Dave Tate's Table Talk

Most lifters suffer through brutal competition preps not because they lack discipline, but because they are using a physical outcome to mask a broken identity.

After a career-ending rugby injury shattered his athletic dreams, Ben Mayfield-Smith rebuilt his mindset by merging raw physical grit with clinical behavioral science. He developed an intensive psychological vetting sy...

Choosing between athlete, coach, and gym owner is the only way to avoid burning out—you can only pick two.

After 20 years under the barbell and totaling 2,044 raw, Chandler Parsons realized that chasing elite performance, coaching lifters, and building a gym from scratch was a fast track to physical and financial ruin. In this conversation with Dave Tate, the founder of Backy...

Stop chasing cheap metrics in your youth only to end up a broken, thirty-five-year-old former athlete who doesn't even know how to properly brace.

When high school geometry teachers double as strength coaches, young lifters pay the price decades later with wrecked spines and destroyed joints. Mark Valenti spent seventeen years on the road as a professional Highland Games athl...

An 185-pound frame earned in the trenches taught Anthony Castore that no protocol can out-discipline a broken foundation.

From a 117-pound teenager asking too many questions to a Fellow at the Seeds Scientific Research & Performance Institute, Castore turned an obsession with cellular mechanics into decades of coaching elite athletes, executives, and physicians. Before ch...

If you train high school athletes like Division I pros, you are destroying their potential.

For 13 years at Wisconsin, Brian Bott built NFL offensive linemen and Rose Bowl champions using old-school grit—only to realize that the biggest mistake strength coaches make is confusing intensity with actual development. Bott reveals the hard-earned wisdom behind taking a 13-year-old...