I’m not going to lie—getting old is the opposite of wonderful. But you won’t find doom and gloom in this text—there’s a lot to feel good about as we all go through this aging process.

It’s time for a talk to the young and the old about the inevitable (devastating yet fascinating) aging process under a loaded bar. Buckle up, it’s a bumpy ride!

The world was a wiser, kinder place with Master in it. Now his body is dead. I guess it’s up to me, then, to live up to his legacy.

If I was that young woman in the picture with my present old mind, I would do it all differently. Unfortunately, I can’t rewind that tape but if you’re reading this and you are or know of a young couple expecting a baby or handling their first one, this read may change your child-raising perspective.

There is no universal healthy diet or macronutrient composition. You must identify what is healthy for you. Read on to understand why we are so diverse to discover your best diet options.

Believe it or not, you don’t need the assistance of a research team to make your training, health, and life decisions. Here’s how to navigate through your uniqueness from identification to decision making.

Three years and counting, through change of grounding and shelter, one thing remains. Here’s my attempt at living, learning, and passing on.

I’m aging, my parents are aging, and yes, you’re aging too. Aging equals disease. Or does it? In this article, I will introduce explanations about the role of strength and conditioning in healthy living and suggest how we can promote that before disuse and decay unleash their vicious cycle.

A short Christmas gift guide for different types of strong people (including yourself).

This is a completely different type of article you’ll find within my column. It’s personal and it makes a case for increased injury burden as an athlete progresses in their career, gets older, trains more, competes more, the list goes on…

Both are scary to endure, but as an athlete, it’s part of the game. A little bit of knowledge can go a long way in managing this kind of stress.

Today I’m going to address one line of scientific inquiry that has a direct impact on our current understanding of human strength: the changing view of the human grip.

If so, were the early-day strength athletes stronger, faster, and more powerful than present-day competitors? Studies about nostalgia suggest the answers to these questions root in nostalgic accounts from both positive and negative emotions.

Beyond the notorious odor knee sleeves omit when soaked with sweat and stored in your gym bag for days on end, what don’t you know about them? Four parts in this personal equipment series, let’s find out.

Beyond the heated debates, love and hate, blood and tears, that constrict knee wraps, exactly how do they work? Let’s take a look at the basics, different types, knee wrapping techniques, a 197-response survey to see how athletes use them, and more.

With a better understanding of belts (the first product studied within this series), it’s now time we’ll move on to wrist wraps. Exactly how do wrist wraps work? Also, a big thanks to the 262 athletes who gave their input in an interesting survey about their use of wrist wraps.

If you are reading this, either you train/enjoy strength training or you like/manufacture personal equipment. In either case, I want to help you. As always, I am committed to causing as much damage as I can to shallow thinking and shortcuts to critical-thinking. This is how the belt works.

At the core of extreme well-being is a state of consciousness and physical experience that has been called flow. In this final chapter of the “motivation” series, we’ll define flow and have a better understanding of how it happens.

The housewife, the architect, and the fighter all live according to a long-term goal-oriented life-project. What is the difference? Who will choose to be the master of their fate and the captain of their soul?

Exhaustion is the main reason I and lots of people quit following a plan. Another reason: catastrophic circumstances. Have you considered goal setting and time framing, monitoring, and journaling to follow your plan?

You must be in control or have autonomy, to set goals, move through intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, and grittily, hardily, toughly keep on track — especially if your choice is to be or continue being a successful high-performance athlete.

There are many versions of such misanthropes around (with home gyms of their own), and while this list will make their days, months, and years, it will make any true appreciator of strength training happy.

I decided to finish the series with what I consider to be the remaining badly misused concepts. The previous one was discipline, and now, the worst of all: mental toughness.

Are you a gritty athlete?

The main reason I would suggest you engage in exercise is happiness. You might ask, “You mean managing depression?” No. I mean simple and plain happiness, although I’ll discuss depression and mental health, too.

What I try to offer here is information to both coaches and obese people about why and how to exercise — different reasons than the conventional assumption concerning weight loss — considering some of the difficulties inherent in the condition.

In this article, I will offer definitions and a technical approach to the terms involved in this problem. With this, hopefully, I may help you understand the forms intimidation can take and turn your dream gym into a nightmare.

I invite you to consider simple choices for space arrangement, staff training, and customer service to help you shape your gym for your chosen demographic and make a difference.

Certain sports are based on cross-athleticism and the mastery of more than one set of skills, such as the triathlon, the decathlon, strongman, Highland games, and now Crossfit Games. But do you get better at one by being better at another?

These are the gyms of Sub-Saharan Africa, where the training environment is unsheltered and un-floored and the equipment is made of scrap iron, car parts, cement, and anything else that works.

Good, quality bars are a component of good, quality training. More so than with other pieces of equipment in a gym, lifters tend to develop a personal (sometimes quite emotional) relationship with bars.

The goal of this article is to provide tools to understand, prevent, and act on the problems of sexual violence, with a focus on the coach-athlete interaction.

In this article I will give you a glimpse of the many variations of the squat rack, its use, and its customization, as done by elitefts.

Now that this series has covered the insight of a powerlifting judge for the squat and the bench press, we move to discuss the knowledge we can gain regarding the final lift of the meet: the deadlift.

In the first article of this series, I explained the value of the judge’s perspective in relation to the squat. Now let’s look at the bench press and see what lifters can learn from considering the judge’s role.

Nothing trumps experience — specifically the sheer number of lifts you watch and analyze. Who sees the largest number of lifts? That’s right: the judge.

It is a challenge amongst intellectuals to talk about the human body in ways that won’t immediately elicit an ideological defensive reaction. But we can try.

My purpose with this article is to use my involuntary position as a character in the story to explore the meaning of the opioid epidemic and its wider implications.

Today we will look into sports psychology. While the coach and the nutritionist are pushed into multi and interdisciplinarity even when there is not a proper structure for it, the same doesn’t happen with the sports psychologist.

This article relies both on a bird’s eye-view of the scientific discipline itself, with some history to make sense of the information, and on the input of people who actually use this knowledge on a day-to-day basis.

Not many institutional environments promote interdisciplinary collaboration in exercise and sports performance. Starting from the ground up, how can we change this?

In this series, we will explore the challenges of interdisciplinarity in Sports Performance. I have chosen six people to help us on this journey, each one representing one discipline or profession.

In this article, we reach the end of our journey. You will read about how original home gym owners made different choices and changed their lives as they followed the iron.

To have a better grasp on the several formats and how they may (or may not) evolve into one another, I searched and found a stricto sensu barbell club: the Valhalla Barbell Club, from Wichita, Kansas.

Nine athletes and coaches who have owned home gyms were asked to share the purpose and evolution of their early setups.

This is the dimension occupied by nursing babies with their mothers, lovers having intimate sex, and friends and family hugging. The relationship between lifter and bar is that intimate.

Is winning all that matters or is participation the purpose of competition? This is the final article in this series.

Every aspect of motivation we discussed in parts one, two, and three are evidence here, through their absence and again through their recovery.

This is where we find the relationship between hope and two other concepts that are directly important to sports performance and powerlifting in particular: motivation and risk.

We need to discuss passion and our affective response to any autotelic activity: it is important to understand that humans engage in things for internal forces other than survival.

For the next three or four articles, this is our topic: motivation. This first part will explore the construction of meaning, identity, and the origins of motivation.

Knowing now how to set up and execute the lift, there is one final process to perfect your bench press.

Every member of this team has been meticulously chosen based on their unique talents. There’s more to earning your spot than lifting big weights.

So far, we haven’t even moved the bar. Keeping in mind what we learned in part one of this series, we are now ready to begin the press.

The first installment of a three-part series, this article discusses the first step of mastering the bench press: learning optimal setup.