Excerpts.

About 7 or 8 years ago I thought seriously about writing a book about weightlifting. There were of course many good (and a few great) books on the sport available, but I didn’t think the one that would have helped ME the most when I first started had been written yet. And that is the book I wanted to write.

As I am all too prone to do, I put some work into it and then didn’t finish. Raising kids, building a business, coaching, moving, etc, all took away from that couple of hours a day that you have to sit down and write every day if you ever want to finish a book. Over the past few years I have tried to start again here and there. I have produced some pages of manuscript, but always stopped for one reason or another.

But, I think the time is right go ahead and finish. So I have decided to publish some excerpts from what is finished so far for motivation, and maybe some feedback. This is the first of several excerpts that I plan to put on this blog. Hope you like where I decided to go with the book.

Excerpt 1

I can remember reading some of the material written on weightlifting way back when I first got interested in the sport. Stuff like Bud Charniga’s translated Russian texts, or Verkoshansky’s book “Supertraining”. Excellent books, and they were as interesting as they could be. But I was often left with the feeling of “ok, that was all really cool, but when I go to the gym tomorrow, how do I apply that information”. How do I use what I just read to pick exercises, weights, sets, and reps to do?

Not because stuff like that isn’t great stuff (it is) but with much of the better material written on weightlifting, there has been a definite assumption by the author that the reader knows or understands certain things about the sport before picking up the book. Since I didn’t have this assumed basic knowledge at the time it was fairly frustrating to read them. I knew there was some really great information, but was not quite be able to understand it well enough to apply it.

Then you have a book like Arthur Dreschler’s “Encyclopedia of Weightlifting”. One of my favorite books and one I think that every weightlifter, and everyone who uses the any variation of the competitive lifts in training in any capacity for that matter, should own. There is probably not one single fact that a beginner needs to know that is not in that book. But I have heard from many a beginner that the book is simply overwhelming in the detail it covers, and that because it is a mostly descriptive book, describing many different approaches to training instead of advocating one system, that again, it can be read by a rank beginner and still leave one with the feeling of “that was great, but I’m still not sure what I need to do when I go to the gym tomorrow.

And that is why 7 or 8 years ago when I first considered the possibility of writing a book about weightlifting, I decided I definitely wanted it to be something that a total beginner could read and feel comfortable with. Feel like he or she could apply the information directly to planning the next workout, or week of workouts, and actually have an understanding of the process of developing a training process, and training. Demystify the process, so to speak.