The Get Strong Show: Mastering the Squat
Carl: Welcome back to another episode of Super Human Radio. Today's first hour will be The Get Strong Show with Coach Wade Johnson. How are you doing, Coach Johnson?
Coach Johnson: Hey, Carl. It’s great to be with you. Happy New Year!
Carl: Happy New Year! It’s the first time you and I have spoken since the New Year. We’re doing the third installment today of the three big lifts with Coach Johnson – and this is really his bread-and-butter lift – the squat.
What was your best competition squat, Coach Johnson?
Coach Johnson: My last powerlifting meet was roughly three years ago. I’ve squatted a 1040.
Carl: That’s 1040 pounds, half of a ton. What was your best non-competition but maybe just in the gym training squat? Obviously, you can’t count those as being your best squats.
Coach Johnson: It was a squat I never tried to do a max attempt. That training cycle, the most I did for a single was 960 but it was the multiple sets of doubles or triples. I think the biggest double I did was 955 and I think the biggest session I had with multiple sets was three sets of two with 925. I want to say I tripled 910.
Carl: Wow! Three consecutive reps with 910 pounds.
Coach Johnson: That was probably one of the toughest things I did and I did it. I had knee braces on. I was in all of my equipment. I had my briefs on, my suit on, but I had the straps down. No knee wraps; I had knee braces.
I was speaking to a really good friend of mine, A.J. Roberts, and he told me when he first broke a grand his biggest triple was 900. So I thought, “I definitely wanted to break a grand,” and I felt like I had that and some in me. I think it was two weeks out from the meet I did 910 for a triple.
Carl: This clearly shows that Coach Johnson is qualified to teach people how to squat. Let’s get into the way you train the squat with a reactive wave approach that you have developed for yourself. Give me the day and give me what you do. How does it roll out?
Coach Johnson: Like everybody, like 95% of the people in the world, on Monday we flat bench. Tuesday, is when we squat. I’m a big proponent on how we warm up. Do whatever it takes to where you feel comfortable and you’re ready to get under some weight. There are a lot of things that I’ll do just to get prepared before I even get under the bar. I’ll do reverse hyper, I may do some leg extensions, leg curls. It all just depends on how I feel on a given morning.
But even though I’ve squatted 1000 pounds, the day that I squatted 1040, I warm up with three sets of five with the bar. My squat bars are 55 pounds and I will do a set of five with a closed stance that tends to put the least amount of pressure on my body as I’m warming up. As you get a hold, you’ll understand that that plays a bigger role. Then I’ll do a medium and stance which is probably just to hear from me a little bit wider than shoulder width. Depending on if I’m squatting without gear or with gear, I’ll do my last set of five. There is a certain width – if I’m in gear, I tend to be a little wider. I’ll do a set of five there before I put any weight on the bar.
Carl: With the leg extensions, are you using much weight or you’re just pumping blood into the muscles?
Coach Johnson: I usually do more leg extensions on my deadlift day. I do a couple of sets and it will be light. I have a plate load of leg extension. The most I’ll do in a squat day is maybe 50 pounds and I’ll do 20 or 25 reps. I’m not like whacking it out completely. I’m just pumping it up a little bit, just enough to throw some blood into the quad to get the knees warmed up. I’m a big proponent of using a muscle rub or whatever the case may be, just to make sure you’re getting everything warmed up. I always train in braces. You’ll always see me have something on my knees.
Carl: After you’re warmed up, where do you go?
Coach Johnson: I always do my competition squat training first. That’s when I’m going to be the freshest and have the most energy. I only do the most I ever do. I’ll post this video. I shot a video yesterday for some of my online guys about some typical things that I see with squat form and why with the method that we use, with reactive method, why we only ever do sets of two at the most in our competitive squat training. You’ll see guys that are doing higher rep sets, first rep looks great, the second rep you’ll see the majority of the time, you’ll start seeing get forward, and each rep, it progressively gets worse.
For power, my thought has always been, let’s make power and strength our focus. We can do as many sets as we need to get enough volume in, but we need to concentrate. Form is the priority when we’re doing the competition squat. So we do multiple sets of two. Because it’s based on the progressive overload system, we use a percentage as a guideline and so we will do the volume based on where we are. It is more sets earlier in the cycle, the sets will curtail as we go into it.
Later in the cycle, it will be sometimes two to three sets of one. Where we get our volume after we’re done with competition training is we go into assisted squats. But right now, focusing on we’re we are on the competition squats, the first we’ll do six sets of two based on a percentage and our primary focus is two clean reps with as clean form as possible and focus on the issues that are generally created when we go into a power squat.
Carl: When you say based on a percentage, you're talking about a percentage of max weight?
Coach Johnson: Yes. That is correct.
Carl: What kind of ranges are we talking about in the dynamic wave approach? What are the ranges from and to percentage-wise for your competition squat?
Coach Johnson: I can tell you specifically. We will generally start depending on how much time we have. Usually the first week is about 65% of what your one rep max is. Depending on the lifter, the experience, and where we’re at, we will finish in a range of either 98% to 102%.
Carl: How can you do 102% of your one rep max?
Coach Johnson: In a 16-week period time, you should be strong enough.
Carl: You should be getting stronger.
Coach Johnson: Let me give you an example. I’ve got an online guy, Bryan, whose max is 340 pounds. At the end of 16 weeks, he has one working set of one with 300. This is 346.8. So we would round that down to 345 and a lot of people would look at that and go, “After 16 weeks, that’s going to be his max?” No. That’s going to be his last week of training. After that, with 16th week, if he’s not ready for a meet, we’ll test. By and large, our success rate is really, really high. The lifter is considerably stronger at that point.
Carl: Keep in mind, the goal of this training is not necessarily to make you reach this number in your head that you want to squat. That happens over time. It’s to be able to get you execute the weight that you want to do in your open and final competition lift and execute them and not miss them.
I don’t know if I said that right. Yeah, maybe it is only 346. But he is going to go in there and he is going to execute the 346-pound squat properly and get green lights all the way around. Who cares if you want to squat 355 and you can’t pull it off in the competition? You’ve achieved nothing.
Coach Johnson: Regardless of program, I tell everybody over and over again that the most important thing with any type of training is your consistency. After 16 weeks, if you’ve executed each set, each rep, you will be stronger. That’s oversimplification but the bottom line is, you’re going to put in X amount of work, you’re going to be smart, you’re going to execute the plan, and the sum of that is going to be a personal record lift as long as you’re consistent.
Based on the program, we’ll get into the other stuff, but by doing this, you’re also conditioning your body for the type of training that requires to hit this kind of weight. The volume is set to where you will condition your body. That’s one of the things we do not talk about enough in powerlifting.
It goes beyond Louie’s general physical preparedness (GPP). There’s a certain level of conditioning that you have to have. The joints have to be conditioned. That connective tissue has to be conditioned. And the mind – not just the central nervous system. There’s a mental, even spiritual and emotional aspect that this type of training is going to prepare you for as you get heavier and deeper into the training cycle.
The old system is actually based on the CAT method (Compensatory Accelerated Training). It’s something that I did with Tom McCullough out of Texas and we’ve talked about this a long, long time ago. Tom and I had extensive conversations about the volume and how to make some adjustments because this program was based on the volume being doubled.
In the old days, when I started developing this, we would do 12 sets of two on the first week. None of us can hold up to that. Basically, we would get done with the 12 sets of two and then everybody was ready to throw up. There was no way to focus on any issues. We made competition training our priority and then our assistance was set up to address whatever issues we had with the lift.
So Tom and I spent a great deal of time talking about these things and how I could mold it into what I needed. You can see the genesis of what I do for squat. You can still find it online. It’s the www.TexasPowerScene.com. Tom will still answer emails if you have questions. He’s a great, great guy.
Carl: For those who are interested in stepping up their game, improving both the squat, the deadlift, and of course the bench press, how do they get in touch with you if they want to do some distance coaching and what does it cost to do distance coaching with you?
Coach Johnson: You can reach me on my Facebook page. It’s Wade Johnson. You can do a search for me. We do have an Ogre Compound Facebook page as well and the easiest way is just to email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. What I do online is I will write the program for a one-time fee of $150 – and that is cheap. As long as you stay with me, there is no re-up charge. What I charge from there is once you’ve paid the fee, after the first month of training, it’s a $25/month coaching fee.
What I ask from you is that you video the main lifts and you type out everything including warm-ups, everything, and links to the video and you send that to me after each session. I will look at it, see what we need to adjust to then I’ll give you the following week’s numbers that you’re going to need to hit. I have several guys right now that are doing really, really well.
Carl: How the people do when they do distance coaching with you?
Coach Johnson: We’ve had great success. People are hitting PRs. I need to say this. I’ve got a client in Beaverton in Oregon. His name is Anthony. He just hit a 315-pound front squat, he’s like a 220. You won’t see that every day in the gym. I don’t care who you are. He’s really, really worked hard and has really come a long way. He said that the thing that he liked about his front squat (I’ve got to him credit for expanding my vocabulary) is the verticality that he maintained through his front squat.
I always say, “Hey, you stayed upright and it looked good.” But he used the word verticality. When I questioned him, I said, “Is that even a word?” He sent me the dictionary definition so I was pretty impressed.
This is Wade that I’m surely he would tell you that I don’t think it was anything that he thought he would be doing a year ago. He’s getting PRs in all of his lifts. Then I’ve got guys in North Carolina. They’re hitting lifetime PRs. It’s not the same as me being in the gym with you where I can get my hands on you.
We’re going to look at some things this year where potentially we can have some clinics where people can come and spend the weekend and that sort of thing and make it affordable. I want to make money and I’d love to make a bunch of money but it’s more important that we make it affordable. I got to get something for the time and the effort but the idea is to make this as affordable as possible. And then understand that the goal of all this is not just to teach you a method but to make you become intuitive about your body and your own training.
Carl: We’re going to go back deeper into the assistance work that he’s done. We’re talking with Coach Wade Johnson about mastering the squat. This is his bread-and-butter lift. Competition lift, 1040 pounds folks, a half of a ton. That would slice through most people’s backs.
Coach Johnson: Traditionally what people have done is they run to the leg extension machine, leg press or leg curl and we don’t do that. What we’re trying to do is do whatever is necessary to address any weakness or glitch or form issue with the squat. So we have a rotation that we use to address that with different types of squatting. I usually would set this up where each movement we will do in two-week waves.
We use four different movements. We use a close stance, high bar, an Olympic style type of squat. That’s where the stance is brought in shoulder width, maybe depending on the size of the person, maybe a little more narrow maybe a little more wider. That’s all going to be depending on size and the tolerance that the person has. These can sometimes be a little bit tough on the knees.
What that does is it promotes you being upright, which is we got to have in the squat, and then makes the quadriceps the primary mover. We do usually three sets of three to six. Again, it depends on the lifter and the time that they have and what the issue may be. We’ll do the few more reps for conditioning. We’ll do less reps where they can handle a little more weight. And we tend to wave that in and out as well. Then we use a cambered squat bar and I can shoot video in the coming weeks to give you an idea of what that is.
Carl: What is the advantage of the cambered squat bar? It just puts the weight in the different angle on the body. Is that all that it does?
Coach Johnson: That’s a simple way of looking at it. The way that the bar moves and how you have to grip it.
Carl: The weight that actually gets in front of you at the bottom, doesn’t it?
Coach Johnson: It can, yes. And the whole idea is to force you to stay upright and then balance. It’s not as dramatic as the bamboo bar that we talked about for bench and the videos that I’ve posted. But a lot of these are going to challenge your stability, and the big thing about squatting big is you have to have control of the weight. You have to be stable. The guy that has control of the weight that is the most stable is generally going to be the strongest lifter as well. It promotes that type of thing where you have to learn how to be tied with the entire body – if we get everything tied, if we have the entire body working – and that’s what the squat does. It works more muscle groups than any movement. It doesn’t what kind of athlete, if you just want to be hot in a bikini, squat. I promise you. All my girls squat, every one of them squat.
Carl: Especially now that butts are all the rage. It used to be that girls with big butts were shunned but today they make the world go round like the song says. If you want to build a nice big, round butt start squatting.
That’s the accessory work for that day?
Coach Johnson: No. We will run it in waves. Like a typical session, it will be our competition squat, then we’ll do three sets of an assistance squat, and then we will follow that up with two sets of 10 or one set of 20 – a very, very light weight, an ultra-wide stance sumo type squat. That is not to develop power.
What it does is it stretches you and makes you use those hips, makes the hips the primary mover. The difference with it is you use the light weight because it will put a great deal of stress on the knees. We look at that as a stretch movement. We want to get as deep as we can but because we’re so wide, the propensity is to lean forward. We want to stay as upright as possible and get as deep as we can and come back up before we start letting that chest drop.
Over a period of time, even in a lightweight, you’ll get to where you can break parallel with it. Most lifters will do two sets of 10. When I was at my strongest, I’d do a set of 20 with 255 pounds.
Carl: What about foot position? There’s a lot of debate about foot position because foot position could also torque your knees if you’re not careful. Where do you go? Do you need to splay the feet more?
Coach Johnson: I know there’s a big debate out there. From my experience, if my feet are straight ahead, my knees are going to travel out over my toes and that promotes people being forward. It torques the knees, it torques the lower back, and it robs you of power. My priority is: how I can squat as safely as possible, all while generating the most absolute limit strength possible.
As a rule, I always think with the left foot about 10:00-10:30 on a clock and then 2:00-2:30 with the right foot and find a happy medium. My knees are going to track where my toes are. I want to put as much pressure on the hips as possible when I squat because that’s where our real power is.
It goes back to the example of when I’ve spoken to kids in classes: “Tell me when you see in the NBA that’s driving down the lane and he jumps from the foul line and he stuffs it, what muscle group was the most important to get the lift off the ground?” and 90% of the time, they’ll say the calves. This is not a racial statement; I’ve said it on the show before. How many black guys in the NBA have big calves? I’ve never seen them. How many of them are even big or have big legs?
Carl: But goods and hips now, that’s a different story.
Coach Johnson: The dynamic explosion that that guy gets, you got to think about. I don’t care how tall you are. If you can jump within a foot of the foul line and stuff it with authority, you’re in the air.
Carl: You’re flying.
Coach Johnson: The amount of explosiveness and the dynamic ability to get yourself off the floor and in the air, to jam it with authority is astounding. That tells you how important the hips are in the squat. We’ve got to have that kind of dynamic explosion.
I wasn’t trying to squat 315, not when I weigh 350 pounds. I wanted to squat over 1000 pounds. So I have to generate the amount of force that I have to generate under control and maintaining stability with the weight. That’s a huge process going on right there. That’s why we do that work – to make those hips as not flexible (we’re not dancers) but we want to be supple. We still have to be tight. If I’m loose, I’m screwed. I have to be tight but remain supple. That’s what those ultra-wide squats are doing. That’s why the foot placement is so important.
Carl: We’re going to talk about where kettlebell work works into this. We’re talking with Coach Wade Johnson about mastering the squat. If you want to reach out to Coach Wade Johnson, you can email him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Take him on. Let him train you. You’ll be stronger. If you want to be stronger in 2014, spend a few shackles to reach your goal.
Kettlebells have all the rage right now. Have you always used kettlebells in your training?
Coach Johnson: No. It was one of those things that I really resist because I thought, “That’s something the Russians did.” Back when I was growing up, we hated the Russians. We did an invasion. We’re shortsighted and as you get older, you start learning.
I’m not going to get real political, but ultimately our governments are the biggest problem. I was very fortunate when I was a young man in music to get to travel abroad (I got to travel the planet) and what will surprise you is regardless of cultures, we’re a lot more alike than we are different.
Carl: Everybody’s alike. Our governments work very hard to make us think that everybody’s different. I know. You’re right.
Coach Johnson: Meanwhile, they all like to drink scotch together and smoke really good cigars. My point is there is so much to learn from so many people.
Carl: What do you do with the kettlebells?
Coach Johnson: For me, it’s very specific. I don’t do a bunch of those things. After we get done with all the squats, before I go into an isolation machine, we’ll use a kettlebell. It prevents us from going really, really heavy after squatting so much. We’ll use a kettlebell and do stiff leg deadlifts.
The height of the kettlebell is lower than the barbell, so we get a good stretch and can focus on form and activating the muscles that we’re really after conditioning versus doing a bunch of weight. Because one you get the barbell on the floor and there’s a bunch of lifters then invariably the weight starts going up. I only go up so much with kettlebells and so it forces us to do the rep work for the conditioning and the blood flow and focusing on exactly what we want to activate to assist the squat. We will do some kettlebell swings. A lot of guys will do kettlebell swings and do them light (25-50 pound kettlebells) and do some swings to warm up for squat and for deadlift. A lot of it is warm up but the only assistance movement that I use for squat is this stiff leg deadlift with the kettlebell.
Carl: Then you go to hamstrings. But what do you do if you hamstring? You’re doing curls?
Coach Johnson: I like seated leg curls just simply because it forces me not to go heavy and a lot of times just whatever is on the machine is what I’ll do for 15 reps. At that point, by the time I get done with all the squats, my body’s pretty tacked.
I’ll be quite honest. When I was at my strongest, because of the amount of time in all the equipment each session would last, I would probably in the gym for three and a half hours. I would be in the gym a half hour before anybody showed up and we were squatting at 5:00 as a group then. So at 4:30, I was in the gym warming up so I would be ready to get in gear by the time the guys arrived because I’d start losing spotters if I wasn’t prepared. By the time two and a half hours went by, not only am I [shot] but my guys are [shot] from their squat work in helping me with my gear and spotting and all the nerve-wracking stuff when every week these guys want to be 850-900+ pounds. Mentally, it wears.
It was one of those things where I had to curtail a lot of the assistance just because my body was [shot]. But for the younger lifter, even an intermediate to advanced lifter, you need that conditioning work. Now that I’ve dropped the weight and I’m not lifting near the weight that I used to, I have a little more time. We’ll get that assistance work in. It becomes more crucial now.
Carl: You do calf and tibia work. Obviously the calf works make sense. You’re doing a standing calf braces and that sort of stuff.
Coach Johnson: If I do standing calf braces, I do sets of 20 and I use body weight. You just don’t have to have a bunch of weight to pump some blood in the calves.
Carl: You’re not trying to build big bodybuilding calves. You’re just trying to get blood in the calves after the work.
Coach Johnson: Exactly. I have a seated calf machine and we have the capacity to do standing calf braces, but I didn’t want to dedicate a machine in a limited floor space. Especially when lifters are competitive, when they have the option to going heavier, they will.
I’ve done standing toe raises where the machine would have 700 pounds in a pin select. Then I put a barbell on top of it and stack it full of plates, and so I’d be doing 1200 pound in standing toe raises, which really sounds cool and impressive. But then you got to look at the collective pressure you’re putting on that spine and the hips. It’s just counterproductive.
Carl: Then you move to tibia and that would be counterintuitive. But I guess the tibia is really important because it allows you to pull the toes up. I have to imagine that getting down into a parallel position requires a lot of ankle mobility and that’s where the tibia is coming.
Coach Johnson: Therein lies the secret. I learned this from Rickey Dale Crain.
Carl: Don’t tell anybody. That’s a secret.
Coach Johnson: A long, long time ago, he considers the calf work to be a percentage of your squat. I can’t recall but the important thing is that it aids in stability and control of your squat. With the tibia work, think of it this way. Look at people that will work their grip. Your squeezing, your crunching, your gripping a weight – you create an imbalance. Remember some of the things that West was talking about, a lot of the entries, a lot of the issues we have are created not from something getting hurt but created by the imbalances that we developed by how we train.
You’ll do the grip work and then you use the bench to do that retracting work. Think of the tibia in the same manner. You’re spot-on that ankle mobility. Remember, we all want to be flexible. We have to be tight but we also have to be supple because we have to break parallel in competition. Every gym should have a tibia machine.
Carl: Mine does. Nobody notices it because it’s down on the floor over there.
Coach Johnson: It’s a little bitty machine and if you’ve never used it, it’s very humbling because you can put 20 pounds on there and do 15-20 reps and it’s going to burn.
All of my girls use it in the evening. I’m not being sexist here. Some of these girls are training for baseline fitness. They want to look good in a bikini. They want to be healthier. I’ve got one that works in the office and is wearing high heels all that time. She notices a significant difference in how her feet feel and how her legs feel. There are times where it’s long hours where she works into the evening and stuff like that it has to be in those shoes. God forbid that she had to wear those. The point is that type of conditioning keeps you supple. For powerlifting, especially that big squat, it helps you maintain control and stability especially when you’re in the pocket with that big weight.
Carl: We’re going to talk about the last assistance work that you do and it’s completely counterintuitive. You’re not going to believe that this is part of the squat routine.
Wade, go ahead and give your websites out again so people can reach out to you and enlist you to help them get stronger.
Coach Johnson: You can reach me on Yahoo at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. I have a personal Facebook page and the Ogre Compound has a Facebook page. We are redoing the www.WeightliftingDiscussion.com site right now, so the forum is down. We’re going to completely clean that up. When that becomes available again, I’ll let you know. But the best, easiest way to get a hold of me is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Carl: The last item in assistance work is ab work. Why?
Coach Johnson: For stability. Again, look at the antagonist training. Look at what we’re doing there. Like with the calf work. When we do all of those toe raises, toe raises, toe raises, and we don’t pay attention to the tibia, we create imbalances. The big thing with abs is having that core strength is what is going to give you stability. The more stable you are, the more control you have over the weight. The more control, the stronger the lifter is going to be.
Also access an antagonist. This is oversimplifying but all that squatting and all the training we do, that lower back takes all sorts of abuse. Having all those strong abs helps keep that core nice and conditioned. When both of them are strong and work together in a synergistic manner then you’re stronger, you’re more in control, and you’re more stable. But the ab work is crucial for the lifter especially when you’re powerlifting.
Carl: When we talk about ab work, are talking about lots and lots of reps? Are we talking about a lot of weight and extending the abs to get them stronger? What are the goals here?
Coach Johnson: The goal is to get the work in. I get email especially from new clients: “What should I do for core work? What is that magical movement?” Ultimately, the answer is there is not one. How do you get a big squat? You train the squat. I know that there are a lot of arguments and a lot of methods out there. I’m telling you what took me to over 1000 pounds.
Carl: Drug-free, by the way. For those who are saying, “I’d to be stronger but I don’t want to use drugs.”
Coach Johnson: I chose not to.
Carl: We’ve talked about that. I just want people to know that you’re a career drug-free athlete. It took you longer to get there but you got there.
Coach Johnson: But the big thing is that you do it. You find something that you can do. I’m fortunate enough that I’ve got a few machines that I use and then I just simply lay in the floor and I will push my feet up close to my fanny and have my back and butt flat on the floor. I’ll just crunch. I really will crunch my abs really hard enough that it will pull my head up and just a little bit of my neck and traps. I’m not trying to do a sit-up, just a basic crunch.
I’ll use a weighted machine. If anyone follows any of my training, the most I ever use is 100 pounds. I just focus on really making the abs work hard. It’s one of those things where you got to remember: it’s called assistance. It’s just like when I speak about supplements. Look at the word “supplement.” It’s already telling you that it is to do something along with what you should already be doing. The assistance is exactly what the word says. If we’re doing 500-pound crunches in the crunch machine, then we’ve probably not done the frontend work that we need to do that was the priority.
Carl: If you got that much energy left. How long should this session take the average person that’s not using gear, not putting on suits? Just from warm up to assistance work and get out of the gym.
Coach Johnson: With this type of session, you’re probably looking at an hour and a half to two hours depending on how quick you want to go. The thing that I have to caution you on, on your competition sets, I like a minimum of 7-10 minutes rest. The priority is that you recover. We’re not trying to body build, we’re not trying to get a pump, and we’re not trying to flood the muscle with blood. We’re trying to get as strong as possible. So you want to be recovered between sets.
Even the assistance squats – once you get there, party on. Go as hard as you think you can go but as long as you maintain form. You don’t want to be fatigued to the point that you start compromising your form.
We have a tendency within the group (especially a bunch of us that are older) to take a little bit more time. It has nothing to do with the age. We just take more time. But you can get this done within an hour and a half to two hours. A lot of my online guys will be done in an hour and a half.
Carl: That’s adequate. That’s an average routine. You train the bench press twice a week. You train the deadlift once a week. You train the squat just once a week.
Coach Johnson: Just once a week. Part of our deadlift training is front squat. We are doing some sort of squat twice a week.
Carl: If someone were to retain you, how quickly can they come up to speed to where they are starting to make progress?
Coach Johnson: Usually it takes the first two or three weeks because I will always start conservatively. I’ll ask the person: “What are your current best lifts?” Not “Five years ago, I bench pressed 500 pounds.” I don’t care what you did five years ago. I want to know what you did in the last five days to five weeks. I will always go conservative. I’ve had more people than one even recently say, “This just looks like it’s not a lot of work.” It won’t on paper but when you do it, it is a ton of work.
You have to understand that at 65%, no one’s afraid of that. But you do all the volume and you will quickly see what the effect of that is. It usually takes two or three weeks just to get broke in because a lot of it is basic movements, but how it is set up and how your rest intervals are set up and session rest is set up. It is a lot of work and it’s really, really tough. It takes two or three weeks to get broke into the routine.
Within six weeks, you will start seeing progress. Usually within three months, if you’re dedicated and you’re consistent, you’ll start setting PRs on lifts.
Carl: Excellent. I say this with all sincerity and it’s not because I’m saying, “I don’t care who you spend some money with.” But if you really want to get stronger, you can’t do it by yourself. Coach Johnson didn’t do it by himself. Coach Johnson used the resources, spent tens of thousands of dollars over his career, acquiring advice, buying things that would make the job easier or better. You can’t achieve anything without spending any money. You can’t become a doctor without dropping a couple of $100,000 in school. You can’t achieve these levels of strength, these super ordinary, super human levels of strength without obtaining some information from people who have been there so that you can navigate the injuries and stick the core business, which is getting incrementally stronger week after week.
Retaining somebody like Coach Johnson will ensure your success for a variety of reasons: (1) you’ll have good advice and (2) you’ll be accountable. You’re not going to spend money with somebody and then say, “I’m not going to do the work” because he is going to tell you, “I don’t want your money anymore. Come back when you’re serious.”
If you want to get stronger in all three of these lifts or one or two of these lifts, step up, spend the buck as Toody [? 56:01] used to say. [Toody] was a bar in Brooklyn that Jackie Gleason used to bartend in. I frequented not when Jackie was there, but I frequented as a young man. [Toody] used to say, “When we used to come in at the bar and sit at the bar, and nurse a $0.25/beer or pilsner.” He would look at you and say, “Come on, for crying out loud! Spend the buck. Help a guy out.” If you want to get stronger, you’re going to have to spend the buck and you will get stronger. That’s the reward.
Coach Johnson: I did the math real quick. If you buy the program and then the $25/month coaching fee which is only 11 months, I don’t charge you to write the program and then ask for a coaching fee upfront. You buy the program, the first month of coaching is included. For the entire year, it’s $425 and I’d be willing to bet a bunch of people spend that kind of money, if not more on morning coffee. That’s a year.
Carl: This is a much better thing. Wade, thanks so much for being in the show today, brother.
Coach Johnson: Always good to be with you.
Just a quick shout out to Jake Soderberg. He has competed a couple of times in Olympic lifting. We’ve talked about him on the show. He’s really making some great games. I want to let him know that I was paying attention and that I’m going to answer his email. And it’s really exciting to see what he’s accomplished. He’s a big-time listener to the show.
Carl: Can you give him a couple of props? What has he accomplished?
Coach Johnson: His meet video split snatch 67 kilograms. His clean and jerk was 86 kilograms. And that’s big and he’s doing it in competition, so that’s really exciting. He’s thanking us for the inspiration. That’s a big deal for us to do what we do and have a positive impact. It’s a big deal to me and then to see a guy work hard and…
Carl: And achieve it. He has proof. He spent the buck. He took [Toody’s] advice, he spent the buck and he got stronger. Go figure.
Wade, thanks a lot, brother. Congratulations to Jake Soderberg.
Coach Johnson: Always good to be with you.
