The Strength Culture Training Manual 1.0 began as a way to organize my thoughts after being asked if I was ever going to mentor younger trainers and coaches. I realized that if I wanted to provide meaningful mentorship, I needed a systematic and coherent way to deliver the information I felt was both relevant and practical for improving and optimizing the training process—for you and your clients.
To create this manual, I had to rewind my career nearly 15 years to when I first started training clients. I asked myself, “What do I wish I had known back then?” and “What’s actually useful for writing effective programs?” The goal was to address the challenges of coaching a wide spectrum of clients—from everyday general population clients to high-performance athletes.
Over the years, I’ve invested significant time and money—easily in the high five to low six figures—in seminars, workshops, and continued education. While these experiences gave me valuable insights, they often lacked coherence, practicality, and applicability. This manual is my attempt to fill that gap.
With the Strength Culture Training Manual 2.0, my goal is to:
• Organize the information I believe is most important for coaches, trainers, and athletes.
• Present it in a coherent, easy-to-understand format with concepts that build on one another.
• Offer pros and cons of various methods, systems, and ideas to help you make informed decisions.
Fitness and training don’t exist in a vacuum. Unfortunately, in today’s landscape, there’s often more focus on being polarizing than providing clarity. My aim is to cut through the noise and deliver something truly helpful.
Over the past year, I’ve worked hard to expand and improve upon what I started with Strength Culture Training Manual 1.0. It has been a labor of love, and I hope this updated version eases your confusion, builds your confidence, and equips you to make better decisions for yourself and your clients.
Thank you for trusting me as part of your journey. I want nothing but success for both you and those you work with.
- Jeff
#personaltrainer #personaltraining #onlinecoaching #strengthandconditioning #strengthandconditioningcoach
Knee cave in a squat is something you’ll hear people tell you to “fix.”
But why is it that we see Lu (one of the greatest squatter of all time) using this strategy?
As the load increases, most people shift the hips back to leverage the hip extensors/posterior chain. For most people, shifting demands away from the quads allows them to generate more force
The cost of this is that foot pressure will naturally shift to the outside of the foot as the shin moves back.
Caving the knees in allows us to shift more weight to the inside of the foot. This balances the foot pressure.
This is why you’ll see great squatters push their hips forward mid-squat after shifting their hip backs. This allows them to re-establish full foot pressure after the sticking point.
If they do this, you’ll see the knees move outwards as a consequence of the pelvis pushing forward.
So what causes knee cave?
Weak glutes? - Nope.
Tight inner thighs? - Nope.
Weak foot? - Nope.
A simple balancing act to generate the most force? - Yup.
This is why the best squatters cave their knees at near maximal loads even when their other squats have no cave at all.
Now if we want to talk relative strength, there are two muscle groups you should consider.
Strong quads and calves allow you to keep the knees over the toes for longer. This allows full foot pressure through the sticking point and reduces cave.
So if you’re worried about knee cave:
1. Drop the load on your squats
2. Reinforce knee over toe for as long as possible on the way up
3. Do your quad accessories
4. Train your damn calves, seriously.
If you need help learning to progress your squat ATG with pristine form, get at me.
Extended pause squats are one of the most underrated tools for building strength, mobility, and control simultaneously.
Most people rush through the bottom of a squat relying on rebound, momentum, and reflexive stiffness.
Pause squats remove that.
You are forced to actually own the bottom position and produce force from a dead stop.
In my opinion, one of the biggest benefits of pause squats is the improvement in mobility and flexibility for people who struggle with it.
Extended pauses in deep flexion can help improve the mobility and flexibility of the:
• ankles
• knees
• hips
They also expose:
• positional weaknesses
• balance and pressure shifts
• bracing deficiencies
• loss of posture/control at depth
You can manipulate stance width depending on what areas you are trying to emphasize and what's more comfortable for you.
A narrower stance will generally create more stretch through the glutes and posterior hip.
A wider stance will generally create more stretch through the groin and adductors.
This can be incredibly useful depending on what is limiting you or your clients in the squat.
Pause squats are not just a strength variation.
They can simultaneously function as loaded mobility work and solid technical practice.
#squat #squats
I love when people think they’ve found a “gotcha” moment.
This is probably one of the most common rebuttals I get whenever I talk about hip IR in the squat:
“Well if squats require hip IR, then how can people squat if they don’t measure for hip IR on a table test?”
The confidence people say this with is always hilarious because it immediately tells me they don’t understand the difference between:
• open chain vs. closed chain
• isolated testing vs. integrated movement
• passive ROM vs. active task execution
• a testing environment vs. a performance environment
A table test is a person interacting with a table while one joint is moved in isolation.
A squat is a full-body coordinated task involving the pelvis, spine, femur, tibia, foot pressure, stance width, tissue yield, muscular coordination, and relative stiffness under load.
Those are not the same context.
How much hip IR you see in an isolated table test does NOT directly predict how someone squats, especially at higher levels of strength and fitness.
This is what happens when people try to reduce complex movement down to a single isolated measurement and pretend it explains everything.
I think Ben’s messaging is mostly positive in the sense that it reaches people who worry way too much about things that don’t actually matter in training.
And to be fair, that usually isn’t their fault. It’s coming from other influencers pushing low-quality, bullshit content.
I’m using this as an example of how easy it is to misuse or misrepresent “science” to cope with your own gaps in physical development.
I’ve seen this for years. People cherry-pick data and twist information to justify what they don’t understand or can’t do well.
There are really only two ways to solve problems:
1. Give people something actionable that actually fixes the issue
2. Get them to stop focusing on things that don’t matter and/or stop doing things that make it worse
This type of content is trying to do the second.
But it usually assumes they’ve already mastered the first, and most haven’t.
I’ve seen it with flexibility or anti-flexibility content. I’ve seen it with pain and injuries, where people default to the BPS (bio-psycho-social) model as a cop-out. I’ve seen it with studies on higher volume training and exercise selection.
The examples are endless.
It’s okay to not know things. It’s impossible to know everything.
But stop making one of two mistakes:
1. Saying certain information doesn’t matter just because you don’t understand how to apply it or get results from it
2. Misrepresenting data or “science” to cherry-pick your bias because you have gaps in your knowledge or experience
Keep learning and don't close your mind off to possibilities you are currently unwilling to accept.
Restricting forward knee travel in a squat may decrease knee torque by ~30%, but it increases torque at the hips and lower back by nearly 10Ă—.
This comes directly from the Fry et al. 2003 squat knee travel study.
When you force a vertical shin, you don’t “protect” the knees, you just shift the load somewhere else. In this case, it gets dumped into the hips and lower back.
It’s not hard to see why an entire era of coaching that emphasized:
• knees out
• hips back
• vertical shins
• stopping at parallel
led to a lot of lifters struggling to tolerate barbell back squats, and why many coaches moved toward single-leg work and trap bar variations instead.
The takeaway isn’t that bilateral barbell squats are the problem.
It’s that how you coach, cue, and execute the squat that determines where the load goes.
At this point, I rarely perform more than 1–3 sets per exercise, which typically results in about 4–6 sets per muscle group per week.
That said, for compound lifts like the squat, deadlift, bench, chin-ups, etc., I still see a strong case for higher set and/or rep exposure. These movements demand more coordination and control across multiple joints, so the added volume helps build the skill needed to perform them effectively.
Using set and rep schemes like:
12 × 1–3
10 × 2–4
8 × 6–8
…even 10 × 10…
can be incredibly useful for developing a better understanding of the lift and building confidence, while still providing enough stimulus to grow and get stronger.
As long as you’re working at an appropriate intensity and keeping reps in reserve, you can use the same load across all sets or gradually increase the load as you work through them.
I use these set and rep schemes in many of the programs I offer, and my clients have enjoyed them over the years.
I also enjoy using them myself and will likely revisit them in the future.
Have you used higher set and rep schemes and had success with them? If so, let me know in the comments.
Fundamentally a back squat is like any other squat variation.
The bar being on your back should change very little about how you approach the lift.
I think the squat is over coached, over cued, and over thought.
Put the bar in a comfortable and stable position on your upper back.
Take a grip width that allows for upper back tightness without over arching or over extending.
Bend your knees and sit down, push through the floor to stand up.
You don't need a 6-8 part YouTube series on the back squat to teach people how to do it or to learn how to do it yourself.
Once the reps slow down, you've achieved a high level of MT.
That's all you need to grow muscle and get stronger.
Train whatever reps you like.
I personally prefer to do more sets and less reps. That doesn't mean I don't train higher reps. I would say 80-85% of my training volume is between 4-8 reps.
There’s a well-documented concept in behavioral psychology called the "goal gradient effect".
People push hard when they feel far from the goal…
But once they feel “close enough,” effort drops off.
Even if they’re objectively nowhere near their potential, subjectively they feel like they’ve arrived.
I’ve seen this pattern repeat over and over again for the last 15 years: 1. High motivation → strong adherence 2. Early results → reduced urgency 3. Reduced urgency → lower adherence 4. Lower adherence → plateau/regression
…and it happens right around that 8–12 week window for a lot of people.
The problem isn’t a lack of information or ability, it’s that early success removes the urgency that created the behavior in the first place.
The justifications and excuses start to outweigh the desire. Then 2–3 months later, when all that progress starts to fade, they’re ready to go at it again…
For another predictably ending cycle.
Please don't stop doing what is/was working.
External rotation torque.
External rotation of the hips.
External rotation of the shoulders.
Overly supinated feet.
Forcing the knees out.
Completely over cued.
