Review of SS Training Camp in Michigan
Yesterday I attended the Starting Strength seminar on the Pulls, hosted by Chris Kurisko and Jonathon 'Sully' Sullivan. I am very glad that I did!
My experience with lifting has been to buy a copy of Rip's books, and I built a squat rack in my basement. Rip and Youtube had been my guide. Not too long ago, I started to record some of my lifts with my phone camera, and that was an eye-opening experience. The picture I had in my head of my form, and what I saw in the videos were two very different things.
I was a bit apprehensive about attending a SS Seminar. This experience was my first time with a coach, or even anyone who really knows what they are doing. I half expected to be told “Get that disgusting form out of my gym, here is your money back, just leave now”, or “Hey Sully, come check out this guy who can barely dead-lift his body weight!” I could not have been more wrong, the coaches were amazing.
The whole thing exceeded my expectations across the board. The program was run efficiently and professionally. There was informative and interesting lecture about the general concepts of strength training, why we lift, and the benefit of the specific lifts we were training. It was great to watch Sully in front of the room, he has an immediately apparent talent for talking to students of strength training. He has encyclopedic knowledge, his discussions are interesting, and the guy is really damn funny. Chris was awesome as well, his coaching was instructive, immediately applicable, and he conveys a sort of genuine and heartfelt desire to improve everyone's lifting technique. It's a bit hard to describe, but it just feels like Chris really cares about the folks and wants to see them grow.
We had a real cross-section of folks - variety of age, experience, ability, and both genders represented. I thought that might be a problem, or at least slow things down, but it did not seem to skip a beat giving meaningful group and individual instruction.
Everyone had a bunch of time 'under the bar', and by the end of the day, not one person in the room wanted to pull one more lift off the floor. Nobody had a single question left to ask. I could not have hoped for any better or more comprehensive experience.
I spent several hours trying to teach myself the Power Clean using SS:BBT3 and Youtube, and I was beginning to think I simply lacked the ability to get it done. These guys produced a miraculous improvement in my understanding and execution of the lift. I expected it to be improved by the seminar, I just did not expect to be my time at the seminar to have as much impact as it did.
The seminar was great, and I was really grateful for the quality of coaches we had putting on the seminar. If you were considering getting some coaching from a SS coach or attending a seminar, all I can say is this was the best use of a Saturday I've had in a very long time.
