Most people think a garage gym is about the equipment. The rack. The bars. The dumbbells. How much you can cram into a two-car garage before your sig-o starts asking where they’re supposed to park.

But the garage that taught me how to train wasn’t valuable because of what was in it. It was valuable because of who was in it.

Where I Learned to Train

I started lifting weights when I was 14 years old in George Zangas’ garage. George was the director of the Thompson Powerlifting Team, which included guys like Bill Kazmaier, David Shaw and some seriously strong mother****ers. He trained me through high school and into my early college years.

His garage had everything we needed. Squat rack. Deadlift platform. Dumbbells up to 150 pounds. Competition bench. Dip rack. But the thing I remember from the first time I walked in was the squat bar. It had 585 pounds sitting on it.

At 14 years old, I had never seen anyone squat anything close to that. So I remember looking at the bar and thinking, strange place to store the weights.

Then I watched a massive dude get underneath it and pull it off the rack.

Welcome to George’s garage.

I learned a lot in that room. George believed everything was built off the squat. We had heavy days and light days. We pulled deadlifts sparingly and hammered accessory work. A lot of what I learned there still shows up in how I think about training today.

But looking back, the most valuable thing in George’s garage wasn’t the rack, the dumbbells or the 585 pounds sitting on the bar. It was the knowledge in the room and having access to people who knew more than I did.

Knowing Enough to Get Yourself in Trouble

One of the first programs I followed was the Russian Squat Program. The light days were supposed to be 6 sets of 2 at 80 percent, performed with speed. Being impatient skinny kids, we decided to start working up to heavy singles and doubles instead. Eventually pretty much every workout became a heavy 1-3 rep max followed by a s***load of volume.

For a while it worked. Then it didn’t. I ended up with severe patellar tendonitis in both knees and a pulled hamstring. George sent me to Joe Horrigan at the Soft Tissue Center in Los Angeles. Joe basically told me I was 16 years old and already beating the shit out of myself. If I wanted to make it past high school, I needed to change how I was training.

So I did. I stopped trying to outsmart the program and went back to letting someone who knew what they were doing write it. I got healthy, earned a scholarship to Cal and carried a lot of what George taught me into the rest of my career.

There’s a lesson in there that has stuck with me. Having good programming matters. Having experienced people around you who know how to apply it makes it a hell of a lot more valuable.

The Garage Looks Different Now

More than 30 years later, I still believe in that kind of environment. A place where you can follow good programming, ask questions, get another set of eyes on something and learn from people who have spent years solving the problems you’re running into.

For Power Athlete, that garage now exists online.

Inside the Power Athlete Discord, our athletes have direct access to Power Athlete Master Coaches and some of the sharpest minds in performance training. You can post a video of a lift and get a coach’s eye on it. Ask why something is programmed. Figure out how to work around a limitation. Get help when five training days a week suddenly becomes impossible. Or talk through where your training should go next.

That human interaction matters because training problems rarely have a simple yes or no answer. There’s context. There are trade-offs. There’s the goal, the athlete, their training history and whatever life has decided to throw at them that week. A good coach can take all of that, ask the right questions and use years of experience to help figure out the right move.

Sometimes that means making a change. Sometimes it means looking at your lift and seeing something you can’t. Sometimes it means asking another question. And sometimes it means telling you to stop f***ing around and do the program as written.

That’s the value George’s garage gave me. Not just a program to follow, but experienced people to learn from when I needed them.

The Ultimate Garage Upgrade

That’s a big part of what we’ve built around Power Athlete All Access.

Yes, you get all 10 Power Athlete programs in one membership. But you also get the environment around them: our Discord, our community and direct access to Power Athlete Master Coaches who understand the methodology behind the work.

Ask questions. Post your lifts. Get feedback. Talk through problems. Learn from coaches who have spent years under the bar and years helping other athletes get where they want to go. George’s garage gave a 14-year-old kid somewhere to train and access to a level of knowledge and experience he couldn’t have found on his own.

More than 30 years later, the equipment has changed. The technology has definitely changed. But the value of getting smart, experienced people into the same room hasn’t.

Our room just happens to be a Discord now. Consider it your ultimate garage upgrade, free with every program subscription.

Grab your bench. Get All Access

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