Are you sick of "fitness influencers," training fads, and crappy advice that barely applies inside the gym or on the field? Then sit down with elitefts CEO Dave Tate as he interviews the strongest & smartest minds across the strength sports community to talk real, hardcore training, business, life, and more. If you're looking for real, applicable information on all things training, join the crew.
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Standard medical advice after a catastrophic muscle tear will turn a high-performance lifter into a spectator if you blindly follow it. Four months after snapping his bicep off the bone on an axle clean, National Champion Strongman Josh Hendrickson refused to sit passive in a sling and hit a max-effort box squat forty-eight hours before surgery. By defying conservative rehab models, forcing daily…
Most lifters suffer through brutal competition preps not because they lack discipline, but because they are using a physical outcome to mask a broken identity. After a career-ending rugby injury shattered his athletic dreams, Ben Mayfield-Smith rebuilt his mindset by merging raw physical grit with clinical behavioral science. He developed an intensive psychological vetting system designed to…
Choosing between athlete, coach, and gym owner is the only way to avoid burning out—you can only pick two. After 20 years under the barbell and totaling 2,044 raw, Chandler Parsons realized that chasing elite performance, coaching lifters, and building a gym from scratch was a fast track to physical and financial ruin. In this conversation with Dave Tate, the founder of Backyard Barbell and…
Stop chasing cheap metrics in your youth only to end up a broken, thirty-five-year-old former athlete who doesn't even know how to properly brace. When high school geometry teachers double as strength coaches, young lifters pay the price decades later with wrecked spines and destroyed joints. Mark Valenti spent seventeen years on the road as a professional Highland Games athlete and Strongman…
An 185-pound frame earned in the trenches taught Anthony Castore that no protocol can out-discipline a broken foundation. From a 117-pound teenager asking too many questions to a Fellow at the Seeds Scientific Research & Performance Institute, Castore turned an obsession with cellular mechanics into decades of coaching elite athletes, executives, and physicians. Before chasing modern peptide hype…
If you train high school athletes like Division I pros, you are destroying their potential. For 13 years at Wisconsin, Brian Bott built NFL offensive linemen and Rose Bowl champions using old-school grit—only to realize that the biggest mistake strength coaches make is confusing intensity with actual development. Bott reveals the hard-earned wisdom behind taking a 13-year-old from a broken squat…
To survive the brutal reality of elite-level strength, you might have to destroy the very person you spent a lifetime building. Ben Pollack earned a PhD in physical culture history while systematically destroying his own body, ignoring years of excruciating warnings for the sake of world records and plastic trophies. But when a sudden, terrifying neurological shutdown left half his body completely…
You can buy fat loss with an injection, but you cannot fake the raw, violent physical capability required to survive when the lights turn on and the floor turns into a warzone. Before stepping under the Hollywood lights as the new faces of American Gladiators , Daniella Means, Lu Faustin, and Kailey Latimer forged their armor through shattered orbital bones, grueling Division I athletic politics,…
The worst thing that can happen to an elite bencher might be the exact psychological reset needed to save their career. Before Jordan Wong could break all-time world squat records and scale a massive commercial gym facility, he had to navigate a catastrophic, full-tendon pec rupture without health insurance and a surgeon who treated him like a dumb meathead. By ripping up the traditional six-week…
"Your skill set's not going to be lifting weights—it's going to be the sport, but you still have to learn how to strain." For thirteen seasons, including eleven in the collegiate trenches, Lucas White has survived the brutal, revolving-door reality of Division I strength coaching by adapting elite powerlifting principles to hyper-talented athletes who have never had to grind out a rep in their…
