In the 1990s and 2000s, when I was doing most of my own training in basements and garage gyms, the strength section of any well-informed lifter’s bookshelf was short and specific: Mark Rippetoe, Mike Mentzer, Jim Wendler, and Dan John.
John is an All-American discus thrower out of Utah State, a multiple-time Highland Games champion, the American record holder in the weight pentathlon, a Fulbright Scholar with master’s degrees in history and religious education, and the author of Easy Strength (written with Pavel Tsatsouline), Never Let Go, Mass Made Simple, Intervention, and close to two dozen other titles. He has a Substack, and a half-century of doing the work behind him. You can find loads more about his methods at Dan John University.
John came up before there was a word for what he was doing. My dad played offensive line at WVU in the early sixties, where the whole of strength theory was a few check-in numbers and a mile run. He was a few years behind my father, training off a mail-order barbell and a wall of now-vintage strength magazines he refused to throw away. The two books of his I actually trained off, Easy Strength and From the Ground Up, are part of the reason I think about lifting the way I do, and a good deal of what I’ve written here about the strength of strength and the strength of weakness runs straight back to him.
Given the amount of work we’re covering, this is the first of at least two discussions. John and I talked about the Sears barbell that started it, the blessing of being the last kid in your class to hit puberty, stealing the one-percent edge in a library nobody else bothered to visit, the big-time squats and weight gain that actually hampered his throwing development, coaching national champion throwers with no field and no ring, how a stack of folded booklets became real books, and why flossing your teeth puts you in rare air indeed. Part Two gets into the best lifts, best practices, and John’s never-ending education. That’s a lot of work!
On the Sears Barbell and the Incline Bench
Dan’s older brother had just come home from Vietnam, an aunt had died and left the family five hundred dollars, and in 1965 a bit of it went to Sears.
“In 1965 my brother bought the barbell, a hundred and ten pounds, fifty kilos. It came with the Ted Williams set [you can see it here; GOAT hitter Ted did the work], and Ted emphasized everything from the floor. You had to clean everything: clean and press, clean and curl. I fell in love with progressive resistance. I was eight years old, and my big goal was to lift two ten-pound plates.”
A year of saved lawn-mowing quarters bought a Sears incline bench, which then got passed down the family.
“When I went off to Utah State I gave it to my cousin Joey, who became a famous SWAT officer in San Francisco. When he was done with it, he gave it to our cousin Keith [Millard], who was NFL Defensive Player of the Year for the Minnesota Vikings. So somewhere on this planet is an incline bench with enough magic that if you walk close to it, you instantly add twenty pounds to your lifts.”
The cousin is Keith Millard, the Vikings’ All-Pro defensive tackle and 1989 NFL Defensive Player of the Year, and a Tecmo Super Bowl terror (where he is classified as a linebacker for reasons known only to the game’s Japanese programmers) for those of you who, like me, spent the late eighties memorizing which players were difficult to block.
The ninth-grade program that came out of all this, which Dan calls the Southwood Program and says he has written into almost every book since, was four lifts: power clean, military press, front squat, and bench. He graduated high school throwing the discus 170 feet at a bodyweight of 162 pounds, with the best GPA on the team and not a single major college interested in him — and thus headed off to junior college to build his body and refine his skills.
On Being the Last Kid to Hit Puberty
Then he met a coach who taught him the Olympic lifts.
“He taught me the snatch and the clean and jerk, and four months later I weighed two-oh-two. I’d gone from one-sixty-two to two-oh-two, ten pounds a month, and it was all drug-free: thighs, traps, spinal erectors. My brother had just gotten married and hadn’t seen me in a couple of months, and when I walked in he looked up from the kitchen table and just said, ‘Holy ____.’”
Dan credits the timing to genetics and to being the youngest of six, the kid his mother had to kick off to kindergarten a year early. He counts it as luck.
“It is such a blessing to be the last person to hit puberty. I was the youngest of six and the last in my whole cohort, so I’d spent my whole life sprinting to catch up. Then it all arrived in three or four months.”
There’s a coaching point in it. A kid who develops late spends years competing from behind, against bigger bodies, so he learns “extra-edge” skills early because he has no other way to win (Dan Severn discussed this with me as well, in terms of being thrust into a heavyweight wrestling slot as an undersized high school freshman). The early bloomer never has to, which might slow him down later.
On Stealing the One-Percent Edge
His method, as he describes it, is to assume the other guy is more talented and beat him anyway by out-preparing him.
“Everything’s a Gaussian curve. There were people who were just born better. But the idea I got from Bill Witt and a lot of other coaches is that if they leave the door open anywhere, we’ll take it.”
The example he gives is a high school biology trip to San Francisco State.
“We went up for a biology class. I was studying the Pacific bottlenose dolphin, and I had the assignment covered in about five minutes. So I read an article by Dave Davis, who’d interviewed all the top shot putters, and the gist was: combine the Olympic lifts with the power lifts. That was 1974, but it’s still true.”
While everyone else was bodybuilding, in the wake of Pumping Iron and Arnold’s Education of a Bodybuilder, Dan was already mixing the cleans and snatches with the power lifts, the way Mac Wilkins and Brian Oldfield did.
Dan calls bodybuilding a poor template for throwing things far, and quotes the old line about the guy “who looks like Tarzan and plays like Jane” (many such cases). He taught himself the discus turn as a freshman, a year ahead of everyone else, after a memorable welcome to the sport.
“My first meet, San Mateo had this kid who was just huge. He looked at me and said, ‘I’m a big mother,’ and he beat me by forty feet. By my senior year I beat him by about forty feet. I asked him, ‘Do you remember that meet, when you told me you were a big mother?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I remember.’ Early puberty means nothing.”
Ask him whether he understood at the time that he was doing something clever, and he reroutes the question to a maxim he didn’t read until 1996, in a magazine called Success.
“Show up, don’t quit, ask questions. I out-showed-up everybody. I out-didn’t-quit everybody. In football we have a joke: how do you spell fun? W-I-N. I didn’t like taking sixteenth place in a dual meet.”
On the Glaring Mistake
Dan went to a training center he won’t name, except to say the emblem has five rings [editor’s note: there are five rings in the logo for the Olympics], and they told him to get bigger by any means necessary.
“At Utah State I snatched and cleaned and threw the discus far. Some coaches, and I won’t say where, but the emblem has five rings, told me to get my squat way up and eat more carbs. So I did. I got to 273 pounds, 124 kilos, and [high-bar] squatted 605 pounds for three [editor’s note: this is extremely difficult, but athletes “need to bend their knees,” as Dan noted]. I could have done more, but I was scaring the spotters. And it destroyed me. My best years as a thrower, I weighed between 218 and 231 pounds. When I got bigger I just got slovenly.”
He uses a line from the writer Steve Ilg to describe it.
“Ilg has this line that fit comes from the old Norse, to be knitted [fitja, “knit”]. At those weights I was knitted. The joke was that I could pick up a flight of stairs but couldn’t walk up one.”
The corrective came from Glenn Passey, the discus champion out of Utah State, whose strength standard Dan still teaches. Clean and press your bodyweight, snatch your bodyweight, clean and jerk about twenty pounds more, and you are strong enough to throw at the international level. Hit those numbers and stop chasing the barbell.
“Passey told me he sometimes only lifted twice a month, just to test whether he was still strong enough. Think about what his recovery and his nervous system were doing. They were just throwing the discus. He wasn’t burning all that nervous energy in the weight room.”
I told Dan this was similar to my father’s WVU regimen from the early sixties: a short list of check-in numbers for a few lifts, a mile run (unthinkable for sumo-sized linemen today, but both he and Michael Oriard at Notre Dame told me they needed to complete that in under 6:30], and not one further thought about training. Dan’s point is that the high school in his part of Utah now fields offensive lines where all five starters weigh over 300 pounds, while he would take five kids who weigh 240 and can snatch 240 over that every time , for the wins and for the longer, healthier life on the other side of the sport (the service academies still enjoy modest success with a variant on this philosophy of size).
On Coaching for the Long Haul
Dan coaches for the life an athlete has after the sport.
“My doctor is a former athlete of mine. So is my lawyer. So is my mortician, because you hit a certain age and you’d be an idiot not to handle that. One of my best athletes ever is a professor of ceramics in Texas. None of those guys made it at the next level, and that’s what I want. I don’t want them limping around or sitting in a chair like the classic old strength coach.”
We got onto the subject of the strength-coach posture you learn to recognize on a Zoom call, the lean-back-and-tilt-the-nose-up pose, and the fact that for some of these big men the kindest thing you can hope is that they taking care of their cardiovascular health. My father and his brother both died from heart attacks, so this is not abstract to me. Dan would not accept it as the standard.
“Could you imagine? Somebody says, ‘Heard you interviewed Dan John, how’s he doing?’ ‘Oh man, he’s still breathing.’ Let’s do a little better than that.”
He wants better, and the reason is his grandkids.
“I’ve got five grandkids, and I want to be around for them. I’ve got two books out already this year and a lot more I want to say.”
On the Given and the Proof
Dan traces the method to a few things that came to him easily.
“Judo was the first sport like that. Being the youngest of six with five older brothers, I was constantly getting my butt handed to me, so the first time I dealt with someone my own size it was the most natural thing I’d ever done. Then the Ted Williams book: here’s where you start, here’s where you want to go. Geometry was my easiest class, because you start with a given and prove your way to where you want to be. Theology was simple for the same reason. Progression draws me like a moth to a light.”
The first thing his Utah State coach Ralph Maughan ever told the throwers was “little and often over the long haul,” and Dan has trained that way for fifty years. When people ask him the secret of fat loss, the answer is always consistency, not some magical number of steps. It also explains a coaching story he told me, about a national champion he produced at an academic school with no facilities.
“I had a national champion in the discus, but we had no field and no ring. What we had were little power balls and a wall. So I built a system to teach athletes to throw the discus with no discus and no field, and coaches drove in from all over the country to watch. The given was a wall and the proof was as many state champions as I could make.”
He sets that against the multi-billion-dollar Division I facilities that, in his telling, mistake having everything for being good at anything. His model is Boyd Epley, the Nebraska strength coach — the man who created that field as well as decades of massive Nebraska linemen — who said football needs two lifts: the power clean and the squat.
“I’ll walk into your facility, see your linemen doing shoulder-rehab exercises, and ask, ‘What do these guys clean?’ ‘Oh, we don’t teach the clean, it’s too complex.’ You’re a college strength coach. That’s like a high school saying we won’t teach math because it’s too hard, or we won’t finish Hamlet because there are too many dead bodies and we don’t want the kids to feel bad. What’s your job? It says strength and conditioning coach on the door.”
On How the Booklets Became Books
Dan’s books came out of his coaching by the same progression, starting from single sheets of paper. Ask him how he learned to coach and he starts by telling you the job is harder than it looks.
“If you think you’re a good coach, go coach sophomore high school football. You’ve got twenty-five seconds to get eleven fourteen-year-old boys to line up and do the exact same thing, and the other team is well coached and trying to beat their brains out.”
The booklets arose from repeatedly being asked to explain his methods.
“Somebody would ask me to explain something, so I’d chart it out. Then the chart needed words, and the words became paragraphs, then chapters. Pretty soon I had these little eight-page booklets folded out of two sheets of paper, and I had enough on those eight pages to take a kid to a national championship. From there it became PDFs, and then books. From the Ground Up, Easy Strength.”
The thing he kept from it is an email from 2006.
“Somebody who’d just qualified for our Olympic team, top three at the trials, wrote to thank me, because the only resource he could find when he started was a contrarian approach to the discus throw I’d written in 2002. I’d never met him. He took what I wrote, trained for a decade, and made the team. That alone makes it worth it.”
When people wave off the writing as a gift, he holds up his extensive notes, and thanks the man who helped teach him to write.
“My best proofreader, Jack Schrader, had been managing editor of the Salt Lake Tribune. He’d take my article, put his finger on the page, and say, ‘Right here is where you caught your audience.’ Sometimes he’d just nod and walk out, which meant it wasn’t a bad article, I’d simply never caught the audience. It was one step from a memo on the cafeteria wall.”
His line for aspiring writers is the same one he gives aspiring throwers. Sprinters sprint, hurdlers hurdle, throwers throw, jumpers jump. Writers write.
On Embracing the Bad Workout
Dan thinks it’s foolish to expect that each workout will be some sort of masterpiece. Instead, focus on consistency — little and often.
“One in five workouts is bad. Just embrace it. Even my bad workouts beat the people who don’t work out at all. Every workout is a brick, and if you stack enough bricks you’ve got the Great Wall of China. But people come to me and say, ‘Dan, this brick isn’t perfect, it’s got a rounded edge, we can’t use it.’ Do that and you’ll never build the wall.”
He is honest about what he leaves out.
“I only share the ideas that work. You’ll never hear me say that was the twenty-eighth of twenty-seven straight stupid ideas. And always do everything yourself before you recommend it.”
It applies to writing too. I’ve published in some form for twenty-some years, and the only way I know to do it is to write whether the day’s work is at 100 percent or 70. The level of the bricks comes up only if you keep laying them.
On Flossing and Lifting
Near the end he gave me another piece of universal advice, and it was about teeth.
“My dentist says at best one in twenty people floss. About one in twenty Americans exercise at all. But walk into a typical gym, and only about one person in two to five hundred is actually lifting weights. So, gentle listener, if you want to be in absolutely rare air: floss your teeth and lift weights.”
He keeps floss sticks in the car and flosses while he drives because there “ain’t nothing to it but to do it.”
“If you want to lose weight, stop talking about it. You know what to do. If you can’t get enough sleep, go to bed instead of watching TV, for God’s sake. My mom believed the hours before midnight were the most valuable for sleep. If you’re not eating your vegetables and you’re not in bed by nine, I don’t want to hear your nonsense about when to preload creatine for a macrocycle.”
Show up, don’t quit, ask questions. Dan has done all three for sixty years and is still doing that essential labor. He’ll be back for part two to go into greater detail about the various lifts and how his thinking about them (and programming in general) has evolved over the years.
