This week's EliteFTS Spotlight interviewee is shot-putter Chad Smith from
Orange County, California. Chad is the newest member of the EliteFTS Q&A staff,
and we think his training log will be extremely useful in shedding some light on
the training of an elite power/strength athlete.
Introduce yourself to the readership and tell us a little about yourself.
I'm 23 years old and just graduated from college. I'm a two-time NAIA
national champion in the shot put and an Olympic hopeful for 2012. I had kind of
a roundabout experience in college. In high school I won two CIF championships
and a section championship in California. I was very highly recruited and went
to the University of California at Berkeley as a part of the number one men's
recruiting class in the country. I was redshirted my freshman year and then into
my sophomore year, things kind of fell apart there. Out of that recruiting class
of thirteen guys, one used his entire eligibility at Cal, another one used four
years but declined to take his redshirt year, and the other eleven quit track or
transferred. The coach resigned, and it was just a terrible situation. They were
great recruiters, and some really good coaches -- actually, right before I got
the opportunity to open up my own gym, I was going back there to be an assistant
track coach because I love the coaches that are still there now.
My freshman year, I was a junior All-American, which is 19-and-under. Halfway
through my sophomore year, I went in and said things had to change, or I was out
of there, and the change didn't happen, so I was out of there. I ended up not
leaving the school, though. I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do, so I went
back and didn't do track. That was January 2007. From then until September 2008,
I didn't train and I didn't do track. I basically decided that I wanted to coach
football, so I moved back to Orange County and coached at the high school I went
to. I was living in Newport Beach about a hundred yards from the sand, but I was
definitely not doing anything too productive.
My dad finally asked what the hell I was doing and told me to apply for
Concordia, which is a half mile from where I grew up, and the throws coach there
is the same guy who coached me in high school. I applied, got in, and he talked
me into coming out for track again. I'd been soured by my experience at Cal, and
was really only doing it as a favor to him. So I kind of went through it, it
sucked and I was hurt, and I threw like shit. They gave me a scholarship for the
next year, though, because it was such a small school that I could throw like
shit and still score points for them. I wanted to just go to school, get my
teaching credential and coach, but my parents said I had to do track because we
needed the money, so once they said that, I figured I had to do it for real,
because I couldn't go through another year like that.
I pulled my head out of my ass, started applying all the things I'd learned to
my own training, and put nine feet on my PR in one year. I became the #4 ranked
collegiate thrower in all the NCAA and NAIA divisions, and the 17th ranked
American male. I remembered why I loved doing track so much more when I actually
worked at it and was good at it.
To what aspect of your training do you attribute those PR's?
Getting in much better shape. I raised my GPP and my conditioning level. I
was fat before. I'm six feet tall, and in the 2008 season, I was about 305, and
probably 25% body fat. This last season, I was about 290, with about 15% body
fat. I read all the carb cycling stuff and got on that. Really, that summer
where I decided I had to do this as well as I could, I lived on kettlebell
circuits, the Prowler, and just got way more fit. My work capacity was so high
that I could have such quality practices and such quality training throughout
the year. The other thing that really helped me out was understanding how to use
accommodating resistance well, and how to use plyos, mostly seated box jumps,
really well. My power just went through the roof. How did you become affiliated with EliteFTS?
I just graduated from college two months ago, and I was looking for a way to
continue throwing after college, and to try to get some help with some
sponsorships, so I filled out the sponsorship application and sent it to Dave.
He told me EFS wasn't doing any new sponsorships, so I was kind of set back for
a little bit, but the more I thought about it, I had actually gotten help from a
businessman out here in Orange County that was going to give me money to help
pay for my supplements, which is the biggest cost I have, really. Travel is not
that big of an issue because there are so many good local meets here.
So I emailed Dave and Jim again and again and told them I didn't even care if
there's no money involved. I just wanted my training log on EFS, and I thought I
had a lot to offer because I kind of kill several birds with one stone.
Is there a particular member of the staff whose material helped you out?
Last summer I was visiting my brother in New York, and I went out to
DeFranco's for a day. I would definitely say that DeFranco is the most
influential with what I've done. My template has been pretty much Westside for
Skinny Bastards, modified.
Talk a bit about your business. You're opening your own place?
Yeah, I'm opening Juggernaut Training Systems, LLC. It's me, Andre Hernandez
and my best friend from college, a guy named Nate Winkler, he was a sprinter for
us. I had that job at Cal that I was going to do, and I was really excited about
it, but the more I thought about it, I realized that I couldn't do it because I
wasn't going to get paid anything. I was going to be a volunteer assistant for
one semester to one year, until I showed them that I was worth paying. I
couldn't live in the Bay Area and train like I wanted to and coach at the level
I wanted to, and actually pay rent and live. So I decided not to do it. Two or
three days after I made that decision, my physical therapist, Gail Wetzler, a
really well respected physical therapist in this area, and very successful, came
to me and offered to help me open my own facility. That was seven and a half
weeks ago. She's been phenomenally generous and said she just wants to help me
live out my dream and create the vision that I have for it. She wants to help me
do it the way I want to do it. She'll also be very helpful because she works
with some guys on the Anaheim Ducks and Misty May, and she's the head of
athletic training at Cal-Irvine.
What does Elite Fitness Systems mean to you?
To me, it means bringing like-minded people together to give them the tools
to reach their goals. In high school, I trained my ass off, but I had no idea
what I was doing. I did a lot of stuff very passionately, but I had no idea. I
didn't know what I was doing for my first two years of college, and the people
who were supposed to know what they were doing didn't know what they were doing
either. I stumbled upon EliteFTS with Google, and starting reading the articles,
and it just made sense to me. Several hundred dollars worth of books later, and
hours and hours of reading articles and training, and training my kids with it,
has given me the opportunity to take my performance to the international level,
hopefully.
What kinds of clients will you be training in your gym?
High school through professional, hopefully. I'll take as low as a
physically mature junior high athlete. When I first talked to Jim about what
we're doing, he asked me if we're trying to make a West Coast DeFranco's, and
that's basically what we're trying to do.
We're looking to sign a deal in the next week or two to train all the teams at
Concordia. They have a weight room that's maybe 500 square feet for 300
athletes. They have no S/C staff, either.
Right now with my own training, I'm doing Dave's "Time Under Tension"
program. I'm in the last week of that, because at the end of the last track
season, I got really sick with an intestinal infection for the week leading up
to and the week after my NAIA nationals. I lost 18 pounds in 12 days and lost a
lot of muscle mass. I've been doing this program for the last month or so,
trying to put some muscle back on. After that, in the fall, I'm going to more
5-rep maxes. I'll go max effort bench on Mondays, I'll run tempos on Tuesdays,
max effort squat on Wednesdays, tempos or recovery/restoration work on
Thursdays, rep effort bench on Fridays, and dynamic lower body work on
Saturdays. I like having the dynamic effort lower body on Saturdays because I
feel like it teaches my body that Saturdays are the days I have to be powerful
and explosive, because when the spring comes, Saturdays are when I'll have
meets. As the year progresses, I'll drop the tempos, and that day turns into
sprints and reactive jumping drills - hurdle hops, usually - and the other
dynamic day is almost always seated box jumps, either weighted or unweighted. My
best there, that I'm very proud of, is 50" at 290 pounds.
Throwers are great athletes. They're some of the most explosive and powerful
athletes on earth, and that's how I need to train. I need to train like an
athlete.
How do you plan to go about setting up training programs for you clients?
The biggest thing for all of them will be to get good at the basics. I've
coached high school football and track, and kids are just weak. They don't do
the small stuff well, so getting them great at the basics - bench, squat, trap
bar deadlift, push-ups, pull-ups, etc. I like kind of the "underground" strength
stuff, too, like Zach Even-Esh and the Diesel Crew do. It teaches kids to
compete and it makes them tough.
I don't really use the Olympic lifts for anyone. I stopped using them in my own
training because I felt like they beat up my wrists and shoulders too much, and
I need my wrists to be healthy. I feel like I'm one of the few emerging or elite
shot putters who doesn't use the Olympic lifts. I did clean 175 kilos when I was
19 years old, though.
