The room that made me

The room

I trained at California Strength from the start of my competitive career. First under Glenn Pendlay, then under Dave Spitz after Pendlay left for MDUSA. Spencer Moorman was a teammate. Jon North and Donny Shankle were part of that world.

I was in the gym when North and Shankle, the two best lifters on the team, walked out the door.

I was still there when Wes Kitts came in. Kitts went on to win four Pan American championships and compete in two Olympic Games.

North, Shankle and Spencer Moorman all won US national titles out of that gym.

Glenn Pendlay

The best coaching lesson I've ever gotten came from Glenn, and it has nothing to do with a barbell.

He was dogged about it. If you did a lift correctly, you knew it. If you didn't, you knew that too, and you knew it right away. There was no softening it, and no letting a bad rep slide because the mood in the room was good.

He cared more about your performance than anybody I've trained under. The way you could tell wasn't that he said so. It was that he never once let you believe something that wasn't true.

He'd also let it rip. If you were moving well and feeling good, Glenn wasn't afraid to turn you loose and go after a number that wasn't on the paper.

Dave Spitz

Dave was a different experience, and I needed both of them.

He's every bit as tight on technique as Glenn was. The difference was the program. With Dave, this is the program, we follow the program, we do not deviate. With Glenn, if you were looking good that day, go for it.

Both work. They work on different people, and they work on the same person at different times. The years under Glenn taught me what a correct lift feels like. The years under Dave taught me to run a plan I'd already decided on instead of running on how I felt when I walked in the door. That second one is most of what I do now with business owners.

Watching North and Shankle

Training alongside Jon North and Donny Shankle was one of the most memorable stretches of my life.

Jon's a good friend now, but he started out as one of my first weightlifting coaches when I got serious about the sport. He was still a young athlete himself, so he was learning it and bringing me up in it at the same time.

What that room taught me is that the only things that matter are your effort and your attitude. That's it.

I remember loading a five kilo plate on one side and two two and a halfs on the other, and nobody cared. There's the bar. Pick it up.

It was aggressive. If you missed a lift, nobody said "you got it" in a nice babying way. The things people said to you were about as bad as the things you were already saying to yourself in your own head. If you could use that to fuel you, you were going to be fine. If somebody saying something hard to you crushed your soul, you washed out fast.

It was a ruthless training environment run by teammates who cared about you more than anything. But if you weren't putting out, they made sure everybody knew.

It was a wild time. People flying off barbells. Holes in the walls from bodies that went between the studs. On a cold winter Max Out Friday the room would get foggy, chalk in the air and everybody sweating, and the walls would be dripping with condensation.

I don't train like that now, and I don't think most people should. But it set the bar for what I think effort looks like, and nothing since has moved it.

What the room was actually for

A barbell is the most honest thing in the building. It doesn't care how you feel about it, how busy your week was, or what you meant to do. The weight either goes up or it doesn't, and you find out in about three seconds.

A good room makes that honesty survivable. You miss in front of people who have missed. You make a lift and nobody's surprised, because that's what the room expects of you. Nine years of that changes what you think is normal, and the new normal follows you out the door.

The team didn't fall apart when its two stars left, because the next one was already in the room. That's the part I think about most, and it took me years to understand what I'd watched. Nothing on that platform depended on one person. The standards were in the room, not in any one lifter.

I've spent the years since trying to build businesses that work the same way. A gym that doesn't depend on me being on the floor. A company that doesn't depend on me answering the email. If the whole thing stops when one person walks out, you don't have a team. You have a bottleneck with good people around it.

The training side of this, the three sessions a week and what was in them, is on the three hours a week page. The meets and the numbers are on the weightlifting page. More on California Strength.