American Weightlifting Documentary
Aptly named, the new documentary American Weightlifting explores the weightlifting scene in the United States. The Olympic sport of weightlifting is wildly popular internationally, but as obscure as noodling for catfish in the U.S. The film highlights many of the...
Build a Pull Up Bar: Construction
Ok, the long awaited finale in the pull up bar series. Thus far, I've covered: materials, tools, anchoring and design - now it's time to walk you through construction. You probably this guessed already but, the construction process is unique for every system due to...
Primal Whoopie Pie
I'm going to try something new on the blog today... stepping aside and letting someone special make a post on this site, the first non-Heavey Duty post in fact. Who is this special person you ask? Well, I'll let her explain - in the third person of course, take it...
Clean from Power Position
A couple weeks ago I outlined one of the best ways to improve your Snatch and Clean & Jerk - by working off pulling blocks. Today I'm going to continue that series by exploring the power position for improving your clean. When breaking the clean down into its...
How to Get Kids Strong
It is well established that weight training is not only safe, but highly beneficial for children. There is, however, little information on the most appropriate training protocols for kids. A paper I recently came across examined the response in young children to...
Training with Pulling Blocks
Athletes are often initially introduced to the Olympic lifts as full movements. They are taught the entire snatch and the entire clean and jerk. Maybe they occasionally go through a quick drill breaking down the movements into a few discrete parts, like the Bergener...
Homemade PVC Parallettes
Whether you're a crossfitter looking to get in more gymnastics skill time or someone looking to outfit your home gym with a new piece of equipment, parallettes are a great option. You can build the rock solid pvc parallettes outlined below for less than $30 in...
Hormones… not just for Teenagers.
Hormones are our body's method for signaling between cells. Perhaps this sounds like a boring topic and you may be wondering why I'm discussing them here. It turns out, this element of biochemistry is of critical importance when we consider things like optimizing...
Relative Safety of Weightlifting
One of the points I touched on in my post on the myth of kids and weightlifting was the relative safety of weightlifting as compared to other common childhood athletic pursuits. This is counter to the common belief that lifting, especially for children, is a...