I’m Not the Best, Not by a Long Shot: Boston Seminar Review
By The Doorman
For www.EliteFTS.com

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“You never want a solution,” declared Dave Tate, pacing, a row of flat benches behind him. Before him, a room filled with aspiring athletes, coaches, and trainers sat waiting for more. “You want an idea.”

I had an idea, for sure, but it wasn’t one I wanted to think about in the twelve hours before Dave Tate planted this little seed. My idea was that I wasn’t the best—not the best by a long shot. Vast portions of the program at Saturday’s EFS seminar/panel discussion/self-help clinic at Total Performance Sports in Everett, Massachusetts covered the various psychological aspects of becoming a champion. Dave, Jim Wendler, Matt Kroczaleski (when Matt takes the floor, it’s like a damned revival meeting), and Marc Bartley went over the entire mental game ad nauseum. What they said reinforced the one driving force in my life—the fact that I’m not the best.

Why am I not the best? The best flew to Boston. They stayed in a luxury hotel, ate steak, drank beer, and talked training while I drove four hours from New York with the “Sleep Apneac” through the middle of a stifling New England night in a ten-year-old car with faulty air conditioning and a passenger-side window hindered by what mechanics call a “lazy motor.” The best didn’t stay among the Massholes at the Econo Lodge “shooting gallery motel” in Malden. The best didn’t lie awake through the buzzsaw until three in the morning wondering if the Sleep Apneac would keep finding his breath enough times to make it through the night. There were moments I wished he wouldn’t so I could get some goddamned unfettered sleep after working all day.

“How about that place?” I asked, pointing. “The Broken Yolk. They gotta have breakfast there.”

“What does that mean?”

“Broken Yolk, you ****ing moron. As in a ****ing egg yolk.”

The Broken Yolk. Welcome to the great state of Mass-o-mutants, losers. I kept driving. I hardly wanted to take the time to further explain the concept of egg yolks to the loudest sleeper in the known universe.

You’ve never heard anything like this guy in your entire life. Trust me, you haven’t. His timing is impeccable. At that crucial split second just before the moment when you’ll finally be able to drop off into oblivion, the whale clears his blowhole and you’re back to square one. All you want is for the son of a ***** to stay quiet just once because that’s all it would take. Just one failure to catch his damned breath, and I would have been home free.

“He needs the machine.”

Ever spend a night in the same room as a guy with sleep apnea? Take my advice and spring for your own room if only to avoid the psychic guilt of wishing sudden death on your friends.

“This place looks like the VIP lounge, except they serve eggs,” I commented.

“Good job. Mention the ****ing club right before I’m gonna eat. We’re probably gonna walk out of here with herpes,” the Sleep Apneac replied.



If you ever get a chance to visit Total Performance Sports (TPS), I highly recommend Dempsey’s Muffins and Bagels. Even the Sleep Apneac liked it, and with him, you’re talking about a guy who complains about diner food at four-thirty in the morning. Nobody complains about a post-workout meal at the diner, but the Sleep Apneac does. You’d figure a guy who makes so much ****ing noise in his sleep might know enough to keep quiet while he’s awake, but he doesn’t, especially when he’s eating. This is because he’s finicky. Seven-hundred pound deadlifters shouldn’t be finicky, but this one is. Still, even he said Dempsey’s did the trick, and I concurred. Good service, good eggs, good everything. Things were taking a turn for the better.

The first TPS—the Broadway version—was easy to find. I’d paid a visit there back in January 2005, the first of my bizarre, groupie-like pilgrimages to gyms at which I’d like to train but can’t. The weight room at the old gym was comparatively tiny with the combat sports side of CJ Murphy’s business occupying most of the building’s square footage. Most of the Strongman equipment, from what I could see, was outside causing the quintessential Masshole dilemma—an abysmal lack of parking. It was still one of the best gyms I’d ever seen.

By contrast, the new Victoria Street TPS is a two-floored athlete’s paradise with enough of the right kind of equipment to give even Joe DeFranco’s place a definite run for its money. They even have a monolift. If you live in the Boston area and want to get yourself strong, TPS is the place you want to be. And unlike the Broadway TPS, one can actually park one’s car. Murph seems to have overcome his Massachusetts upbringing long enough to purchase a building that came with a parking lot. Onward and upward, as it were.

“We’re not here to tell you **** you can read about on the internet.”



See, for some people, beginning a seminar like this could be construed as total bull****. It could be seen as an immediate justification for money spent. For distance traveled. For the slings and arrows of other peoples’ breathing disorders one suffers through in the name of higher learning. But when a rock solid—even off-season, nursing some seriously nagging injuries—Matt Kroczaleski sits in front of a crowd, exhorted by Dave to “get right into it” at the beginning of a freewheeling panel discussion and gives his “keys to success,” everything it took to get to that point fades into the background. It’s time to listen and listen hard because when the **** will you ever get the chance to listen to the 2006 Arnold Classic 220-lb class champion in person again?

“Be self critical,” said Matt, instantly warming to the crowd. “I see so many guys at gyms all over the place coaching guys on every little technical point and then making the same mistakes themselves without even knowing they’re doing it. You have to be your own biggest critic. You have to find out what works, for yourself, and keep it. Throw out what doesn’t work. Formulate a realistic plan for where you want to be and then work backward. The most important part of it is to know that most limitations in lifting, and in life, are mental. You gotta find time to train, and you can’t come up with excuses. Everyone comes up with excuses not to train, and it is all bull****. How many hours of TV do you watch? If you watch an hour of TV every night, there’s your training time right there.”

The jovial Marc Bartley, whose demeanor belies his 2562-lb total in the heavyweight class, sat on a bench to Kroczaleski’s right. As he’d continue to do throughout the day, Marc hammered home the importance of technique:

“You have to hone your mechanics because you need everything to kick in together at the right time. Everything has to work properly at the same moment. You also have to remember that everything you do supplements the main lifts. Minimize your volume, but maximize what you get out of it. When you get to the top levels of powerlifting, what you’ll find is that even the top guys do too much **** and overanalyze everything.”

Jim Wendler, skipping the preliminaries in his trademark seminar style, went directly for Dave’s jugular, stating that Dave’s all-time best squat—935 lbs—“killed the average” in the room.

Jim said, “I’ve been training for nineteen years now, and I think the best thing that happened for most of them was that I didn’t have the internet. I was happy training without it because when I was starting out, and for years after, it was just me lifting weights, and I had to think. I think the best thing I could tell someone is to just lift for ten to twelve years before you start reading about ****. Everybody up here trains differently. Matt and Marc are totally different in the way they train, but the one thing they have in common is that they’re consistent and persistent.”

“The guys at the top,” added Dave, “are all doing the same **** to maximize the basics. The one thing they’re not doing is listening to all the ****ing ‘gurus’ out there on the internet. I hear **** all the time about weak point training and trying to figure out where your weak points are when most of the time, guys are just afraid of the ****ing weight. The best thing you can do is just man up and try a little harder. For most people out there, it’s not about weak points. If you’re not in the Powerlifting USA’s top fifty, you’re just ****in’ weak.”

“You have to remember that it takes time,” said Matt, when asked about keeping a training log. “Time, consistency, and desire. When I was first started out, everyone told me I wasn’t going anywhere because my genetics sucked. Then when I won the Arnold, all I heard about was how great my genetics were. It’s just putting in the time and writing everything down in order to figure out what your indicators are.”

Matt continued, “You can’t worry about what everyone else is doing. In a meet, don’t worry about what your competition is doing until your second deadlift and don’t worry about what you squatted a month ago. Meets are all about what you can do that day under those conditions.”

“When I trained at Westside,” said Jim, in response to the same question, “the atmosphere was so amazing that you didn’t need to write **** down. You don’t write **** down there. You just go.”

“Find the best and train with them.”

Another thing common to each panelist, at least during the early stages of their respective careers, was—and mostly still is—a willingness to travel in order to find the best training groups and places to train. Southside Barbell’s (Connecticut) Vinny Dizenzo (Southside’s Matt Rhoades was also in attendance) stepped in at this point to offer some important advice on how to approach training in a big time gym for the first time.

Vinny said, “Everyone in this sport is willing to help you if you want to put in the work. If you end up training with world class lifters, they’ll always help you if you come in the right way. The best advice that I can offer anyone is to just listen, spot and load, let us train, and talk later. When you come into a place like Southside, you’ll get bigger just loading plates.”

“It doesn’t matter if you’re only squatting one-thirty-five,” said Matt. “We’ve all been there. We started at the bottom too. What does matter is that you’re there to work hard.”

“And don’t be afraid to get on the phone and call people,” added Vinny. “When people love what they do, they love to talk about it, and in this sport, people love to talk about training. As a matter of fact, they’ll go on and on all day about it if you call them.”

“Be ready to hang up,” quipped Dave.

“Beginners need more. The advanced need less.”

Of particular importance was an analysis of the differences in all four presenters’ approaches to training, particularly when comparing Matt’s programming with Marc’s. Matt quickly became something of an internet icon recently with his marathon dumbbell row set and his drop-set vomiting session. What everyone found out, however, is that their respective approaches are, in actuality, quite similar with regard to their optimization of volume and an obvious focus on the big lifts.

“The stronger you get,” said Matt, “the big lifts put a ton of stress on your body, and you don’t need to do a lot of other ****. Some of the **** you see on the internet, like my drop set, is stuff I’ll only do once or twice a year just to get tougher mentally.”

“One thing I always see is the top guys doing too much heavy weight too close to a meet,” added Marc. “I don’t know about the other guys here, but it takes me a month to recover from meets.”

“There’s a huge difference,” said Jim, “between training optimally and training maximally. You want to find out how to train optimally.”

“Sometimes during this whole thing, I was feeling so good that I didn’t want to go to the gym and screw it up.”

“I think what people have to realize,” said Dave, “is that elite levels of any sport aren’t healthy. We’re not doing this for our health. We’re doing it for competition. I mean look at the way I ate for years. You ever see that movie Super Size Me? ****, I did that for years. The problem with that guy is that he didn’t do it long enough.”

“Any limits you have are all mental, whether it’s lifting or eating or just life in general,” added Matt. “I don’t think there are any limitations on how strong a human being can get. It’s like when Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile. Everybody said it couldn’t be done because of oxygen intake and **** like that, and now we’ve got high school kids doing it.”

“Tempo is bull****.”



“Nobody thinks about tempo,” said Jim, responding to a question from an attendee. “Tempo gets stressed by people trying to sell you something. It’s just another thing ‘gurus’ bring up to make you feel inferior.”

“Let’s break for lunch.”



During the break, I recognized two guys, Brian Holloway and Gary Velardi, who I’d met at the seminar at DeFranco’s back in March. I asked them both why they’d decided to come back for a return engagement with Dave, Jim, and company.

“Joe’s seminar was for the people I train,” said Brian, the head athletic trainer at Choate Rosemary Hall, an elite prep school in Wallingford, Connecticut. “This one is strictly for me and my own lifting.”

“I train at Southside with Vinny and Matt (Rhoades),” said Gary, “and I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to come and hear Matt Kroczaleski and Marc Bartley in person. I want to get under a bar and have Marc clean up my squat.”

“We brought Dave a package of SnoBalls for lunch,” I offered.

“****, man. We got him a box of Twinkies.”

“Don’t relax so much on the box, man.”



After lunch, with Matt, Marc, and Jim each taking a station (Matt and Jim each took a rack while Marc manned the monolift), Gary Velardi got his wish and so did I. I stuck with Marc during the initial portion of the second half, and when my turn came to get under the bar—squatting in front of Marc Bartley with Matt Rhoades running the hydraulics—I found myself nervous in a weight room for the first time since high school.

I squat in the mid to high 600s, which, while decidedly pedestrian for an EFS seminar, isn’t exactly beginner weight at most gyms outside Columbus, Ohio. In my mind, at least, I’ve earned every pound of it through years of work and study. Marc, however, took a look at a few reps and saw a major problem immediately. I was relaxing my arch way too much when sitting on the box. Using an inch-thick square of rubber matting, he showed me how to remedy the problem.

“Go ahead and sit back the way you normally do,” Marc said. I did, and he slid the mat up to the point where it made contact with my ass. “Now arch all the way and hold it.” I arched and Marc was able to slide the mat another three to four inches further up. “That’s what you should be feeling when you sit down.”

More F.G.I.

After the seminar at DeFranco’s in March, Dave spoke at length about the concept of “F.G.I.,” the feeling he gets when people just “****ing get it” when they leave one of his presentations and the feeling they get when the lights finally go on in their heads. At that one—the first of (hopefully) many EFS events I’ll be attending—my F.G.I. moment had everything to do with program design and how to structure my own training. I smiled repeatedly throughout the March seminar bemused by the realization of how badly I’d warped most of the concepts I’ve learned from all the articles and interviews I’ve read over the years. When you hear from the source how things should actually be done, sometimes you can’t help but laugh at yourself and the way you’d originally perceived and ****ed them up.



The Boston seminar, by contrast, allowed us to ride the coattails of people who can do the things just about everyone who reads this site dreams of doing. I listened closely as Matt Kroczaleski philosophized on training and life; as Marc Bartley proved that thousand-plus-pound squatters can be as mellow, laid back, and subtly erudite as a Grateful Dead song; and as Jim Wendler and Dave Tate did their cutting-through-the-bull**** thing for the thousandth time, making everything seem fresh and new all the while.

Merging onto the Mass Pike with the Sleep Apneac starting to nod off in the passenger seat, I realized where I’d gone wrong on my way to Everett. The best do go through hell and back to get where they need to be and their hell is far more intense than an irritating drive and a crappy night’s sleep. Ask Matt Kroczaleski and Matt Rhoades about all the road trips they’ve taken over the years to train with people they knew would make them stronger. Ask them what kinds of ****box cars they drove. Ask Marc Bartley about his triceps. Ask Dave Tate about paying dues. Ask Jim Wendler about walking on at a Division I football program. ****, ask Matt Kroczaleski about life and sleeping in a motel with a snoring Strongman competitor will pale in comparison to the things this guy’s been through.

I left Wyckoff, New Jersey back in March determined to get my training organized, and I did. The DeFranco seminar taught me to think so that’s what I do now. I think. After leaving Everett, Massachusetts and getting my thoughts together for a few days, I’m pretty certain I understand what we all learned at TPS. We learned from the best what they feel it takes to be the best. We learned that you have to work so that what I’m going to do. I’m going to work.