Strength and conditioning. Not sure why I didn’t just say that first when someone asked me to describe Max Power.
I had convinced a colleague to trek 80 miles across state lines with me for a Sunday group training session with Mike and Nick and the usual Max Power crew. My coworker had been training at the office gym for the past 6 weeks, taking group classes and working with a personal trainer, and I thought he was ready to be introduced to the world of Max Power pain.
He wanted to know what we’d be doing, and I was somewhat at a loss to describe the Max Power experience.
How do you describe a training session that might include any number of powerlifting, olympic lifting, plyometric, and just plain sadistic exercises that might involve kettlebells, chains, bumpers, sandbags, and slosh pipes – not to mention your bodyweight – to someone whose Gold’s Gym trainer had him doing something called “Kung-Fu Curls” just a few months ago? Someone who just recently learned what a burpee was and who looked skeptical at the fitness enhancing properties of a farmer’s walk?
The average person has some idea of what a “personal trainer” is – the guy who counts reps and sets the pins on the leg curl machine. But does he know what a “strength coach” does?
And the more avid “fitness center” members might be familiar with squats, deadlifts, plyos, and high intensity intervals. But will that so-called gym rat truly understand how lifting a heavy weight and moving it from one spot to the next will make you question your sanity and will to live? The mental clarity and focus that comes from holding a plank for 30 more seconds or flipping a 250 pound tractor tire and jumping through it one more time?
That looking good in a swimsuit is more of an outcome, a byproduct, than the goal of training? That you’re more proud of how much you can pull off the floor and hoist over your head than how you look in front of the mirror? (Although, let’s be real – train hard enough and you look damn good in the mirror.) Or even that you’re not taking him to a “class” – you’re taking him to “train.”
Because that’s the difference with Max Power and the normal gym experience – you don’t take “classes” with a “trainer” who gets you fit and helps you shed a few pounds. You “train” with a “strength coach” who helps you improve your performance – on the field, in the office, and just in life in general.
I couldn’t tell my buddy what we’d be doing because I really had no idea. “It’s usually circuit-based, since it’s a small group. It’s kind of like what you do now with your “Core and More” class, but with weights. And more intense. You know what those MMA guys do on the Ultimate Fighter? Almost like that but not really.”
“So we’ll be hitting people?”
“Uhh…probably not. But you never know. Maybe we’ll hit tires with a sledgehammer if we’re lucky.”
That conversation thread, and my enthusiastic description of a summer training session consisting solely of farmer’s walks (“Seriously, all you do is pick up something really heavy and walk with it. It’s awesome!”) for some reason did not seem to erase his skepticism. But my friend shrugged his shoulders and said, “Hey, maybe I’ll pick up a few things and add some variety to my repertoire.”
I could still hear the skepticism in his tone in the middle of our first set of exercises on Sunday – push-ups and pull-ups with 30 seconds of rest between rounds. “This is almost like my Core and More class, but T (the trainer) doesn’t let us rest this much.”
We moved on to the next set – squats and jump squats with chains hanging from our necks. Mike demonstrated and warned us to keep the chains tight – and that someone in the earlier session had puked at this point. My friend wasn’t saying much then. After several rounds with no end in sight (Mike: “It’s last person standing! Sit out the next round if you get lightheaded or want to vomit!”), my buddy quietly said to me, “Okay, I was wrong. This is way more intense than what T does.”
I would have grinned in triumph, but my quads had decided to secede from its union with my brain and were not obeying my mental commands to catch me after each jump squat. Another set, and I started seeing spots when I (finally) managed to stand up after my last jump. I threw my chain down in defeat, trying to massage some feeling back into my thighs as I watched Mike swoop in to pick up the chain and throw it around my friend’s neck. He picked up a few more chains laying around and added them as well. My friend didn’t complain or protest, just kept squatting and jumping. And squatting and jumping. And squatting. And jumping.
And at the end when Mike said they were done, and my buddy finally dumped the 5 chains off his neck, with steam rolling off his sweaty forehead in the cold morning air, he said, “Next week? Sure, I’m in!”
And that’s really the best way to describe a Max Power training session. It’s the blood rushing to your aching muscles and sweat dripping off your nose and the occasional desire to vomit or lay down. It’s pushing your limits until you come face to face with your own weaknesses and fears – and the strength and will to overcome them. And it’s really just getting the crap beat out of you for an hour and immediately asking, “Same time next week”?
So yeah, strength and conditioning. And so much more.
