The plot thickens.
I had been aware of the fact that there’s a lotta bickering, petty name calling and under the breath talking going on in the fitness business but never fully understood why until I received my own fair share of it.
Even now I’m having a hard time grasping what drives someone to start online brawls when our focus should be on helping people make their lives and bodies more awesome through proper training and nutrition info.
Apparently this was not the case with a certain female who, after spewing scientifically invalid theories in spite of an overwhelming amount of anecdotal evidence pointing to the contrary, observed mainly in weightlifters and other strength athletes all over the world, simply shrugged off my arguments regarding squatting technique, depth, frequency etc. with this following clever, obnoxious line on my Facebook wall:
“Right, and with my doctorate, and your online education, I’ll be sure to recommend people to you so I get more business :)”
After briefly having pondered about her ulterior motives for acting like a bratty kid, her amusing holier-than-thou attitude and whose knob she had been sucking in order to get those online brass balls to be talking shit about others in the utmost disrespectful manner, I went about my business and had all but forgotten about the whole incident until the other day when I – much like an alert-minded protagonist in a John Grisham novel – felt that something was not fitting in the bigger picture.
Her claim about me having been in this business for 35 years.
I was racking my brain over it and finally came to the conclusion that the only person with a track record of that magnitude I know of is Mark Rippetoe, pictured here with two revolvers.
Much like a younger, more suave version of Robert Downey Jr. – aided by unmatchable Holmesian sharpness – I quickly reasoned that all along she had been referring to this article on squatting by Rippetoe which I had merely posted up because I thought it was a damn good read, preventing beginners from squatting the wrong way.
So in essence, what had happened was she thought I was Mark Rippetoe.
Is there anybody this side of Stevie Wonder who can’t see this is clearly not the case? Any living, breathing human being with an alleged IQ higher than that of a bag of toilet paper, thinking I’m the author of Starting Strength and like to give coaching cues while enticing proper technique with the help of a machete, belongs in a nice, cozy, white padded room wearing a stray jacket.
How an “educated” woman waving around her doctorate possesses the competence to fail in life this badly is beyond me. Not even Paris Hilton’s dog could make such a huge fucking blunder.
Nonetheless, bullshit aside, this showcases all her original claims in an even more absurd light – as if that was possible.
Now I’m sure Rippetoe doesn’t need anybody jumping in and validating his work. I’d still like to point out that this Laura Steffen woman accused me of not knowing how to squat while under the impression that I was Mark.
Saying that he doesn’t know his shit about squatting is like saying Ron Jeremy doesn’t know how to bang chicks. (1)
Impugning the author of Starting Strength, one of the most comprehensive guides to barbell training you’ll ever read, and questioning his ability to teach a proper, deep squat is a bit of a tall order, don’t you think? (2)
What next, Usain Bolt doesn’t know how to run fast?
Final clarification - I am NOT this guy
Hence, this woman has managed to pull off the unthinkable, stripping Tiger Woods off his baton as the culprit of a monumental faux pas and giving a fresh new meaning to the term “a fuck-up of immense proportions”.
Look for the 2012 edition of the Oxford Dictionary. Her face will be right next to the word “clusterfuck”.
To recap:
1. She mocked Mark Rippetoe, openly accusing him that everything he knows about squatting is wrong. What you think of him as a person is one thing but you can’t deny his knowledge.
2. In what might be her biggest crime overall, she mistakenly took me for a 50+ year-old fella with 35 years’ worth of involvement in the fitness industry. Do I look like some fucking guy who has passed the half-century mark? I might just cry myself to sleep over this tonight.
3. She arrogantly retorted with how her formal education by some means was superior to decades spent in the trenches.
4. In all earnestness, how a person can completely ignore both the scientific research concluded by guys like Prof. Vladimir Zatsiorsky – a Soviet strength expert – and the anecdotal evidence from coaches like Ivan Abadjiev and other advocates of high frequency squatting (besides the Bulgarians, Soviet and Chinese Olympic lifting programs instantly come to mind) that have molded a bunch of ultra-successful strength athletes such as Naim Suleymanoglu, arguably the greatest weightlifter of all time, is beyond me.
There’s a damn good reason as to why squatting deep, heavy and often is good for you, as clearly demonstrated by their remarkable achievements at the Summer Olympics. (3)
“[Suleymanoglu] won three Olympic Championships, seven World Championships and six European Championships and earned 46 world records.” (4)
Anatomical demonstration of how deep squatting does not - and should not - automatically mean rounding of the lower back (5)
And now that we already touched on the methods of Eastern European lifters:
“Russian strength researchers discovered that fragmentation of the training volume into smaller units is very effective for promoting strength adaptation, especially in the nervous system. In other words, one set of five every day is better than five sets of five every five days.” (6)
- and in layman’s terms -
“If you are serious about achieving your goals, you need to focus on doing the things that will best help you achieve those goals. If you currently squat 300 pounds for 1 repetition and want to back squat 500 pounds for 1 repetition, your time would be better spent on doing a lot of heavy back squats rather than nonspecific exercises such as leg extensions and goblet squats, especially for high reps.” (7)
Furthermore, her position extensively degrades the work of the more well-known coaches of recent times, like John Broz or Pavel Tsatsouline which I won’t be delving any deeper into since I’m not gonna beat a dead horse any longer. Either that or because my eyes are about to start bleeding at this point.
In any case, the bottom line is pretty damn obvious.
It’s quite laughable and speaks volumes about the caliber of her character when some never-heard broad who has spent a couple of years memorizing lines in a bunch of textbooks discredits few of the most accomplished coaches in this industry who’ve got decades of hands-on experience under their belts and the results to show for it.
As evidenced by her demeanor, a few arbitrary letters after your name and a shiny diploma hanging on your office wall doesn’t prevent you from looking like a complete tool – I doubt anybody needs to go to college to uncover that.
You’d have thought obtaining a doctorate might require at least a decent amount of reading comprehension and analytical skills. Thanks for restoring my faith in the suckiness of class room learning over real world experience.
To top things off, here are a few wise words from Joe DeFranco on why you shouldn’t blindly follow science.
“If you try something with your athletes and it works; it shouldn’t matter what the “research” says! If you want to ‘make it’ in this business and actually have athletes seek you out and pay you for your expertise, remember this quote: “RESULTS trump RESEARCH!” Athletes don’t give a shit “what the research says”; all they care about is what you do for them.” (8)
“Don’t get me wrong; I have read countless books, articles, studies and translated texts regarding human performance — and I learned something from almost all of them. (In fact, my training library is so big I had to look into renting a storage unit when my twins were born lol!) With that being said, I’ve also learned that you shouldn’t believe everything you read. Every athlete is different and every situation is different.”
I guess at this point we can state that if there ever was a perfect situation to cue in this picture, now would be it:
I could go on but I think her ass has already been handed to her over and over again so many times that that red swelling on her buttocks will take quite a long time to heal, so right now appears to be the perfect moment to head to the gym, get back to business, load the bar with heavy-ass weights and squat deep.
References:
(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/books/review/Stern.t.html
(2) http://www.amazon.com/Starting-Strength-3rd-Mark-Rippetoe/dp/0982522738/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326554689&sr=8-1
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightlifting_at_the_Summer_Olympics
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naim_S%C3%BCleymano%C4%9Flu
(5) Rippetoe, Mark and Lon Kilgore: Starting Strength, 2nd ed. p. 31 Aasgaard Company 2007
(6) http://humanmachine.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/grease-the-groove-for-strength/
(7) http://www.charlespoliquin.com/ArticlesMultimedia/Articles/Article/491/Five_Lessons_I_Learned_from_Ivan_Abadjiev.aspx
(8) http://www.defrancostraining.com/ask-joe-test/41-strength-training/248-scientist-vs-coach-whats-the-difference.html
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