Q&A with Eric Cressey
PN: What did your counselor in high school tell you you’d be?
EC: Actually, it’s interesting because I didn’t take any science classes in my last year of high school. I was pretty dead set on accounting. I have three accountants in my family, so it might have been genetic or something. I just liked the black and white, crunch-the-numbers aspect of it, and I remember my counselor was all for it. Accounting is a career path that counselors feel comfortable recommending and supporting. I did well in math, I did well in accounting classes, so studying to be an accountant was the next logical step. But I had some health problems near the end of high school and in my freshman year of college, and as a result I lost a lot of weight. It was one of those critical life experiences, and I wanted to gain it back and gain it back the right way. And in doing that, I started to realize how passionate I was, not only about the exercise part of it, but about nutrition as well. So I started to figure out how to put it all together. And ultimately I discovered t-nation.com, and I started talking more and more with John Berardi, and that led to that first article. And it just kind of snowballed from there. It’s been an interesting couple of years, that’s for sure.
PN: Do you remember the first day you picked up a weight?
PN: Do you remember maybe your worst mishap in the gym?
EC: Oh yeah, sure. I’ve done some silly stuff. But looking back, it’s always taught me something. I’d say probably the biggest downer was when I pulled 400 pounds for the first time back in 2002, and then about a week later I was in the gym doing my warmup sets on a cold November day, and I was anxious to get back to the house and watch some football, so I didn’t warm up like I should have. And I ended up herniating my L5-S1 disc doing a warm up set of 185. [Laughs.] A long story short, I ended up learning a lot about lower back rehabilitation, I did all my own rehab, and I wound up bouncing back. And I’m pulling right around 650 right now. So in retrospect, it was really a blessing in disguise. You never think it’s going to be like that, but that’s how it goes, you know. I learned so much about how to warm up properly, and it turned out that I had some imbalances that were predisposing me to the problem in the first place. But hindsight is 20/20. Like I said, I learned a lot from the experience.
PN: Do you remember maybe your best day, a day where you thought to yourself, “Yep, this is what I want to do”?
EC: Oh yeah, I have those all the time. A lot of them for me have been as a coach, and not just as a lifter. I mean, I’ve had meets where I went 8 for 9, you know, really performed well and everything. Times when I really felt in sync. But I’ve felt it more so as a coach, you know, you get in the groove, and you barely realize you’re having so much fun, because you’re so into what you’re doing. But from a lifter’s standpoint, my first meet stands out, it really had a big impact on how my career went, and it forced me to look at how I did things and really change for the better. I had a lot of experienced lifters who I’d never met before take me under their wing, teach me things I didn’t really know. I learned about the fitness-fatigue model, and how you know, I had accumulated a lot of fatigue over the years, and maybe that bodybuilding stuff had caught up to me. So it was really critical to just get out there and compete for the first time, to go through the whole process.
PN: You work one-on-one with a ton of athletes as sort of a cross between strength coach and physical therapist. Where do you fit in along that spectrum?
EC: Well I’m not a therapist, I’m not a PT or anything like that, but that’s a good question because a lot of what I do does fall somewhere between the two ends. I think I have a keen eye for dysfunction, and helping out with that. I mean, if someone tears a labrum, there’s not a whole lot I can do about that, but what I can do is look at someone and see a scapular dysfunction that might make them susceptible to a tear, and I can definitely work with that. And at the other end of the spectrum, you know, often you have people getting acute treatments from the medical profession, and you still have to know how to produce a training effect in the meantime. You still have to shore up the weaknesses and deficiencies that got them there in the first place, and that’s where I come in, I think. A lot of people don’t realize that 80% of Americans have back pain at some point in their lives. But we can’t send 80% of the population to physical therapy. There’s a lot we can do to address that in the gym, so I see myself covering that gap. But at the same time, I’ve got plenty of athletes who are healthy and just looking to improve their performance, so that’s still a big part of what I do.
PN: Who are you doing most of your work with these days?
PN: Were you always strong and athletic growing up?
EC: No, I wasn’t necessarily your typical athletic kid. I didn’t really eat very well. But I was always out there, moving around, doing a lot of different things, so I was athletic, but I didn’t really get into weight training until after high school. So I didn’t have that early start that some people had. But I feel like I’ve still got a lot of good years ahead of me, I’m still making good progress. And I find it exciting, you know, because I’m always trying out different methodologies and things like that. I do consider myself an athlete first and a powerlifter second. I’m not really sure that I want to be a powerlifter forever, I might want to try some strongman soon, or do some vertical jump stuff, you know, I just want to go out there and enjoy being athletic. It’s cool training around here, because I’ll jump in with the athletes and train with them too. I just want to keep pushing myself, keep trying new things, and keep going for many years to come.
PN: Yeah, you’re still pretty young – what’s your secret to national recognition at such a young age?
EC: Probably sacrificing the social life, I’d say. [Laughs.] No, I’ve just been really fortunate, and I’m lucky enough to have a job I love. I get to train athletes. To me, there’s nothing better than that. But if there’s one thing, I think it’s that I keep trying to learn more. I’m not satisfied with what I know now. One of the problems with training clients and charging an hourly rate is that you get working so hard, you’re training clients all the time, and yeah it may be all well and good from an income standpoint, but you’re not really continuing to educate yourself. You train people all day, go to sleep, wake up in the morning and do it again. And that does you no favors. Where’s your chance to read? Where’s your chance to call other coaches, or attend seminars, or things like that? So for me, the Internet has actually been helpful in the sense that it’s opened my life up to other opportunities to get better as a coach. So I’ll try to regularly set aside a day to go travel, maybe up to UConn or to see Mike Boyle over at BU, or even set aside a day to call other coaches just to talk about what they’re doing, what I’m doing, what’s working and what’s not working. So that’s helpful. A lot of trainers can get swept up in training people and don’t leave the time for continuing education. But apart from the time commitment, I think I also approach things from a writer’s mindset, I’m always looking for new ways to do things, new insights and interesting ideas to bring to the public, and I think that forces me to stay on the ball. And the thing about writing for the Internet is that you get instant feedback. I mean I’m sure you guys see this, you publish something and you can get people from all over the world giving you feedback instantaneously, and it pushes you to respond to them, to address their questions and to refine your ideas. There’s no other way I could get that kind of feedback in person, and I definitely couldn’t get it in those kinds of numbers. There’s no other way to test your programs and ideas on a sample size that large. So on the Internet you have more opportunities to test out your ideas and see if they have merit. And it’s iterative, you can go back and forth, bring things from the net into the gym with your local athletes, and from the local athletes back to the net and that huge sample size, constantly testing and refining. You guys have probably found the same thing with nutrition. So the web has played a big role in speeding up the process for me, for sure.
PN: You have almost an obsession with biomechanics. Were you calculating joint forces on your GI Joes at age 6?
EC: No, I hope not. [Laughs.] Maybe subsconsciously I was. But for me the real turning point was when I transferred out of business school to do my exercise science degree at the University of New England, which happened to have one of the best medicine programs in the country. And so I got to take Gross Anatomy, and I spent 6 months of my life working with cadavers. I was surrounded by physical therapists, athletic trainers, occupational therapists, pre-med students. I was immersed in an environment where anatomy was first and foremost. And then I started to learn how the body moves, I started going beyond the anatomy itself. Structure dictates function, and function obviously dictates dysfunction, so it’s important to differentiate between functional anatomy and the stuff you find in an anatomy textbook. The body isn’t a two-dimensional sheet of paper. You also have to understand compensation patterns, things like that, and the only way to do that is to look at a lot of different athletes, to experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. And that’s led to a lot of the things that Mike [Robertson] and I have done, like the seminars and DVDs. It’s not just about origin, insertion, innervation and action, it’s also about what happens when muscle A doesn’t work. What does muscle B do to compensate? Does it shut down, or ball up, etc? And most importantly, what can you do to correct it?
PN: What are your ultimate career and athletic goals?
EC: Well, athletically, I think competing as a strongman would be fun. I mean, ultimately I’d like to be a guy who can say I deadlifted 700 pounds, I had a 40” vertical, and I competed as a strongman. To me that would be ideal. I like the variety. And also, I train athletes with a lot of different goals, and I want to have a frame of reference for everything that they have to go through. So I think having that experience and staying competitive will help me with my athletes. Professionally, you know, I never expected the Internet stuff to take off like this. I actually had to bring someone on to help me with it, because I don’t have it in me to be an Internet-only kind of guy. I need to be in the gym, or on the field, I need to be working with athletes. I have to train people. I’m a coach first and foremost, a writer or whatever else second. I would ideally love to work with athletes all day, and that’s pretty much where I’m going. So I’d just like to stay the course and see where it goes, keep giving everything I’ve got to any athlete who’s motivated enough to put in the work, and just let it snowball from there. Hopefully that somehow that results in a huge empire. [Laughs.]
PN: If you had a dream client, what kind of attitude would you want them to have?
EC: If you read Brian Grasso’s stuff, he talks about how you can classify every athlete according to motivation and skill. So obviously your high motivation, high skill athlete is ideal. The low motivation athlete, you definitely don’t want to work with those. They need to convince themselves that they need to be there before you can help them. Personally, I like any athlete with high motivation, whether they’re low skill or high skill doesn’t matter. The difference is that it’s pretty easy to bring the low skill guys up if they’re motivated. And I like a challenge, so I really enjoy working with the high skill guys because it really pushes you to be that much better. Because really if you’re working with low skill athletes, you can give them mediocre programs and they’re still going to get better. But I’m working with a kid now, for example, who squats 675 at just under 200 pounds. He’s a D-III kid who wants to go to the NFL. And it’s going to be a big stretch for him. He’s a great weight room guy, great attitude, but he’s coming from a D-III program, so he’s not going to get the attention he deserves. So he’s high motivation, high skill. So that pushes me, I’ve got to put together an optimal program for him. It’s not going to do much for him to take his squat from 675 to 700. Does that really matter in the grand scheme of things? Not really. What I need to do is look at the other components that are really going to make him better, because he’s so strong it might actually be slowing him down out there. So we’re doing a lot of work with rate of force development, hit mobility, pure soft tissue work, a lot of reactive stimuli, things like that. What would work for a high motivation, low skill athlete, there’s no way it would work for him. So it forces me to really be on the ball with my program, to adapt my programming a lot quicker, and I like that a lot. And typically a high motivation, high skill athlete will come in and they’ll have questions. They don’t just want to know what, they want to know why, they want to know when, they want to know everything they can do to get better. And luckily we’ve got a lot of guys down here who are great like that.
EC: No worries, great chatting with you. It’s been my pleasure.
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