Who I am!

My first blog, where do I begin? Lets start with what I want to accomplish. My goal is to build a platform for me to share my experiences as a strength & conditioning profesional. I am a private strength coach. Not a personal trainer! A personal trainer is the skinny kid who follows you around holding a clip board while you use a machine. I do not use machines, because they do the majority of the work for you. Why train from a stationary position? In the real world do we ever perform any type of movement from a stationary position? I teach people how to use thier bodies the way it is designed to work. I came up in the iron game doing the same bodybuilding routine that everybody does for many years. I got tired of monday chest day, tuesday legs, etc. Also, lets be honest, who has time to spend two hours in the gym five days a week to working a different body part each day? Not me. I needed a way to train my whole body in a short time period two or three days a week. I say two or three days, but the truth is I train when ever I can. Maybe three days this week, one next week, or whatever.What kind of workout do you do? I get this question on a regular basis. I can't put it in a catagory. All I can say is I train hard whenever I can.
I worked last summer with the Vanderbilt Universtiy Strength & Conditioning department coaching the football team. What I learned changed my thought on training forever. First, Coach Sisk, Coach Teeple, & Coach Turner are great guys to work with. They treated me better than any other training facility I have worked in. They introduced me to kettlebell training. What is a kettleball? Basicly it is a cannonball with a handle. The kettlebell is the single greatest training tool I have ever used. I will further explain and show pics of my clients working with the bell in the future.
After training with the kettbell I started to look for other outside the box training modalities. Giant tires, sledge hammers, sand bags, body wieght calisthenics, and any other way I could think of to train I did it. Man can I notice a differnce in how I feel and look from this non-tradional style of training. My overall total body strength has truely benefited from what I like to call homegrown training. Clients who have been with me for some time also have noticed their strength levels increase. MY clients and I do what the majority of people do not want to do. Push ourselfs to the absolute limit and then go a little further.
Continue to check my blog periodically as I add pictures and training tips to benefit your training.
Matt Holder, M. S. CSCS