An extreme over-emphasis of formal education is plaguing American culture similar to a metastasizing cancer.  The system is set up to develop over-educated and under-trained idiots who have lots of “knowledge” but no practical skills to employ the knowledge.  They can memorize a system from a book for a test or for recitation to an instructor.  Most are unable to apply ANYTHING or make a split second decision at a point of no return that will successfully increase the chances of a positive outcome.  They can text and type but they can’t talk, well they can talk, they talk trash while playing X-BOX live to someone of the same intellect in a foreign country.  They can’t speak or write proper grammar and their ability to build relationships is ZERO.  The system has led some to believe that cutting and clearing a path for oneself is difficult and filled with failure, so it’s best to save energy and effort and hope something comes along and bounces right into one’s lap.

The Greatest Generation won two world wars and survived the Great Depression.  They defeated Nazism and communism, PUT MAN ON THE MOON, and developed a manufacturing infrastructure for which the rest of the world could only hope.  They built, maintained, and passed on the greatest economic machine the world had ever experienced.  And they did it all with an 8^th grade education level.  How did they prevail?  When their backs were against the wall they found a way to tap into human ingenuity to make things work.  And then with the same ingenuity, they found a way to do it better!

The exercise science/performance training field is full of over-educated and under-trained morons who believe they uncover the next shiny new object on a daily basis.  Screwball objects such as “functional training,” “the core,” “muscle confusion,” are given entirely too much attention.  The team at PANKO Strength & Speed, as one has probably figured out at this point, is rougher around the edges than most.  Functional training is championed at PANKO Strength & Speed, but only in reference to training a movement or a movement pattern(s) as opposed to training a muscle, which, when most people do, is usually done in an isolated environment.  Athletes at PANKO Strength & Speed also have strong cores (generally regarded as the knees up to the neck minus the arms), but it is not from standing on a wobble board to engage the kinetic chain, or doing ab exercise upon ab exercise.  PANKO Strength & Speed athletes have strong kinetic chains because they squat, deadlift, push press, Farmer’s Walk, and Yoke.  They also do plenty of relative body weight exercises such as pull ups, and any progressions created, box and broad jumps, and any progressions created, and lots of acceleration training, where the body is in a 45 degree lean with forward hips while the posterior chain serves the purpose of supporting the human crane.  Finally, PANKO Strength & Speed athletes are exposed to muscle confusion, but only in the form of conjugation – finding a desired outcome for a movement pattern and implementing numerous big multi-joint exercises progressed and overloaded properly over time to achieve the desired outcome.

Education needs to be handled in a more laissez faire manner.  True education about training and sports performance comes in the form of research over many years and not by reading a book or memorizing a table from a published article.  That research is done for thousands and thousands of hours training hundreds of athletes and finding what works and progressing or overloading the right way to find what works best.  The education that takes place under a bar with time under tension and a decade of figuring out how the pieces of the puzzle best fit together is TRUE education.

Training the right way is not always fun.  Success is fun, dominating the competition is fun, climbing to the top of the mountain is fun, and if it takes un-fun things to reach the top, every athlete should jump at the opportunity.  Training athletes, or anyone, is not rocket science.  Train big movements, train those movements to produce a lot of force, jump a lot, train accessory exercises to fix imbalances, and sprint a lot. Eat.  Rest.  Recover.  Repeat.  Spend time under a bar.  Sweat, bleed, puke, and get scarred up.

A Clinical Registered Exercise Physiologist whose expertise was clinical exercise physiology, exercise testing and programming for clinical populations, and cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation was teaching an exercise prescription class at IUPUI in 2004.  The Final Exam of the class was a 13 week meso-cycle (one quarter of a year-long macro-cycle *big words are being used here to show some ridiculousness and win over the heart of the reader) of training for any athlete the each student picked.  A confident 22 year old turned in an extensive final product he was sure would win a Nobel Prize.  His project fulfilled what the class rubric outlined, but there were additions.  The manual included also included implementation of strongman training, implementation of baseline speed training, incorporating plyometric training into strength training, and it briefly touched on a crazy idea of Russian Conjugation.  The student received a C- on the project which was explained in the following paraphrase, “…and trying to incorporate what is seen on ESPN is flawed at best.  The human body cannot gain mass, strength, and speed all at once; it needs to be periodized over the entire 13 weeks.  Read up on Block Periodization.”  When the student argued the grade, the professor remarked it should have been a D, but attendance was perfect.  The professor teaches the same class the same way as he did seven years ago because he is over-educated and has had no time under a bar.  The student opened a training facility and has made significant changes to the training program of his athletes every 6 weeks because his team has found a better way of doing things.

PANKO Strength & Speed, Stewards of the American Dream