Never Let Go: A Philosophy of Lifting, Living and Learning by John Dan

Author:John, Dan [John, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: On Target Publications
Published: 2011-05-16T22:00:00+00:00

Nautilus, Crossfit and High/High

I began lifting in 1967 when my brother, Gary, bought a 110-pound weight set. As I sat back and realized I’ve been obsessed with a hobby for forty years, I thought, hmmm, maybe I should share a lesson or two.

One of my favorite books has a title that caught my eye the instant I saw it in the bookstore. It’s Great Books by David Denby. Seriously, when you’re looking around the bookstore for a new book to read and you see one called Great Books, how can you pass on it?

Denby spent a year doing something I wish I could do. He went back to his freshman year in college and retook the Humanities curriculum. In his mid-forties, he returned to Columbia College and sat in a room with a bunch of freshmen wearing backward baseball caps, and reread the great books.

Great books change as you age. A hung-over college freshman can’t really understand the issues parents go through in great literature. Kissing the killer of your child, like Priam in The Illiad, or being asked to sacrifice your first born, like Abraham in Genesis, might not be such a big deal on a Wednesday morning in a comfortable classroom after a nice cafeteria breakfast. Now that I have teenagers, I can barely read these same passages.

The greatest gifts from Denby’s book are the insights of his professors. Professor Edward Taylor constantly prods the class to think double. Another professor begs the students “DGSI,” or “Don’t Get Sucked In.”

Sucked in? Yes, sucked into the BS. Let me pull out my bee pollen, my B-15 tablets, my sublingual L-Arginine drops... It’s all BS, folks.

Think double resonates with me.

In a world of either-or and an occasional neither-nor, Professor Taylor is reminding us of both-and. In the strength community, we like to take sides of an issue. It doesn’t matter the topic; just put up an internet forum post about a high-protein diet and the high-carbers will attack you. Machines are great; machines suck. Kettlebells are great; kettlebells suck.

Professor Taylor’s insight is worth studying. Let’s think double a little bit. I’d like to share three different times in my career when I spent at least two years trying a program, and discuss the insights from each.

It’s funny to look at the advice I took (and didn’t take) over my career. In 1991, a former world-class lifter told me three things I needed to do:

1. Keep my bodyweight on my heels when I lifted. (Advice I ignored until I discovered this was absolutely correct, and it changed my lifting in a second or less.)

2. Use complexes in training. (Advice I ignored until Alwyn Cosgrove made me start using them, and the body fat just fell off me like grease from bacon.)

3. I should do nothing less than tens in the squat. (Advice I ignored. Instead, I did lots and lots and lots of heavy singles, got a big gut, and lost all my snap. Now I do tens.)

Why didn’t I at

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