Coach Venable - How ATG Changed My Coaching After 40 Years In The Trenches

STEWART: Thank you ATG coaches for allowing me the opportunity to present.

I also want to thank my high school students.

They are the reason that I do what I do every day and they provide me with a laboratory to try my theories and methodologies.

What I want to talk about today is the ATG for Coaches and LTAD but different from Istvan Balyi's long-term athletic development which went with fundamentals and train for fun, train to compete, train to win, and train for retirement, we're just talking for the secondary school, a high school athlete, so from freshman to senior year.

So in order for you to understand where I’m at with this process, I need to give you a little background on how I arrived to the position I’m in today.

Now, who am I?

I’m a husband to my beautiful wife Shelly.

I’m a father of three kids, my oldest is Jessica 36, Bronson is 30 and my youngest Faith is 14.

My grandson Cass just turned 2 years of age.

Both my professional and coaching careers have run concurrently.

I would almost say my athletic career has run concurrently as well and I’ll explain why.

When I graduated high school in June 1981, I went right into the military.

Infantry soldier, very much like those soldiers depicted in the photograph where we're out walking, if you're not walking, you're running, only you stopping is to shoot.

You have a pack on your back with your helmet, your equipment, your food, your ammo, and your weaponry.

The average soldier carries about 100 to 120 pounds worth of gear.

The most common injuries for us outside of what's sustaining, training, or combat is the foot, the ankle, the knees, the hips, and the lower back.

When I was in the military, I was there for seven years.

I’m stationed in Fairbanks Alaska, Schofield Barrett's Hawaii on the island of Oahu.

When I was in Fairbanks Alaska that's when I very first started coaching.

I got my first coaching experience in 1982-1983.

I started by coaching my platoon sergeant.

He wanted to go to the gym with me but I didn't have time.

I was really busy I told him, and he said I will pay you and he gave me five dollars to go to the gym with me and something went off in my head ding ding ding ding ding, this thing that I love, this thing that I love to do, and people would pay me to do it with them or for them and that was a game changer and I haven't stopped since then.

I did my seven years in the military and when I got out I started as a federal law enforcement officer working for the Department of Justice.

I was stationed at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth Kansas. So I’m going from what you would call now, a tactical coach in the military to I’m training civilians but even the civilians are correctional officers, police officers, and firefighters.

So now I’m still a tactical coach but I’m training mainly in law enforcement.

During my time at Leavenworth, I started a powerlifting team at the high school in town and I did that for a while then I ventured into CrossFit in 2006. So I like that so much that I got my affiliate in 2007 CrossFit results.

Again ding ding ding ding, that little bell went off in my head, this thing that I love to do, I can do with other people and I can make money.

So training became a side hustle for me and my CrossFit affiliate was born and I kept my CrossFit affiliate until I want to tell you 2012, 2015.

So I’ve trained military. I’ve trained general pop. I trained high school athletes there, I was training some other athletes there.

I started my CrossFit affiliate.

I’m used to every kind of lift with the exception of the Olympic lifts, weightlifting, snatching, cleaning, and jerk.

My clean was a deadlift and a reverse curl.

So I had to find a local weightlifting coach to teach me these Olympic lifts so I could help my CrossFit business and that's what I did.

So I told you that my athletic career, my coaching career, and my professional career all ran concurrently.

When I was in the military and I started training soldiers, in my mind, I was going to be a bodybuilder so I trained my clients the same way.

We had leg day. We had back and biceps day. We had chest, shoulder, and tricep days.

When I got out of the service, I gravitated toward powerlifting.

I’m still training soldiers, I’m training other law enforcement officers and firefighters, and I gravitated toward powerlifting. I trained my clients the same way. It was bench squat and deadlift.

In my mind, if everybody got stronger they would be better at their sport, they would be better at their job.

So my military career, my civilian career, my coaching career, and my athletic career, all kind of went hand in hand.

I did powerlifting for 16 years and just like the military where you have a lot of wear and tear on your ankles, your knees, your hips, and your lower back. Working for the penitentiary did the same thing.

There's a lot of wear and tear on the ankles, knees, hips, and back, where from the powerlifting, where all I did was squat bench and deadlift with a few accessory exercises, can we go again with the wear and tear on the lower back, some shoulders, knees, again.

My powerlifting, I went for 16 years until I started having back surgeries, and then I had to stop.

Once I started my CrossFit affiliate that made me gravitate toward my Olympic weightlifting and so I competed as an Olympic weightlifter for 10 years. Now when I made that gravitation toward Olympic weightlifting, I also pulled my clients the same way.

So now, I wanted all my clients to snatch and clean and jerk.

They still did some other lifts but those were the most important lifts to them and you can see, by the way, I’m laying this out for you. Whatever I seem to be doing at the time is the thing that I think is most important that my clients do at the time.

Whatever it is, I like, I think it's the best for them since it's the best for me.

In my mind at the time that made sense.

What I regretted was my Olympic lifting days didn't come before my powerlifting days and for my powerlifting, my body was locked short in the front, the anterior muscles, and locked long in the back, my posterior muscles.

So my shoulders rotated in, my hip flexors shorten up and I started having problems just like from the military, just like from working corrections, in the ankles, the knees, and the hips, which brings me to where I am today.

I retired from Leavenworth in October 2012. My wife and I moved from Kansas to Nebraska because that's her home.

Honestly, I wanted to move to Florida but she's the babe of 12, and all her family's here so we end up at Lincoln Nebraska where I am now, Lincoln North Star High School where I’m a high school strength and conditioning coach.

I’m also the head strength and conditioning coach and a PE teacher there as well.

Our school has about 2,300 students. It's a very diverse population.

Lincoln Nebraska is a hub for immigrants and refugees.

So people that are escaping, whatever they’re leaving the country for, where is, they want to have a better chance at life, they’re escaping genocide, there's warfare going on, whatever they're fleeing and if they end up in the United States, Lincoln is one of the hubs that we get a lot of people sent to so we have quite a diverse population, this town of 300,000.

But I also get a lot of kids that have never seen a weight room, or touched a weight room before and we have a lot of kids that don't speak English too.

To me this was a great opportunity, I had clean slates and I get to try anything I wanted and I did just that and here's a sample of what I tried with these kids: Cal Dietz Triphasic Training, Dr. Michael Yessis 1x20, Jim Wendler's 5/3/1.

I did Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength.

I did Joe Kenn's Tier System for Strength Training.

I tried everything on these kids and it was fun and in my mind, at the time it worked and you can see from the photo quite a diverse population.

The kids look like they're having a good time, they were myself and coach Watson having a good time and this is how are you measuring success, injury reduction, improved movement, winning teams, and larger classes.

We believed at that time that we had all of these things in place but for some reason, it kept bothering me that my kids still sustained the same injuries even though in my mind the program was much better.

They were sustaining the same injuries they had before.

I even got there and that didn't make sense to me and just like coach Dan John says everything works but nothing works forever.

So I go back to my library that's my home library and I’ve been collecting these books since I was in the 80s when I told you I started coaching.

I’m going through my books like, what am I missing?

How can I make this better?

What is it I can do?

And I come upon this book this is a book called “The Checklist Manifesto” by a surgeon named Atul Gawande. If you haven't read this book, I would highly recommend it to you.

Coach Mike Ball recommended this book to me.

We were talking at a conference and he spoke about it and I talked to him after and I didn't get it right away until one of his prodigies, Brandon Rearick was talking about it.

He recommended it again.

So I got it for my collection and I read this book.

In this book, Atul Gawande talks about how the world health organization approached him and asked him to come up with something to help them because 150,000 people are dying as a result of surgery every year and he had to come up with some type of a system or program to try to reduce those numbers.

He started thinking about the airline industry.

He started thinking about engineers building skyscrapers and bridges and all of those people in those different professions.

What they had, the common thread was they had a checklist.

So he thought this was a good idea for surgeons.

We could have a checklist so he came up, he went to Boeing, talked to the person in charge of their checklist office came up with a checklist for surgeons, took it back to his hospital and the other surgeon shot him down.

They're like “we're highly intelligent, we've been to school for years, we have experience, we don't need a checklist”.

So he went to the world health organization and they assigned six hospitals across the world, prestigious hospitals not just six hospitals in the hood, and let him try his checklist manifesto and he gave him a six-month trial period.

At the end of that six-month trial period, there was a reduction in complications due to surgery by 37 and a 45 reduction in deaths because of surgery because those deaths and those complications were a result of human error and people had just got so educated they were leaving out the small things, again ding ding ding, that bell is going off in my head.

I need to do this checklist manifesto, my checklist for the weight room.

Well, I can't call a checklist manifesto, somebody already has that title, so I named my program “Earn The Right To”.

So instead of jumping from Jim Wendler to Joe Kenn to Dr. Yessis, I have my own program.

I’m going to put the checklist manifesto in place and I don't have to move again.

We can stay with that.

It's going to be comprehensive and it's going to be awesome and that's what I developed, using the six movement patterns: hip dominant, quad dominant, vertical push, vertical pull, horizontal push, horizontal pull, and the core.

I came up with this checklist you see.

You see this example I’m on right now, it's for the bilateral quad dominant.

I also have a bilateral hip dominant and then if I go down further, you'll see a unilateral quad dominant, a unilateral hip dominant.

I’m trying to cover all the bases.

I got the assessment in there.

We use the functional movement screen.

I got certified by them like 10 years ago.

I got the soft tissue work in there.

We have mobility exercises for the kids to do in there.

We have the warm-up and if the kid can't do the baseline exercise then they can use the warm-up for stability and pattern until they can get to the baseline and then you can see you get to every exercise.

Like we'll go with this, I’ll go back to the bilateral quad dominant.

The baseline exercise is a deep squat for 10 reps.

It's just a bodyweight squat, an air squat.

They have to do 10 reps with really good technique and if they can't do it they stay on that every time bilateral quad dominance shows up on our training session at school until they can do 10 reps with good form.

Once they can, they get advanced to the standard, which is a goblet squat, the goblet squat is done for 10 reps at 50 percent of the body weight.

So whenever bilateral quad dominant, that's what the student-athlete does until they hit that.

Sorry I jumped off the screen again.

Once that's done they come to the goal.

The goal is for them to do a hundred percent of the body weight in the front squat by five.

For females, I put 75% by five.

The standard is what I want them to accomplish during the semester.

The goal is what I want the student-athlete to accomplish long term.

So if you start this your freshman year or your sophomore year, by the time you're a junior, or senior, you should be able to reach that goal, and if a kid reaches that goal their junior year then they have earned the right to do whatever exercise they want.

If we get to a bilateral quad dominant day and they want to do Zercher squat, overhead squat, or split squat, it doesn't matter.

They've earned the right to and this made sense to me.

So I was like “man we are cooking in crystal”.

Now I got everything squared away, all my bases are covered until I get to the end of the semester and it looks the same, the numbers aren't going up any higher. They're not doing any better.

I mean they're strong but they're not stronger than they were before.

We have just as many injuries as we have before and the bad part is, with the program I just showed you.

It took us, I’ll go back up to the top, it took us three weeks to get through the FMS assessment for all those kids.

To teach them all the soft tissue exercises and the mobility exercises.

We're in week four of the semester before we actually start lifting and that's a big no-goal.

You can't take 25 of your semester going through functional movement screen.

So I was like “man, this sucks, back to the drawing board we go again.”

So that John Wooden quote, “don't confuse activity with achievement”.

I felt like that's exactly what I was doing.

We were doing a lot of stuff but I wasn't really doing anything and Cicero quote, sorry forgive me because I don't speak Latin, so I’m not going to butcher that but “to be rather than to seem” like I wanted to be better but I really wasn't better. I just seemed like I was better because I rolled out this comprehensive program where we're dotting all the eyes. We're crossing all the t's but I’m not really doing anything different. So I’ll go “you know what, I’m going back down in the basement.

I’m getting back to my library.

I got to fix this I got to make this better.”

I don't know if it's getting rid of the assassins.

I’m not sure what it is.

So I’m listening to podcasts, I’m going through my books, I’m on Youtube and I run across this guy and he's got that funky name, knees over toes.

I get it I’ve been coaching for 35 years.

This is a guy, who has a program for sale, and his marketing is height.

I get it. He's jumping off the roof.

He's jumping off HVAC units. He's jumping off ladders. His knees are touching the floor. I get all that. He sprayed the cooking all over himself. He looks really good and shiny in the floor of the sun. I get it, I just don't have time for it because I have a comprehensive program that I have to get rolled out.

So I bypass him.

A couple of days later, he pops up on my feed again, that photo to your right and he's doing that ATG split squad and I said man he's stealing stuff from my man Joey Burglas down in Houston Texas, my man Alan Bishop, he's using their stuff to sell his program, right. So I text Joey Burglas, and I say “hey this knee is over toes guys, this Patrick guy, you know him?”

He goes “Stew, Ben Patrick is a good dude, he's a solid dude”, he goes that's just Charles Poliquin's old, because Joey knows I was certified by coach Poliquin back in 2000. So 20 years ago I got the principles of coaching theory.

So he said Ben Patrick is a good dude with a good heart.

Just block out the antics because that's marketing but listen to his message. So I did. I’m listening to this guy talk and it's making sense, I mean this guy, he has more knee pain than me and I’m 50-something years old.

I was like “wow this is crazy man” but still that's not what got me.

This is what got me, Celia his mama, I’m 58, she's 66, I know she's 67 now, she's 66 and I see her doing this.

I’m like “man this lady is a baby boomer like me born between 1946 and 64 and she's doing this stuff, she's not just doing that, she's doing all this stuff, like all the stuff this kid is doing, jumping off the buildings and doing all that, all the exercises he's doing like this lady is doing it. So I’m thinking, I’m gonna give this a try, I could probably do it too.

So I did, I was like “man when I think about my injury history, I’ve had 14 surgeries. I had five surgeries on my back. I’d get back surgery, I’d feel better and then I’d go in a powerlifting meet, you pull 600 650 from the floor then my backside again.

Another year I got to have back surgery, and my wife told me I was cuckoo but I loved lifting so I wasn't going to stop.

So I’m eating anti-inflammatories. I’m eating painkillers. I’m getting cortisone injections on, they went from you can get a cortisone injection once every six months to whenever you want one. We'll give you one. You have no cartilage left in your knee.

So I’m tearing up the cortisone. I’m eating anti-inflammatories and I’m looking at this lady saying, let me get this knees over toe stuff a try.

What is it gonna hurt, right?

So I tried and within I would say five weeks, it might have been for no more than six but I said about five weeks, I’m going downstairs to my basement like I do every day, and normally when I get up in the morning, I go get my hoodie to go to school.

I’m walking sideways because I can't walk straight down the stairs, my knees killing me in the morning, they get better after a couple of hours though.

After I’m doing this for five weeks I go downstairs to get my hoodie and I walk straight downstairs and when I got to the bottom stair I stopped.

I’m like “this is incredible. Like this works. I can get other people to do this. I can sell this. Dude, we can do something with this.”

So I dm Keegan on my way to my daughter's volleyball game.

He's with Real Movement. I dm him and Ben.

I start the ATG group. I’m loving it. it's working.

I got my wife doing it. I got my daughter doing it.

I’m thinking my athletes would get better, maybe their injuries would go down, and maybe I’d be able to present something but this dude went from jumping 19 inches to 42.

My athletes get better and up, this is what I’m looking for, right? This is it.

I’m at my daughter's volleyball game.

So I joined Real Movement I joined ATG group, I’m paying for both of them.

I’m like “hey I just want to do this stuff”.

So I’m telling Ben, “hey can I coach this with other people? How much money do you want?” he was like “you're paying me 50 a month, I don't want it.

I go “you don't understand like I’m going to use this man, this is going to be my business.”

I’m getting ready to get my side hustle at a whole nother level.

I’m willing to pay you for it but if you keep saying you don't want any money then I’m going to take your stuff and run with it, right? So he said “look once you pay me that 50 bucks whatever I have is yours brother, go with it.

I said, “oh it's on.”

So I go to my daughter's volleyball game and this is what I see, I’ve never seen this before and she's been playing volleyball since she was five. Look at their knee position. I’m videotaping my daughter doing kneels because she's a hitter and in the background, I see this.

So I’m blowing these pictures up so I can show you guys.

I was like “oh my god, this knee is over toes guys, like with the volleyball players, man so I’m gonna but there's already a volleyball strength coach, not gonna take your stuff brother but I was thinking about it.

I’ll mark it strictly to volleyball take care of my daughter, and her friends, and come up.

So even bilateral, look how far their knees are over toes.

I got to do this.

But then people are on social media and they're bashing “why that's crazy, it's extreme, coach that's dangerous, people even d dm me Stew, don't do that, coach V don't try that, that's dangerous.”

Dangerous, is it really dangerous to put your knee in that extreme position? It's dangerous, right?

My daughter does this for three games.

They play in at least two sets, they might play three sets and they might have three or four games in the tournament and you're telling me this danger so I shouldn't coach this in the weight room but they're gonna do this on the court.

Like if you knew nothing at all about strength and conditioning and you see this guy on the left in this position and this guy on the right in this position and you know your kid ends up in this position numerous times during the course of one set, not counting how many games they play or the multiple sets in the games like which one makes more sense to you, ding ding ding ding ding, It's not rocket science baby.

Now what, what am I going to do now? I have to find a way to make ATG work for the developmental athlete, the high school athlete into my long-term athletic program.

So what am I gonna do? I’m not sure but I got to make it work and just like Charles Poliquin said “you can't ride two horses with one ass” I gotta either sit or get off the park, I got to pick and choose so do I stay with the other old coaches like myself who “we don't push the knees over their toes, we're not going to do Nordics because you're going to tear your hamstrings”, do I ride with them or I’m going to jump?

I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna hitch my horse to that ATG wagon with these two old Ben and Keegan here and I’m driving this wagon and we're gonna see how far this takes us down the path.

That's what I’m gonna do and that's why I decided to do it.

The beauty of it is, Keegan and Ben have already laid out my checklist manifesto with zero and with dense, and with standards, everything is already laid out.

I don't have to go through that again and reinvent the wheel, it's already there for me.

It's just a perfect transition, it's seamless.

So for me, this was a no-brainer. I appreciate your time.

Keegan, I don't know if you want me to take questions if they have any now or if you want to roll right into the next presenter and get me out of the way.

Man but thank you guys for listening to me, I appreciate it.

KEEGAN: that was great Stew, really really good. Make sure you follow @coachvenable on Instagram and always brings a lot of energy every week so really really appreciate that the honesty and the delivery there is spot on.

It's good you're bringing your human slant to it, your background, that's what makes this real, like it's literally gone and changing these kids’ lives.

Kids that are coming from all sorts of backgrounds.

You having the openness to stay fresh after so many different experiences, is just really really powerful.

I would like to keep moving but I would like to also circle back for questions.

So if you want to type questions in there guys, you can now.

But that high school level, I think we really need to do a whole call about the high school level.

I know there are a bunch of guys that are working with that kind of age bracket.

I think it is a specific sort of conversation. It'd be great to hear about what you're already seeing with it as well you get your own experience but I’m sure you're passing it on as well.

So maybe we can have a little discussion about that.

Let's see how we go for time. GRAHAM: I got a question for Stewart, I don't know if he's still on. So regards to the FMS, are you still using that?

So I’ve kind of struggled with that as a very static assessment relatively something like sprinting but knowing what you know now about the ATG is that something you've adapted for use or you kind of tossed it out or you know, what's your process for that?

STEWART: Graham, I’m still here and that's the easy one.

I’m gonna toss it out it took too much time and we didn't really go back to it so we collected the data from nothing. So I’m done with it. GRAHAM: So have you replaced that with a different type of assessment tool or do you basically just use the standards like can you do the calf raises and the overall movement if they can achieve those they're passing that or what's taking that place?

STEWART: No like you said, I’m going to use the standards and then I’m going assess based on that. We always had that saying that “if you're not assessing, you're guessing”, so I felt compelled to use some system and I’ve used a couple other things other than the FMS. I just like that a lot but it was too time-consuming and we really didn't go back to it with the corrective exercises anyway.

We haven't looked at that data since we initially collected and like I said it took 25 of our time just to collect all the data so I’m done with it.

GRAHAM: All right it makes sense. JET: Following on from that then which is basically this could be first Stewart… and Rodrigo and all of you really, I’m interested in how much people are using the ATG system verbatim like straight exactly as it is and how much people are kind of using elements of it but modifying it to how they would otherwise implement their own training style and I asked because I teach like martial arts and so I obviously can't simply just teach the ATG system and so it's more about integrating it as much as I can into an existing system which has a long history in itself. RODRIGO: I’m happy to answer this a little bit.

So from my end, I’ve had a variety of personally I try I start everyone doing it almost verbatim.

I think it's like before you start playing around with it it's best to just use it as it is.

You'll understand the intent behind it so much better and now that I’ve had the intent much more in my head and in my client's head then I started to tweak things depending on their more specific needs but usually you're covering all the bases with what's already there and then you can start to play around with it.

So that's kind of how I go wrong with it with most clients and with my own training.

I just did it, the whole thing just from a to z, just do the whole thing, and then, for example, I’ve had clients that are like “are we gonna do this for 12 weeks? It's too long. I’m paying you all this money…” and so sometimes I’ll do the same thing with a different tool or with a slightly different order so that that just gives them a little bit, they feel like they're doing something different and it's more for an entertainment purpose if I’m totally honest with you because the system works.

You don't really have to change too much to have great success with it.

So it's a gold mine just by itself. It's pure gold.

So I think that's kind of my two cents on that. I don't know if Stuart and … have some other thoughts on it.

JET: Well I mean it's good to hear because I guess that's the thing, right?

People coming to me they're like “I want to learn martial arts” and I’m basically saying “yeah and we'll get to that but first I want you to do like 12 weeks of this” and then that'll basically be my assessment and where I figure out where you're at and I can kind of drip feed in a little bit of the martial artwork as we go, so by the time we hit the 12-week period, I’m feeling more confident about what I can show you and what you need to work on.

So it's good to hear that you say you're happy to just push people 12 straight away.

RODRIGO: Since you're also doing a martial arts component, I could easily see how you could kind of martial arts-ish like an ATG split squat.

You could almost like put makeup on it and make it look like it's a martial arts, like a position and you just give it a little bit of a thoracic rotation and just arms extended or something and I think you can kind of massage things around to kind of make it that type of stuff. For example, If I’m aiming to park and I have no walls to do an anterior tibialis, I’ll have them be in the top position of an ATG split squat and just do the top.

They're doing an anterior tibialis on the front leg so from a split stance they're just doing one of those.

So you can just have them be in different positions and you can kind of play around with it just making sure that you're hitting as many of the key pieces as possible, like you could do a two-month period or at least the first month and a half six weeks or something of just focusing on zero movements and then you can start playing around with some dense like sequencing, so you do every minute-on-the-minute type stuff for the first 20 or 30 minutes.

Those are some thoughts because I’m sure they're like “I wanna learn” what you're paying me for at the same time but I sometimes hide the medicine in the food type of thing, same thing that I do with my dog so I don't know kind of that's the thought process that comes to mind for me.

STEWART: I’m kind of different Jet because I have those developmental athletes and I can push the zero program on the freshman and do it, follow the zero program as it is because they're freshmen and 90% of them have never touched the weight before.

I can't do that with a high school kid that has lifted his freshman year, his sophomore year and now he's a junior and he's 16, 17 years old.

I can't start him with the zero program so I got to pull aspects of that and that's currently what I’m going through now.

I got to pull aspects of that and use it for the warm-up where before I was doing five reps of Romanian deadlift bent over row, upright row, shoulder press, and squat go through that for two circuits.

It takes six minutes, seven minutes and then we start our workout and I work out of spree blocks, it's a core exercise and two accessory exercises.

So with my older kids, juniors and seniors, I can pull part of the zero program and use that for the warm-up or for the technique aspect before I get into the three working blocks and when I get to the three working blocks, you can't tell a 17-year-old boy he can't bench press anymore, he's not going to get that.

So I can put him on a dense program and go you can bench press but we're also going to follow up with accessory, with dumbbell bench presses neutral grip, try to get the head of the dumbbell all to your shoulder, and then we're gonna superset that with bent over rose.

So I can use it that way and that's what I’m going through now because not only will I lose my older kids and they just flip me the bird and be gone, I’m gonna lose a lot of the older coaches.

So I’m not sure where you live but whether it's football, rugby whatever.

Imagine the old school coach that's been coaching for 20 years or 25 years, what we have at the high school level, I’ll go “we're not going to clean a deadlift or back squat anymore with the football players, we're going to do tip raises, calf raises, sissy squats” and he will say “you're not going to train my athletes”.

So I can't force that on my old athletes if that makes sense, I’m gonna have to integrate and that's what I’m in the process of doing now.

KEEGAN: That's a great answer and I would definitely go more that way working with the team as well like you got to make it feel and you can play with the volumes and things to give them that sensation, you can still get their numbers up but you can make sure the program underlying is slanted towards what's going to matter most.

I love that and there's still something to be said for squat bench dead as long as it's not the only way and it depends on a lot of the details.

So Ben's got something for us here he's been waiting there patiently to share some thoughts.

BEN: Firstly, I just wanted to say a fantastic job, everyone.

I think that was really really great.

Just sort of to get what Stewart was saying, just to sort of summarizing, I think in some ways the whole ATG system which is in some ways your conclusion of getting rid of the FMS assessment is something that Charles told me. He said, “training is assessment”.

So fundamentally what we're doing when we put our athletes and our clients and old, young, and all that kind of stuff, is you're seeing it and with the standards, you're seeing it.

They're doing the exercises and that's the measurement and they do the exercises.

So fundamentally what Keegan's done and what Ben's done together is that in one encapsulation which is training is assessment, as opposed to assessments over here, we do all this training and then you come back to the assessment, is it better? isn't it better?

And I think that's the fundamental flaw with the FMS system and all these other systems is exactly what Keegan's done.

The magic of it is the mobility in the way of the long and the short range, all that stuff, that's magical because that's the stuff that as Keegan said before the esotericism of Charles.

I mean I claim that it was there but not in the way that Keegan and Ben have articulated it such that it's systematic and that we're getting these things like the human knee extension, all these kinds of things and so I think that's great because you just summarized and all of what you're saying, the conclusion is that you did it in practice where you fundamentally concluded that training is assessment.

Anyway I just wanted to say fantastic and I think that's the point that fundamentally this whole system hinges on, we have it every day, every session you do that and just add a little bit, I have a jiu-jitsu athlete that's done MCL two weeks ago and she's done zero every day.

So you can up zero to every day.

So Zero you can up the entity, I think the other stuff you gotta be more careful with but fundamentally I think the magic is zero you can go every day and I have another athlete as they're talking about is saying is 30 minutes of zero and then 30 minutes of jiu-jitsu.

So if you zoom right into it and it could be anything that could be basketball as Ben would be, you can do it, and then as Keegan's saying on fields you could do that, you could easily make a football team do it as a warm-up because it doesn't even feel like quote-unquote strength training, oh it's the warm-up and then you go into the gym and you hit the weights and you're doing bench press, bench squat, dead clean but you're doing all the other stuff.

So in some ways, it's very easy to integrate, I think and any way that's my one cent.

KEEGAN: 100%, you just see “okay they can't do this exercise right”, let's try this one instead.

Let's do this in between, let's spend some more time paused in the bottom.

I love making those little adjustments on the fly and showing them.

Let's take some weight off. Let's spend some more time in that stretch position.

Let's do these in between.

Most people really love those small individualizations that fits within the group environment.

You can get the most out of it for everybody.

People feel special with getting their right regressions.

It was great to have everyone on today and I really love these shares.

I think there's so much value in hearing how different people are applying it and just making those connections as well.

Please your Instagram links in there but you can also connect with each other through mighty networks and see each other's profiles and whatnot.

I think a lot of the great things that will come out of this network will be through the relationships that are built and people just going out and making changes.

The majority of people have never heard of ATG still, most athletes still don't know what it is, or why it works, maybe some people have seen the account but they still don't have any idea what it's all about.

So it's still very much like day zero for this and think about Charles Poliquin and he covered a lot and whatnot, the fact is it didn't get out to 99% of gym goers.

They've never heard of him. They don't know why they're doing… some of his movements might be there or whatnot but it's all still ahead of us.

This is day zero for making a real change in the way high school athletes are trained and the way strength coaches are thinking about their training and we have a massive opportunity.

I love this chance to connect as a community makes it all the more real and hearing these real-life scenarios.

So you can feel free to drop your Insta in there and catch up and connect with others Patrick did a really good job earlier in the week.

I don't know if we've got the recording for that, Patrick if you can help us out with it but he did a presentation around the BFR training which was really cool.

He did a great job presenting that, I think that does have application.

I think it crosses over quite a bit with how we attack the sled work.

I think that there's a crossover with those theories and the way you know Westside Barbell attacks the belt squats and the sled work and those sorts of things.

I think there is a crossover with that and the blood flow restriction and I’ve got some cool stuff coming up for you this week, things I’ve been thinking about but thanks, guys.