just experience and understand but there's always going to be that place for experimentation and that's how we're going to get to the next level with this.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you.