If you know your stuff, it's a world-class gym; if you don't, it's a dump. – - Dan John
Dan John, who looks like an NFL linebacker even at the age of 57, is not easy to define. Teacher, educator, scholar, author, strength guru, powerlifter, discus thrower — he has been some combination of all of those things, but let’s start here:
This morning he was on the phone with an NFL coach who was seeking advice about the team’s weight-training program. This is routine stuff. John is almost always on the phone during weekday business hours, talking to people who want information on how to get bigger, stronger, faster, leaner, more athletic or all of the above. He does podcasts, Skypes and radio interviews almost daily for requests that come in from around the world. On weekends he often jets off somewhere to do workshops and clinics for college athletic programs, professional sports teams and military units.
During the recent Michigan-Utah football game in Ann Arbor, John was on Michigan’s sideline. He had been brought in that weekend to advise the Michigan staff about its weight-training methods. Earlier in the summer, Ohio State had retained him for the same purpose. In recent weeks, John also has been hired to put on clinics and evaluate strength programs in Geneva, Stuttgart, Virginia Beach, San Diego, Chicago, Providence and Long Beach.
“I work with a lot of strength coaches,” he explains. “Sometimes you just need someone to ask, ‘Are we crazy?’ And sometimes you say, ‘Yeah, that’s crazy.’ ”
He routinely receives calls from coaches in the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and National Hockey League. He is consulted by weekend warriors, military/Special Forces, professional coaches and athletes, and even Hollywood types.
“It’s work,” says John. “It’s rare that I’m not on the phone most of the day trying to fix things. It’s a Rubik’s Cube in a way. There’s a solution, but you’ve gotta keep turning stuff.”
When he’s not on the road, John can be found in his laboratory, which is also the garage of his home in Murray. As noted in a Men’s Health magazine story in April, “Some of the most innovative advancements in fitness are being developed in a garage in Murray, Utah. Follow them and grow stronger.”
There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve utilized John’s training innovations yourself — many of them have been widely adopted, from the NFL right down to your morning exercise class at the local gym.
John has a standing invitation: Anyone is welcome to train with him in his garage five mornings a week, no charge. “The idea is that we’ll help each other out,” he says. “You bring your energy and I’ll bring my experience. Everyone adds his own gift. We got one guy who makes sandwiches. That’s a good gift.”
On a given day, the group might consist of doctors, lawyers, professional football and baseball players, Navy SEALs, or a housewife trying to rehab an ankle injury. John calls his training group “The Intentional Community.”
“We have all decided to come together and train,” he says. “That’s five days a week. Even if I just got back from Switzerland the previous night, I’ll get out of bed for them.”
The first thing you’ll notice about the garage-gym is that the equipment is spare. This is no Gold’s Gym; there are no Nautilus machines, or any machines for that matter. John believes in basic lifts that use a lot of muscles at once and have practical application for athletic movement. We’re talking about a former national-class discus thrower who used to train by dragging a sled in the snow while wearing a 150-pound backpack. In the garage there are kettle bells, bar bells, a TRX strap and pullup bars and little else.
“If you know your stuff, it’s a world-class gym; if you don’t, it’s a dump,” says John.
In John’s backyard he uses a simple climbing rope and gymnastics rings for abdominal exercise, along with “stuff you can push and stuff you can pull,” as he puts it. For years he kept a tractor tire in his back there, flipping it over and over as a total-body exercise.
John, a fast-talking, philosophical man with a quick wit, relishes helping others make training gains, which is why he trains so many at no charge. He also uses the group — and himself — as guinea pigs to test many of his training ideas. It is from such experiments that John developed many the training innovations that are so widely used today.
Among them: The goblet squat. Because poor squat technique is so pervasive (and potentially injurious), John devised a simple method to correct it by having the lifter hold a dumbbell or kettlebell in front of his chest, as you would a goblet, forcing the lifter to keep his chest up and his butt pushed back. He also created the family of weight exercises known as “loaded carries,” and, along with his friend Greg Henger, he created “slosh pipes,” another popular exercise tool. Google any of these exercises, and you’ll see much discussion about them on the Internet.
“It’s all about constant assessment,” says John of the innovations.
John, who is a stout 6 feet, 230 pounds, is more than meets the eye. He was a Fulbright Scholar, and he owns master’s degrees in history and religious education. He taught history and theology and coached track athletes at both Judge and Juan Diego high schools. For a decade he served as director of religious education at the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City.
Early in his teaching career, he wrote a column for an intermountain Catholic newspaper about strength training, which led to a workshop in Arizona. Word of mouth did the rest. He began receiving invitations to do workshops around the Intermountain West and then around the country. He was safe, knowledgeable, passionate and his philosophy was minimalist, simple, sensible and applicable.
He was asked to write an article for a bodybuilding magazine and received a check for $1,500 and had an epiphany. “This was when I really needed the money,” he says. “I had two daughters and was paying for their private education. I thought maybe I should write more.”
Since then he has authored five books and countless magazine articles (he is a regular contributor to Men’s Health). His first book — "Never Let Go: A Philosophy of Lifting, Living and Learning," he describes as a melding of "body, mind and soul — it's about weight lifting but with a theologian's view, a bigger purpose." His books have been translated into Korean, Japanese, German and Hungarian.
John has been featured in Outside Magazine and various European men’s fitness and health magazines. He receives frequent invitations to do clinics and interviews in Europe.
“Tiffany (his wife) jokes that I’m David Hasselhoff — I’m big in Europe,” says John. “I can get work there any day of the week.”
John grew up in San Francisco, where he was a three-sport athlete with a burning desire to excel. He saved money for a year to buy used weightlifting equipment for his backyard, where neighbor kids gathered to train. The work paid off for John, who threw the discus 170 feet — a tremendous throw for a 162-pound teenager. At Skyline junior college he learned the Olympic lifts and gained 40 pounds of muscle in four months. The changes were so dramatic that friends and family barely recognized him when he returned home. He won a scholarship to Utah State, where he qualified for nationals and threw 190 feet, 6 inches.
Over the years he continued to study and experiment with weight training. He won the national master’s powerlifting championships. Earlier this year he won the Utah State powerlifting championships for his age group — 35 years after he won his first state championship and was named the meet’s Outstanding Lifter.
He believes his background in track and powerlifting, which offer objective measurements of athletic performance, helped him understand what most athletes and coaches in the team sports don’t realize — the importance of recovery and not overdoing it in practice and the weight room.
“Getting them tired in the weight room is so 1960s,” says John. “Get back to the fundamentals.”
Then again, it is such matters that keep John in business and always will. “The thing about sports is that you might fix the problem this year, but because of the evolution each sport undergoes, next year you might have a whole new problem.”
Doug Robinson's columns run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Email: drob@deseretnews.com