Austin Andrade and Nick Guardione both train at Heavy Metal Fitness in San Antonio. Austin, best described as an Eddie Hall lookalike, burst onto the pro scene in 2024 by winning World’s Strongest Latino, securing an invite to World’s Strongest Man, pulling over 1000lbs at the World Deadlift Championships and taking 5/16 at the brutally heavy Shaw Classic. Nick, who is taller and more…. aerodynamic…. is right on his heels, having won the open at OSG last December and getting his WSM nod for 2025.

It isn’t the numbers that are so crazy, or the rapid rise to the top. Rather, the fact that two training partners can start out at a small gym in San Antonio, and both develop the world class strength that would take them to their debut at the Arnold Strongman Classic in 2025. Together, they talk openly about the importance of a structured, rigid training program, a supportive coach and community, and their essential role in pushing each other to the top.

Follow their Youtube channel… I mean, their training is pretty cool, but Nick’s best Steve Irwin impression during “Ghost Adventures” is what really steals the show.

Some key points from episode 3 of StrongerMan:

• Visualization

Both men are trained at ‘flipping the switch’ on command, which is necessary for maximal performance with bone crushing weights. But Nick specifically uses tactics like yogic breathing and visualization to put himself in a place to perform. This wasn’t surprising to hear, as one of the first thing’s I heard about him from his coach Tim Ingram was that Nick had a “gamer mentality”. Where so many people show up to the biggest events of their lives nervous and prone to mistakes, Nick always excels at meets relative to his training.

Continue reading “The Rise of “The Texas Boys”: Austin Andrade and Nick Guardione”

Everyone knows front squats are good, but few do them religiously. Maybe the technique is intimidating. Maybe they aren’t sure about how to program them in. Maybe they just don’t like pain. I mean, squats are hard enough when taken to the limit, but front squats feel like you’re doing a set of lunges with an anaconda around your neck. Most people don’t find that fun. But if you’re one of the weirdos that do… the reward is huge.

Position

Upright

• Assuming we aren’t doing some Zercher harness monstrosity, the beauty of a front squat is that the barbell position REQUIRES the correct, desired position of being upright. You can cheat a high bar squat, but if you cheat a front squat, you dump the bar, or end up in some kind of contorted hunchback position that makes you wonder how a squat can be a bicep exercise.

Continue reading “Everything You Need to Know About Front Squats”

Mitchell Hooper is currently experiencing one of the most dominant surges into the sport of Strongman since Mariusz Pudzianowski in the early 2000s. In the last couple of years, he has taken the 2023 Worlds Strongest Man, the Arnold Classic (2023, 2024), the Shaw Classic 2024 (now “Strongest Man on Earth”), and the Rogue Invitational (2023, 2024). As the only man to win all 4 of these shows, he singularly holds the Strongman “Grand Slam”.

Here is a taste of his pressing and pulling ability, which are done around a body weight of 325lbs, which is a solid 100lbs less than Shaw, Thor and Hall in their prime:

One of the first questions I had for Mitch was about durability. The bone crushing contests that the best strongmen have to endure are only getting heavier, and those at the top compete 6-8 times per year (and often more).

His answer was surprising: aside from being genetically predisposed to being ‘sturdy’, Mitch credits his robust athletic background with his staying power.

He grew up playing hocky, football, baseball and golf, even working with Tiger Woods’ coach at one point. The regular exposure to impact and different movement patterns, he says, prepared him for the demands of strongman and bestowed an essential adaptability that won’t be seen in those who only lift weights.

You can see my full interview with Mitchell Hooper here, or listen to it on the “StrongerMan” podcast here:

WHY do we compete?

Obviously, we all compete because we have dreams of dominating our obscure sport, getting 1M followers and booking an appearance on Rogan. I mean, we all have dreams of being the next big thing, the GOAT, the person on the Wheaties box.

But what if I were to take you aside and tell you the depressing truth: that you, reader, have almost no chance of setting a world record or even winning a competition at a high level. It’s not because I carefully evaluated your genetics and environment and upbringing and determined that you just don’t have the stuff…. and it’s not because I don’t like you.   

It’s just a numbers game. It’s part and parcel of the definition of ‘competition’. For there to be one winner, there has to be a lot of losers.  And you all can’t be winners because that would mean that there’s literally no losers…. and  I’ve read your comments…..

5% of you are going to be devastated by this sad truth and say “I’m out”. And I would say good riddance.

The people who bail when they realize victory isn’t guaranteed are spineless poor sports and are a net negative on their respective culture. They are the same type of people who farm clout by making the grand proclamations on IG that get them attention but require no actual investment or risk .

Every gym has one; the guy who rounds his maxes up to the nearest 50lbs and who writes long Mea Culpas on Instagram about how they ‘let everyone down’ by placing 9th in the novice division. They won’t continue on without a ton of engagement and support, they require praise every time they take a shit in the gym and they put the biggest strain on every training group they interact with.

As an aside: this is the same group of people that pro bodybuilders and powerlifting world champions are supposedly abusing with their supplement sponsorship by setting ‘unrealistic expectations’. Rational people are well aware that taking Cell-Tech isn’t going to make you look like Jonnie-Fucking-Jackson, just like eating Wheaties won’t endow you with Olympic potential and Paris Hilton won’t do this if you eat a Bacon Western Cheeseburger. 

Continue reading “Why You Need to Compete”

My teenage years were defined by exceptionally long workouts. Everything was new to me; I was still experimenting with different movements, different splits and different methods of progressing. Every tip I pulled out of a Muscle and Fitness, I would have to apply somewhere and if it wasn’t towards the squats at the beginning of the workout, it was going to be towards the leg extensions, leg presses, split squats, lunges or hack squats at the end of the workout.

The time spent in the gym early on and all of the variety that went into my training was certainly valuable. In addition to learning how everything in the gym worked, I acclimated to really long, grueling workouts. I grew like a weed and was certainly more well-rounded in my development than if I spent those years on the same few barbell lifts.

But by the time I was out of high school I knew that I needed some direction with my training. It was a no-brainer, of course: I was going to train to be strong. I began searching more aggressively for methods of training that were strength specific and, despite all of the different ways of getting strong that were written about, there was one clear pattern: more weight with more effort for less reps and less total work.

Continue reading “How I Got Strong as SH** on a MINIMALIST Program”

Success in strength training is a journey of physical and mental transformation and to level up to the elite ranks you must adopt the habits of the elite. I’m going to explore the five key habits of elite lifters that  are required to survive the type of training that results in world record performances. So forget your current workout plan and forget about your preconceived notions about training. Let’s dive in to the five habits of advanced lifters.

1. THEY EMBRACE THE ART OF BASE BUILDING

Reaching the pinnacle of strength requires being able to distinguish between base building and contest preparation. Not everybody has the desire to compete but everybody needs to have concrete goals and a structure training approach.  Since you can’t effectively train for everything at once, and the most specialized athletes in the world have to spend more time doing specialized athlete things,   time spent building your foundation has to be scheduled separately.

Continue reading “5 Habits of Advanced Lifters”

Among all of the useless discussions that populate the internet lifting space, there is none more brain rotting than the ‘debate’ between HIT cult zealots and… well…. everyone else.

For those not in the know, the cult of High Intensity took two bodybuilding figures out of thousands and decided to hold them up on a pedastal as if their career represents the pinnacle of strength training. I am of course talking about Mike Mentzer and Dorian Yates. Mike was a pro bodybuilder and an extremely well spoken ambassador of the sport. Yates was one of the greatest who brought in a paradigm shifting physique and both trained with some iteration of ‘High Intensity’.

The root of the ideology that gives birth to all of the variations is the belief that a muscle taken to failure has experienced sufficient enough a stress to grow, so every set beyond that is pointless. Doing a thoroughly challenging, all out set for each muscle group is enough, and that allows you to have shorter, more efficient workouts and train each muscle group more frequently throughout the week.

Like any religion, a small bit of truth was taken and used to justify the existence of 9 thousand different denominations. On the list of things that HIT fanatics don’t agree on is how much work is too much (Mike argued that Yates was still doing ‘too much work’, as if the point of training is to do the absolute bare fucking minimum), what constitutes failure (is it not being able to complete a rep or complete, scorched earth exhaustion within the muscle on a chemical level?) and what techniques should be used to reach this level (vicious debate over fatigue techniques like drop sets, tempo, load, etc.). 

The current representatives of the Heaven’s Gate Cult of lifting cite Mentzer and Yates routinely as being the shining examples of what the training modality should be, yet they promote training that is substantially different from the strategies that he leaned on. One such guru adamantly argues against the forced reps and drop sets that Mentzer used to reach full exhaustion, calling it unnecessary nonsense. This individual promotes super light weight, super slow tempo lifts that last well over a minute (who wants any pesky strength adaptations to go with their hypertrophy?) and claims that reaching that point of failure is good enough.

Now, High Intensity as an approach has validity, but the movement shows that it has scraped the bottom of the barrel when droves of run-of-the-mill gym goers hop online and proclaim that, in the name of the KING, HIT is the ONLY way to train!

So this is my call to sanity, using methods used for size and strength by LITERALLY EVERY PROFESSIONAL SPORT AND STRENGTH PROGRAM. I don’t mean that a small majority, like 53.4% of football players, bodybuilders and Olympicans utilize volume, “so THERE!”. I mean, like, 95%+ of the best performers in the world utilize volume to grow mass; in some cases it really is 100%.

Here are the 10 reasons why volume is still the granddaddy of all training variables.

Continue reading “10 Reasons Why Volume is KING for Size and Strength”

I routinely find myself engaging in self-reflection, where I’m teetering between my rigid views on best principles and my desire to enforce them … and the realization that I might just be the guy sticking my finger in everyone’s Snack Pak.

That’s never more evident than when I’m watching popular lifting channels where the feature of the day is some mode of lifting that I think is trendy, overhyped click bait at best and a counterproductive or outright dangerous influence to it’s viewers at worst.

Take Juji, Boogez and Szat.

3 guys who are as popular as they are jacked, obvious veterans to the barbell and who likely have a ton of experience-driven wisdom to pass on to their viewers.

But then they do some crazy, “hey look at me” shit that’s useless to the viewer at best and a dangerous influence at worst.

Continue reading “Problems With Odd Lifting Culture”

KONG is up live on Boostcamp and the 115 page ebook is LIVE here!

This tier list is dedicated to all things spinal. Inspired by the odd-lift rant I went on yesterday, I began to think a lot about risk vs. reward. If it wasn’t for the low back being such a tempermental, irritable shrew of a body part, none of this discussion would need to take place. So how do we get the low back just stupid, cock strong? 

Well, I have a tier list for that. Let’s indulge.

DEADLIFT- 

  Pros – accessible, relatively easy to master, connects with competition, fun to do!, actually gets the back and supporting structures really f—ing strong

   Cons – while not ‘technical’ technique matters (bracing and stability more than posture), difficult to recover from when you get good, makes programming a bitch, is a cause of a lot of the injuries to the low-back

   The Verdict – I give deads a solid A-tier rating. As much shit as I’ve given BBM for their insistance that rounding doesn’t matter and their fixation on never committing the mortal sin of nociception, which will scare off droves of young, skiddish lifters like so many baby deer…..  I agree with most of their points. The population that deadlifts, I believe, will be a healthier and more capable one. Just try to do it while keeping your stomach more rigid than day-old tres leches.

Continue reading “Ranking Exercises to Build Steel Cable Spinal Erectors”

I put off reviewing Nsuns for years despite numerous requests because it looked…. daunting. It claimed to be inspired by 5 3 1, but the program had long runs of varied reps that seemed disconnected from each other, with set and rep schemes that were needlessly jumbled.

In scrolling down the Boostcamp app (check em out here for FREE access to Kong and Bullmastiff!) I saw how popular the Nsuns program was; there were more people running that than any other program on the platform! So, I decided to suck it up and do a thorough review.

The first website I came across summarizing the program began as such:

“Nsuns is a program inspired by 5 3 1 and Sheiko.”

Oh, boy. Off to a rough start.

Continue reading “Review of NSuns 531: Wendler in the Front, Sheiko in the Back”