Can you go? : assessments and program design for the active athlete and everybody else

252 Pages·2015·1.06 MB·English

by  John

Can You Go?
Can You Go?
Assessments and Program Design for the
Active Athlete and Everybody Else
Dan John
Foreword
Chad Harbach
On Target Publications
Santa Cruz, California
Can You Go?
Assessments and Program Design for the Active Athlete and Everybody Else Dan John
Foreword by Chad Harbach Copyright © 2015 Daniel Arthur John Foreword © 2015 Chad Harbach ISBN-
13: 978-1-931046-74-9
First printing May 2015
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America using recycled paper. No part of this book may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author or
publisher, with the exception of the inclusions of brief quotations in articles or reviews.
On Target Publications P O Box 1335
Aptos, California 95001 USA www.otpbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data John, Dan, 1957– Can you go? : assessments and
program design for the active athlete and everybody else / Dan John ; foreword by Chad Harbach.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-931046-74-9
1. Athletes—Training of. 2. Coaching (Athletics)—Study and teaching. 3. Personal trainers—Study and
teaching. I. Title.
GV711.5.J65 2015
796.07'7—dc23
2015007672
Also by Dan John
Intervention
Never Let Go
Mass Made Simple
From Dad to Grad
Easy Strength (with Pavel Tsatsouline)
Fat Loss Happens on Monday (with Josh Hillis)
Dedication
To Kelly and Lindsay—
For everything, every day
To my brother, Gary—
For always being there
To my friends who died that August day—
Long Live the Brotherhood
Contents
Foreword: Chad Harbach
Chapter 1: Assessing the Question, What Do You Want?
Chapter 2: Constant Assessment
Chapter 3: The 1-2-3-4 Assessment
Chapter 4: Grade the Mirror: Assessing the Program
Chapter 5: The General Application of the 1-2-3-4 Assessment
Chapter 6: The Five Tools
Chapter 7: The Fifth Tool…For Most of Us
Chapter 8: Enough Is Enough and the Goldilocks Effect
Chapter 9: Coaching 101
Coaching 10: The Coach’s Ten Commandments for Keeping the Goal the Goal
Chapter 11: The Big Picture of Training Systems
Chapter 12: In Conclusion
Appendix 1: Suggestions for Further Reading and Review
Appendix 2: Programming for Everybody Else (Ones through Sevens) and the
Active Athlete
Appendix 3: Classic Conditioning in X Moves: A Monthly Training Program in
Ten Movements
Appendix 4: The Basic Weekly Training Template: Basic Training for the
Seasoned Trainee
Appendix 5: Hypertrophy and Mobility Complex
Appendix 6: Climb Every Mountain!: Six Weeks of Prep for the Tallest Mountain
on a Continent
Appendix 7: Training the College Thrower
Appendix 8: It’s More Than Just One Day—It’s the Career
Foreword
I FIRST STUMBLED ACROSS Dan John’s work in 2012, a year I spent traveling on a
book tour and living out of hotels. The hotels didn’t have gyms, and when they
did I was too beat to use them. My workouts involved a few pushups before
breakfast and plenty of pint curls after dinner, plus many hours crunched into a
middle airplane seat.
At least I was doing a lot of suitcase walks, though I didn’t have a name for
them yet.
No doubt because I felt deprived of physical exertion, I found myself, in rare
down moments, lying half-asleep on the hotel bed, reading about physical
exertion. Through who-knows-what labyrinth of link-clicking, I found an article
by a guy named Dan John. Its clarity—its simplicity—stopped me short: Here,
plain as your nose, was the truth about working out.
Soon I hopped up to test whatever the article suggested—Bulgarian goat bag
swings, I think. Reading Dan’s work has a way of getting you up on your feet, or
down on the floor.
I clicked to a second article, and a third. I went to his blog and immersed
myself. I had yet to handle a kettlebell or fix my appalling squat form, but already
I knew I’d found what I’d been seeking. Every hard-won insight I’d brushed up
against, in three decades of thinking about sports and fitness, was present in
every line he wrote.
When my travels ended, I began to practice what Dan preached. Of course, I
got stronger and fitter. But more than that, I started thinking about how my
fitness fit with everything else. If my weight training and my martial arts practice
seemed sometimes to work against each other, instead of harmonizing…well,
why was that? Were my workouts making me more energetic? More resilient?
Was my mind getting stronger? Was my writing improving?
Under Dan’s tutelage, I fixed my squat. I stretched my hamstrings and
learned to hinge. I bought a kettlebell. I bought a bigger kettlebell. I worked out
easier and easier, and harder and harder. I read like-minded experts and
attended seminars. I got—am getting—better and stronger. Not younger—I hope
he includes that trick in his next book—but better and stronger.
As much as I value Dan’s programs and protocols and practical insights,
what strikes me most about his work is the method and quality of the thinking.
Dan is fond of saying that “the body is one piece.” You could say the same
thing about his body of work. The blog, the articles, the interviews, the books—
it’s all one piece.
That work has a bracing clarity that’s instantly recognizable. It’s the clarity
that comes from thinkers who spend their entire lives in direct, empirical
engagement with a subject they love. These people bring to their work as much
humility and as few preconceived ideas as possible. Ideas emerge from
observation, and not vice versa.
What works—both for themselves and, usually, for many others—comes to
the fore. Everything else drops away. What remains is a humane, flexible,
systematic, nondogmatic approach. The job becomes, as Einstein had it, “as
simple as possible, but no simpler.”
Whenever I find such thinkers, I cling to their work, not just for what I can
learn about the subject at hand—the subject is almost irrelevant—but for what I
can learn about how to live, how to think, how to approach situations.
There are examples, of course, in every field. I’m not a kindergarten teacher
or a six-year-old, but I can happily reread Maria Montessori’s books on
education, because her writing is grounded in years of patient observation of the
dirt-poor Italian kids she was tasked with teaching—a startling number of those
kids learned to read at age four.
I’ve never written a screenplay, but Story by Robert McKee, who’s honed his
screenwriting seminar over decades, grasps the form so deeply that I constantly
refer to its insights. In fiction, it’s hard to beat Chekhov for the clarity of his
insight into human behavior.
And in strength and fitness, it’s hard to beat Dan John. I wish like heck
somebody had told me about his work in 1981, when I started playing organized
sports (I was five), or at least in 1996, when I started lifting weights, but oh well.
At least I know it now.