REVIEW: Easy Strength seminar by Dan John & Pavel

This was a L-O-N-G view.  It was 14 DVDs!  If you've viewed Dan Johns DVD set Intervention, then you will have seen some of the Dan John stuff before, that's not necessarily a bad thing as I think he uses quite a basic, understandable approach, but if you are thinking about getting one or the other this covers a lot of the same ground & includes Pavel as well.  I liked the theoretical stuff, & just about all the training hints they have are going to be useful to someone.  It's a shame they didn't have an 'average' trainee to use as most of the people doing the lifts were pretty good (not your typical people turning up in the gym), but you can only show what you can show, but bare in mind that you yourself or your clients if you are in the business will not be so proficient at the lifts & will need a lot more coaching & time to get things right.  I did have my doubts about one aspect of the DVD set & that was the 'Even easier strength' section.  This was picking 5 lifts, done at a very low percentage of your maximum (say half what you could normally lift) & doing 3x3, 5,3,2, 5x2 or 10x1 (reps first then sets, so 10x1 is 10 reps/1 set) up to 5 times a week for 40 days.  They didn't seem to cover 'accommodation' into the example.  Accommodation is where you actually become more efficient at doing a movement, so you can lose muscular size & absolute strength by doing the same weight over & over.  As an example think of the guy at the gym you saw doing the same weight 12 months ago as today, often you'll see they look worse than they did 12 months ago when they first started doing that weight, this is because the body has adapted to that weight & actually working LESS to move it than when they first did it.  I don't really follow how NOT progressing could be better?  It is progression that leads to positive adaptation that lead to greater strength &/or size.  Maybe for an in-season athlete it may kind of keep them ticking over, but I can't see where the claimed big strength increases would come from?  Maybe I just don't know the science enough, but all of my training career the basic idea of progressive overload has been the cornerstone of my training routines.  I couldn't follow their arguments, they didn't make sense to me.  That was my one gripe with this DVD set.  It was only one piece of a really big DVD set, so I can't complain as most of it was pretty interesting.

This set is a lot of cash, so you might not be interested in getting it unless you are an athlete or train athletes or really like Dan John &/or Pavel, but for an athlete who isn't into lifting sports (so not a powerlifter or O-lifter) this will give you some idea how to structure your training for best results.

For full details about the DVD click here