Ground Up Strength

anybody read? i ordered a copy…should be here in a few days…in reality i should have gotten an audio version if it's available…i love listening to that guy talk….he's morgan freeman-esque for me.

I've read it. I used one of the progressions in the Tweaking the Overhead Squat article. Some of it is very good and some of it is very subjective but you are probably aware of my views on that. It's a good book, well worth having but like any book it is not without it's flaws. As long as it is not seen as a bible then I would recommend Athletic Body in Balance to be on every trainee's shelf.

Like so many of these guys today who fancy themselves "strength and conditioning coaches" most of his assumptions are centered on training for sport or athletes training. That colors everything, including ideas about periodization. Keep that in mind because only athletes and strength competitors must have their training needs coincide, in performance and timing, with some event.

Probably my biggest criticism is starting the damn thing with frigging Milo and the bull again. Training is progressive, yada yada. But books like Athletic Body in Balance and Milo carrying a bull up a hill every day have NOTHING in common. If training was as simple as that you wouldn't need books like this. So the logic of the analogy escapes me. Trainees take that story literally and I am darn sick of it. Milo COULD NOT HAVE ever been able to carry a bull up a hill in the way the story describes. It wouldn't have worked and it is a stupid story. A myth not a strength training lesson. Yet, Cook introduces the first chapter with that Milo crap, like so many others have done before him.

Remember this book is NOT about training for absolute strength. It is about "athletic development" in general. Use it as a reference for specific needs or problems you may have.

i've heard it was good to read this one before his new one "movement"…i'll wait till that one comes down in price though. it will be with a grain of salt just like it is with boyle :) little nuggets of info like overhead squat stuff was what i was hoping for…hopefully more than one nugget though :) thanks for the info.

The thing to remember about all this is that you can't advance in strength by focusing only on the movement aspects, or only on the quantitave performance aspect. Likewise you can't, for instance, underestimate how fatigue affects things. Think about it this way, you can subjectively view somebody's overhead squat, in a "ideal" setting, based on your own schema, and no matter how good that is, it will tell you nothing about how that person performs in a real training setting and how they hold up under fatigue. Just as an example. So, yes, books like this contain nuggest of information that can be very useful as long as people don't turn them into their manifestos. There is a lot that is new in these viewpoints and "newness" sometimes gives people tunnel vision.

It is similar to the book "Anatomy Trains". Most of that is a very new and unique way to look at the body for most readers. It's so new and different, in fact, that people report on it as if they have discovered "the truth" and they have been SET FREE! Amen. But there is as much blatant, and sometimes silly, speculation in that as their is concrete information that can be repeatedly observed, or even observed at all. Everybody has got to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

agreed. i have run into one or two of those people…after they read his new book :) cults are everywhere.

it was a good read…i stopped when i reached the conditioning stuff…just because…i don't care, and i don't play a sport :)