Tag Archive for: Juggernaut Articles

5 Tips for Training on The Road

It’s another week and I’m on the road yet again, for my third training camp in the last three months. This time I am in Tenero, Switzerland’s national training center located in the Italian-speaking region south of the alps. Being on the road so much I have learned a few tricks to make sure things go as smoothly as possible. In my latest article for Juggernaut Training Systems, I detail five tips for training while traveling:

My car's trunk on a road trip last year. Plan ahead to make sure you'll have what you need.

My car’s trunk on a road trip last year. Plan ahead to make sure you’ll have what you need.

  1. Know What You’ll Need and When You’ll Need It
  2. Do Your Research
  3. Find a Routine
  4. Sleep
  5. Make Friends

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Real Range Throwing

You have to be careful about what you read about Bondarchuk online. Much of the stuff out there is taken out of context or just plain myth. There are articles floating around about his opinions on step ups and squats, the “five elements” Charles Poloquin attributed to him, and the Litvinov workout. Some have a fraction of truth in them, but the majority is hyperbole. I am quite skeptical unless I hear him talk about it or see him use it. For my most recent article for Juggernaut Training Systems I tackled the topic of range throwing, a term coined by an internet article about Bondarchuk:
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Implementing Specific Strength

Over the past few months I’ve contributed to the popular Juggernaut Training Systems webpage with a series of posts on specific strength. I’ve talked about the theory of specific strength, the debate about youth specialization, and how to create specific strength exercises for your sport. My latest post was published today and starts to talk about how to take specific strength exercises and implement them into training.
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Juggernaut Training Systems

Creating Special Strength Exercises

One of the core concepts at the heart of Bondarchuk’s training methods is his exercise classification scheme. Bondarchuk has written about dozens of different periodization models that can be used for a variety of sports, but all of them make use of his four-category system of classifying exercises from general to specific. The concept is straightforward, but not one that I have spent a lot of time on here talking about.

In my latest article for Juggernaut Training Systems I take a look at how both Bondarchuk and Yuri Verkhoshansky use their own systems to define special strength exercises. By looking at two leaders in the field of special strength, we start to see what common elements special strength exercises need. I also explain my own five tips for selecting a special strength exercise:
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Youth Athletics and Specialization

tiger_woodsOver the last decade, youth sports have undergone a drastic transformation: general athletic development is being replaced with specialized preparation at earlier ages. This transformation began a long time ago, but has been accelerated as people saw the success of Tiger Woods (shown to the right) and the Williams sisters. Now I see more kids choosing to focus on one sport year-round than the three-sport letterman of years past. This is the topic of my most recent article for Juggernaut Training Systems.

This trend is bad, but the common reaction against it is to focus again on only generalized training. As I argue in the article, there doesn’t need to be a choice between specialized and generalized. A combination can work even better and I bring in some examples from the throwing world.
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Juggernaut Training Systems

Putting Theory Into Context

While I spend much of my time on this site talking about the hammer throw and training for the hammer throw, it is important to remember that much of what I talk to is just as applicable to the other throwing events and even other sports. Training principles are fairly uniform. Facts like how the body adapts to stress or the how to increase power output are the same for other sports. The main difference is how they are applied.

Juggernaut Training SystemsWith that in mind, Chad Smith asked me to contribute regularly to his site Juggernaut Training Systems. Smith was an elite shot putter before starting the JTS webpage, hitting a personal best of 19.46-meters as a post-collegiate in 2009. Since then he has switched to other strength sports, most recently winning the 2012 North American Strongman championship. He has also worked just as hard on his website as he has in the weight room. The site provides training information for a variety of strength sports, from throwing to strongman to powerlifting to Crossfit and more. Over the past year it has grown tremendously from around 20,000 visitors per month to over 300,000 a month.

Every month or two I will be posting a new article on JTS. The content on this site will not change and I will also post with the same frequency here. My posts for JTS will instead focus on the new topic of applying concepts like special strength to other sports. My first article, found below, focuses on a key factor of all training missing in many online training articles: context. Too often articles focus on theory or practice, but they leave out the most important element of context. Read more