At at what point you can accurately assess your training needs?

Lately on the discord there has been a lot of chatter regarding some foundational components of what it is to be on a Power Athlete program. Specifically, being strong and fast. There’s no denying that we all find ourselves joining a Power Athlete training program coming from different places in the training space, and with a catalog of so many archetypes it’s pretty easy to find one that fits your needs. The only issue with that is knowing what lens to assess your needs through or, rather, at what point you can accurately assess your needs. Now, if you’re here and you’re in one of the programs you are doing infinitely more for yourself than if you’re not. But, if you’re someone who is looking to really reap what John’s programming can sow, chances are you should pivot programs to Bedrock. Yes it’s our “beginner” program, that’s an apparent truth. But a not-so-apparent truth that’s out there as well: you’re probably a beginner.

What is Bedrock?

Bedrock is what used to be called the “Amateur” team when John first started programming. It is a repeating week of programming with each 6-week cycle, with four “lifting” days, one accessory day, and one conditioning day, taking on a theme regarding a plane of motion. One block may be focused on hammering the Y-axis, which would be our lunge movements. One block may be focused on frontal plane movement which would be hip abduction and adduction as well as change of direction sprinting. But the program itself is designed to be run for 20-30 weeks typically, which allows an individual to build strength and competency in all verticals of our multiplanar model of athleticism. The strength progression is basic, which is it follows a linear progression of our seven primal movements: squat, step, lunge, vertical/horizontal press, and veritical/horizontal pull. But, more than anything else, it is a program designed to build confidence and competence in the most athletic of all movements: sprinting. Everything within the program is geared towards one north star: to be able to sprint.

Why sprinting?

Before we can answer the “why”, we need to describe the “what”. What is sprinting? On the surface, it may just look like getting from point A to point B as fast as possible. That’s definitely one aspect of it. Fitting it to John’s definition of athleticism: to move seamlessly and effortlessly through space to achieve a known and novel task, competency in sprinting is the highest form of being both seamless and effortless. Yes, sprinting itself requires high amounts of effort. But the ability TO sprint, to be able to flip the switch, after you’ve built the capacity becomes much easier. But if we drill down even more granularly, sprinting is the only time when we can demand our body to make large movements as fast as possible facing essentially no resistance. That requires a pretty exceptional amount of physiological processes to be firing on all cylinders. First, we need to be able to coordinate single muscle groups to rapidly contract to produce the maximal amount of force as quickly as possible. Secondly, we need those large muscle groups to coordinate with other large muscle groups at the same time (think swinging your arm while driving your opposite knee). And lastly, we need to be able to handle immense eccentric loads as we come to a stop from a maximal sprint. 

While there are plenty of ways to tackle each one of those qualities, there is no better way to express all of them at once than an open sprint. This is easily noted on the field and court, but let me paint you this picture: You’re a forty-something year old carrying your groceries in from the car during winter. You hit a patch of ice on the driveway. If you’ve been sprinting, rapidly contracting contralateral muscle groups to regain your balance is pretty easy. If you haven’t been, you’ll likely look like a Bugs Bunny cartoon and bust your ass. Sprinting is the tool that allows greater functionality in all aspects of life, not just sport. Twitchy hamstrings? Building your sprinting capacity fixes that. Low back pain? Building your sprinting capacity fixes that. Poor body composition? Building your sprinting capacity fixes that. You’ll get a healthy dose of deadbugs, Captain Morgans, and all of our other prep work to build an ironclad trunk to handle the work. Sprinting, and the work needed to build that capacity, is arguably the most effective means to attain whatever physical goal you are trying to achieve.

But you’ve run a linear progression before…

This is, without a doubt, the most common rebuttal to the suggestion seen in Discord. Yes, bedrock includes a basic linear progression of compound movements. That is, we systematically add weight each session to the same lifts (squat, press, deadlift, bench, and power cleans) until you reach failure. Then we reset, run it again, rinse and repeat for a few cycles. It’s monotonous by design because just like anything else, building strength requires practice. But not all linear progressions are built the same. First, in Bedrock that’s not all the lifting you do. We also progress our lunges (by distance then weight) and step ups (by reps then weight) as well as our vertical pulling (pull-ups and chin-ups, on a spectrum of eccentrics all the way through to weighted pulls and chins depending on starting point). While heavily influenced by Linear Progression pioneers like Mark Rippetoe, there is still a uniqueness to our program that fits our purpose. 

But you might still be thinking: I don’t need to run a linear progression again, I’m plenty strong. Sure. Just curious, all you Jacked Streeters…how many times have you run the Shadow cycle? For my folks on Field Strong…how many times have you run the PAMC? The party people on Johnnie WOD…when Volkswagon or Monkey Claws pops up, do you skip that session because you’ve hit that before? As someone who is now starting his fourth cycle of the Hammer 90 programming, I just want to make sure that everyone else recognizes how absurd it is to dispel a certain cycle because you’ve run it before when you all clamor for specific cycles in other programs. Instead of saying “I’ve run a linear progression already.” Say what you really mean, “I think I am better than that.” But when you do, I’d ask that you post a video of your loaded step up or a cross-over to open step sprint. I promise I’ll let the kinder Power Athlete Master Coaches gently inform you that you’re not and I’ll stay quiet.

You can always get better

If you’re still in the camp of thinking you’re above a “beginner” program, we’ll make one more attempt to get you to recalibrate your needs. When arguably the world’s greatest Ultraheavyweight Brazilian Jiu Jitsu player and multiple time world champion started training with John, guess what they did. When Big 10 Champion, NCAA medalist, and 2016 Olympic swimmer Ali Khalafalla came into my garage to prepare for the 2018 Mediterranean Games (where he became the fastest Egyptian in history), guess where we started. When every one of the troves of NCAA scholarship athletes PA Master Coach David McKercher has trained over the years comes into his gym, guess where he starts them. Am I saying that Bedrock is what made all of these athletes great? Absolutely not. What I am saying is that spending the necessary time honing the most basic skills to foster and develop athleticism by running Bedrock is what allowed all of us to train these athletes to a level of greatness they had not achieved before.

But I can’t make it work

Once we clear the first hurdle of self-actualization as a beginner, the next hurdle is routinely surrounding the scheduling. At face value, it is a pretty demanding program. Four heavy days per week plus the bonus stuff. Oftentimes you’ll hear other Master Coaches like Johnny Durrett echo that it’s the hardest program in the catalog. And the reality is you’re not a professional athlete so you don’t always have a schedule that caters to training. While the standard template presented in Train Heroic is the idealized version of Bedrock, all you have to do is ask in the Discord how to chop it up to fit your schedule and we can make it work. Power Athlete Master Coach Matt Sullivan has an air-tight three day per week version that he runs his athletes through to great success. If you’re currently on Grindstone rocking the two-day per week schedule, we’ve got a version for that as well. Time is a flat circle and we can arm you with the information to make it work on even the tightest of schedules. But if you are stuck thinking you can’t make it work, that’s something we can’t change.

An honest conversation

As I mentioned, I’m writing this as an evergreen stop for the conversations that happen regularly on Discord. I may be an idealistic person in theory, but I’m a realist in practice. I know many of you reading this will not make the switch, and that’s okay. Like I said above, if you’re in our ecosystem you’re already training in a program that is far and above more sophisticated than most of what’s out there.

But without Bedrock, you’re like Neo in the Matrix. Showing up, doing the work, but not really able to see the entirety of the landscape. So take the red pill, follow us down the rabbit hole, and learn how great you can actually be.

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