Dave Tate's Table Talk

The myth that aerobic conditioning steals your strength is the exact reason most experienced lifters hit an early plateau and stay chronically beat up.

From running high-volume CrossFit boxes to completing a PhD in Kinesiology, Jason Brown realized that rigid, maximal-effort splits were wrecking real-world athletes who lacked the autonomic recovery to handle constant strain. ...

Standard medical advice after a catastrophic muscle tear will turn a high-performance lifter into a spectator if you blindly follow it.

Four months after snapping his bicep off the bone on an axle clean, National Champion Strongman Josh Hendrickson refused to sit passive in a sling and hit a max-effort box squat forty-eight hours before surgery. By defying conservative rehab ...

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...