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.