2016 for me was a great year, lots of famous people I never met or whom never affected my life in any tangible manner died from drug abuse or old age.  The presenter of the American version of the appetence won a democratic election and triggered great swaths of the “free” world into crying about things that haven’t happened yet and the UK decided to roll the dice.

2016 was a busy year for social media politicians and real politicians but none of that affected me in any real way.  For me 2016 was about boiling away the shit in my training and trying to get into more depth on the parts that were working.  In February I went to a Boris Shieko seminar which was a hugely perspective changing shift for my training as a powerlifter.  That man is doing a lot of things right that I don’t think most lifters or coaches realise or catch onto, I have been trying to put my own spin on it for the last 10 months with both myself and my lifters with a mixed success.

Sometimes the programming has worked like black magic and other times it’s not really worked or it’s worked in some way that made some people lose confidence in what I was doing because the return wasn’t obvious.  The return is there however and it is real for those who bought in and went with it.  For my strongest lifter and myself we both put on in excess of 60kg on our lifts both of us are highly adapted lifters and life time naturals so we aren’t exactly what you would call noobs.

I learned some new things, I applied them got some great returns but I also went away from other things that worked so well for me in the past.  It can be difficult for someone who is coaching and lifting at the same time.  I am 100% guilty of doing a programme or periodisation style that works for me great and then blanketing it across my lifters or programmes as the new age secret sauce.  This is something I want to adapt this year in my programming I want to put something in place that ensures I am providing systematic overload bottom line, and doing it in a pragmatic manner.  This will come into my own lifting first and then will develop into a more systematic version of my programming for other lifters.

I also got fat in 2016, it was intentional for the most part but I fell by the wayside and got lazy on a lot of things.  This something for my own health and well-being that needs to change, I’ve had spats where I have been fantastic with this aspect of my training life and other times when I have been terrible with 2016 being one of the most spectacular lapses in dietary ability.

For 2017 I am not intending on getting mad cutz or sick serrations, the plan is to just be a bit healthier and sit at a more reasonable bodyweight for my muscle mass somewhere around 108-110 I will be just as strong but won’t be such a lardy piece of shit.  I’m just going to practice a bit of loose calorie counting and just stick to cooking my own food for 6 days out of 7 which should have the desired effect.

I am also keen to get back into the habit of going to bed at a set time regardless and getting up very early, my normal waking time in 2016 was 06:00-06:40 I want to push this back a minimum of 1 hour to allow me some time for writing and recording as although this isn’t really a big revenue driver for my business it is something I enjoy doing and something I would really like to make some more time for.

For Lifting I just want to continue on and double down on the successful parts of 2016 so I am going to stop chasing rep outs and heavy weights almost entirely unless they are planned in post volume in the programme.  The strongest I was at all year was when I was just following the 4x per week Shieko inspired routine, I am going to try and refined this down as previously mentioned so it has a month to month progression whilst still not being massively fatiguing session to session as the later end of the year was for me from a training perspective.

Goals for the year are

310-320 kg squat

230 kg bench press

320 – 330 kg deadlift

Also to place top 2 in the 120 kg class at the British and hopefully put my hand up for selection.  The 2017 commonwealth powerlifting championships might be an option I look at as well since I failed to qualify for selection for IPF international meets this year as I didn’t compete in the 2016 British Championships.

From a business perspective I am looking to collaborate and bring a lifting focused gym the likes of which the UK hasn’t seen before this year.
Look to step back my employment to a part time / subsistence level

Grow out my online and in person coaching business so it can provide a good standard of living on it’s own without the need for me to devote more than 15-20 hours of my time a week.

Happy new year and hopefully 2017 can bring some good advances in your training and professional life.

Marc