IOL Strength and Conditioning

Training Techniques for Coaches, Personal Trainers and Athletes by Michael Boyle

The cover athlete is Ingrid Marcum, during her win at the 2009 Nationals

In the seven years since the publication of his first book, Functional Training for Sports, new understanding of functional anatomy created a shift in strength coaching. With this new material, Coach Boyle presents the continued evolution of functional training as seen by a leader in the strength and conditioning field.

After an introduction into his new thinking, Michael uses ten basic sections to present everything a strength coach or personal trainer needs to understand modern training theory, beginning with his joint-by-joint approach to training, along with details of his use of Gray Cook and Lee Burton’s Functional Movement Screen. Next he discusses injury avoidance, treatment, rehab and training after injury. Then he updates the reader on the current thinking in core training, back pain, and on how the hip musculature works, and how it fails. We learn his philosophy on cardiovascular training, and see what has worked for the athletes training in his facility.

In the second half of the book, Michael shifts to training strategies, including which exercises he uses today and which he’s discarded, what equipment and tools are in use on his gym floor, how he develops speed, and, of course, there’s a large section on his now-famous single-leg training. Finally, we get to program design, where he puts the entire package together to mesh theory with daily reality. He’ll teach you the basic objectives of a sound program, and then over the course of 32 pages, he’ll show you exactly which programs he uses in a variety of client and athletic circumstances.

The category sections include:

• Mobility and Flexibility
• Injuries
• The Core
• The Hips
• Cardiovascular Training
• Developing Athleticism
• Equipment Choices
• Exercise Choices — The Basics and Single-Leg Training
• Program Design
• Sample Programs

You can grab a pdf of the full Table of Contents here.

This book is in stock and available for shipping.
The official release date is January 10th; bookstores and online stores such as Amazon.com will have the book available for order after that date.

Click here to place your order, $34.95.

90 minutes of new training ideas!

We’re now set with part four of Dan’s IronOnline workshop — or at least we will be Friday or Monday — the final DVD of the series, in which he shows us his sample warm-ups, a few workout varieties, and his famous barbell complexes. Trust me, these aren’t your regular Bomber bodypart splits, although over the decades Dave’s done his share of barbell rows, presses and dumbbell farmer walks, and he’s probably also done our share.

One of Dan’s key phrases here was, “The warm-up is the workout,”  and as he puts our crew through the paces, you’ll see how he can make that claim! He also uses members of the audience to demonstrate new movements, or to show his corrections when we went astray.

Here he uses Elke to show, as he tells the story and gives guidance on Koji squats, which I’m assuming you haven’t seen before.

Dan shows his daily favorites:
Gait Warm-up
Goblet Squat & Bootstrapper Squat
Hip Flexor Stretch & RDL Stretch
Plank Series
Horizontal Shrugs
Maxercist and Parked Rows
Crocodile Pushups
Heartbeat Squat
Kalos Sthenos Getup
Ab Circuit
Star Plank
Barbell Complexes
A full warm-up series
Sample workouts, insights and more

Includes pdf handouts of the sample workouts, warmups and barbell complexes

And in this clip, Dan’s pal Josh Vert performs the deadbug series, again with Dan at the controls.

Here’s where to get your copy of Dan’s 90-minute workout samples dvd, $29.95. Or if you’d like to save $20 now that the entire series is complete, here’s the link for the 4-DVD set.

What a great idea for Christmas — now you know what to ask for next week when you get the what do you want for Christmas inquiry!

Now that the new Michael Boyle book, Advances in Functional Training, is at the printer and the proof for the final DVD of the Dan John seminar weekend has been approved for replication, I found myself kicking around over the weekend wondering what of that huge mess on my desk most needed to be done. Those two projects have been my primary focus for nearly six months, so I wasn’t quite ready to backburner either one of them. Hey, how about I update the On Target Publications website?

So I get there to take a look and oops, what do you know… hasn’t been touched in about five years. Ouch! No new book updates, no new technology. It just looked b a d. You can probably guess what I did the next couple of days, and you know I’m going to send you over there to take a look. In fact, maybe I’ll even ask a favor: Would you let me know if you find any problems? Typos, browser issues, like that? Your review comments on the various book and dvd pages are most certainly welcome, too, because I know the authors appreciate hearing your thoughts.

Buried in the author pages you’ll find bits of history, perhaps how the books came to be published, or how I came to know the authors. I’ll continue to update the Forthcoming page as new projects hit the planning stage, but meanwhile perhaps you’ll want to know what’s up for now.

In the print department, Dave’s just begun work on his new, as yet unnamed book, which sounds like it will be part memoir, part motivational, part pictorial. The selection of photos is underway, which means he’s dreaming up memories to tell the stories behind the images. His memory articles are often the readers’ favorites, and just the idea of this new material is enough to lift my spirits.

I’m working on another book project in partnership with Byron Chandler, this one directed toward the maturing trainee who, perhaps through chronic pain, has discovered the training routine he or she has been using since 1980 is no longer doing the trick. I hope we’ll see both of these new books in early 2010.

May 1st we’ll be filming a workshop in San Jose, California, featuring Mark Reifkind and Dave Whitley for publication on DVD. This will be a paid day-long workshop; registration and seminar details will be online in January, and the DVDs hit production during May, available early summer.

And the weekend of September 25, 2010, will mark our 10th annual IronOnline bash to be held in Kansas City, where Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore will be on hand to present a workshop weekend, also planned for DVD publication. Details on that event will be posted in the IronOnline forum as they become available.

The new website is OnTargetPublications.net. If you find any problems, please give me a yell: ldraper@davedraper.com.

In part three of the four DVDs from the Utah workshop weekend, we get a taste of Dan John’s instruction for beginning Olympic weightlifting. Our original idea was this would be primarily for adults who’ve never lifted Olympic-style, and it’s certainly that, however one of the attendees is a competitive Olympic lifting, who told me a couple of Dan’s tips changed her lifting forever. So I’m thinking anyone interested in Olympic lifting will get something out of this one.

As I did last time for the kettlebell dvd and the time prior for the strength lecture, I pulled a couple of clips from the dvd to give you a taste of what went on during our time with Dan. First, let’s look at his take on pulling through the heels.

In this 80-minute DVD, Dan taught:

• Olympic lifting overview
• Snatch positions
• Push jerk
• Split jerk
• The Jerk
• Overhead squat
• Goblet squat
• Shoulder mobility
• Putting weights overhead
• Hamstring lengthening
• Romanian deadlift stretch
• Wrist flexibility

Now here’s one of value to everyone, even those without interest specifically in Olympic lifting: How to get wrist flexibility.

Having been at the event and as an adult with absolutely no Olympic lifting experience, I can tell you I left feeling fairly confident in my ability to snatch and jerk… a short piece of PVC pipe.

Seriously, it left me and the rest of the attendees with plenty of enthusiasm for learning the O lifts, and enough technique tips to give us a start on our own at home. Here’s where to get your copy of Dan’s Olympic Lifting for Beginners DVD, $29.95.