John - Can you go? : assessments and program design for the active athlete and everybody else

Can You Go?

Can You Go?

Assessments and Program Design for the
Active Athlete and Everybody Else

Dan John

Foreword
Chad Harbach

On Target Publications
Santa Cruz, California

Can You Go?

Assessments and Program Design for the Active Athlete and Everybody Else

Dan John

Foreword by Chad Harbach

Copyright 2015 Daniel Arthur John

Foreword 2015 Chad Harbach

ISBN-13: 978-1-931046-74-9

First printing May 2015

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America using recycled paper. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author or publisher, with the exception of the inclusions of brief quotations in articles or reviews.

On Target Publications

P O Box 1335

Aptos, California 95001 USA

www.otpbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

John, Dan, 1957

Can you go? : assessments and program design for the active athlete and everybody else / Dan John ; foreword by Chad Harbach.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-931046-74-9

1. AthletesTraining of. 2. Coaching (Athletics)Study and teaching. 3. Personal trainersStudy and teaching. I. Title.

GV711.5.J65 2015

796.07'7dc23

2015007672

Also by Dan John

Intervention

Never Let Go

Mass Made Simple

From Dad to Grad

Easy Strength (with Pavel Tsatsouline)

Fat Loss Happens on Monday (with Josh Hillis)

Dedication

To Kelly and Lindsay
For everything, every day

To my brother, Gary
For always being there

To my friends who died that August day
Long Live the Brotherhood

Contents

Foreword

I FIRST STUMBLED ACROSS Dan Johns work in 2012, a year I spent traveling on a book tour and living out of hotels. The hotels didnt have gyms, and when they did I was too beat to use them. My workouts involved a few pushups before breakfast and plenty of pint curls after dinner, plus many hours crunched into a middle airplane seat.

At least I was doing a lot of suitcase walks, though I didnt have a name for them yet.

No doubt because I felt deprived of physical exertion, I found myself, in rare down moments, lying half-asleep on the hotel bed, reading about physical exertion. Through who-knows-what labyrinth of link-clicking, I found an article by a guy named Dan John. Its clarityits simplicitystopped me short: Here, plain as your nose, was the truth about working out.

Soon I hopped up to test whatever the article suggestedBulgarian goat bag swings, I think. Reading Dans work has a way of getting you up on your feet, or down on the floor.

I clicked to a second article, and a third. I went to his blog and immersed myself. I had yet to handle a kettlebell or fix my appalling squat form, but already I knew Id found what Id been seeking. Every hard-won insight Id brushed up against, in three decades of thinking about sports and fitness, was present in every line he wrote.

When my travels ended, I began to practice what Dan preached. Of course, I got stronger and fitter. But more than that, I started thinking about how my fitness fit with everything else. If my weight training and my martial arts practice seemed sometimes to work against each other, instead of harmonizingwell, why was that? Were my workouts making me more energetic? More resilient? Was my mind getting stronger? Was my writing improving?

Under Dans tutelage, I fixed my squat. I stretched my hamstrings and learned to hinge. I bought a kettlebell. I bought a bigger kettlebell. I worked out easier and easier, and harder and harder. I read like-minded experts and attended seminars. I gotam gettingbetter and stronger. Not youngerI hope he includes that trick in his next bookbut better and stronger.

As much as I value Dans programs and protocols and practical insights, what strikes me most about his work is the method and quality of the thinking.

Dan is fond of saying that the body is one piece. You could say the same thing about his body of work. The blog, the articles, the interviews, the booksits all one piece.

That work has a bracing clarity thats instantly recognizable. Its the clarity that comes from thinkers who spend their entire lives in direct, empirical engagement with a subject they love. These people bring to their work as much humility and as few preconceived ideas as possible. Ideas emerge from observation, and not vice versa.

What worksboth for themselves and, usually, for many otherscomes to the fore. Everything else drops away. What remains is a humane, flexible, systematic, nondogmatic approach. The job becomes, as Einstein had it, as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Whenever I find such thinkers, I cling to their work, not just for what I can learn about the subject at handthe subject is almost irrelevantbut for what I can learn about how to live, how to think, how to approach situations.

There are examples, of course, in every field. Im not a kindergarten teacher or a six-year-old, but I can happily reread Maria Montessoris books on education, because her writing is grounded in years of patient observation of the dirt-poor Italian kids she was tasked with teachinga startling number of those kids learned to read at age four.

Ive never written a screenplay, but Story by Robert McKee, whos honed his screenwriting seminar over decades, grasps the form so deeply that I constantly refer to its insights. In fiction, its hard to beat Chekhov for the clarity of his insight into human behavior.

And in strength and fitness, its hard to beat Dan John. I wish like heck somebody had told me about his work in 1981, when I started playing organized sports (I was five), or at least in 1996, when I started lifting weights, but oh well. At least I know it now.

Chad Harbach

NY Times Best Selling Author of The Art of Fielding

For More From Dan John
Wandering Weights: Our Epic Journey
Through All Things Heavy

SOMETIMES YOU MISS THE most interesting training-related articles. Sometimes the ideas in the most talked-about articles are confusing. Youre not sure what to think.

Sometimes Dan just makes you laugh.

Weve gotcha covered! Each Wednesday Dan gives us a short overview of what hes reading and what hes thinking about while he reads. All you have to do to get his weekly review is to sign up.

And when you click the confirmation link, well send you a copy of Dans five-page report on The Quadrants of Diet and Exercise, one of his most-discussed training concepts. Enter your email address at the link below to keep up with Dans conversations.

http://danjohn.net/wandering-weights/

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