Driven Doesn't Require a Destination
What if being driven has nothing to do with knowing where you're going, and everything to do with knowing what you refuse to become?
From Basement Clinics to Better Data: Mike Stratton’s Long Road to Marek Health
From teenage lifter to burned-out founder, Mike Stratton’s story is a raw look at strength culture, hormone health, entrepreneurial sacrifice, and the wake-up call that reshaped his mission with Marek Health.
5 Things People Get Wrong With the Max Effort Method
The max effort method is one of the most powerful tools in strength training. It's also one of the most misunderstood.
Don't Fight the Last War: Why Your Best Training Results Might Be Your Biggest Enemy
The method that built your best results can become the thing holding you back — here's why most lifters stay stuck and what to do about it.
You're Not Crushed by the Weight. You're Crushed by Thinking About It
Most of what wrecks you never actually happens. It's the thinking about it that does the damage.
The 4 Biggest Traps That Kill Lifters (And How to Stop Falling Into Them)
Four traps will end most training careers before they start — here's how to recognize them and what to do instead
You're Talking to the Wrong People
You are broadcasting pain to people who cannot change it, while avoiding every conversation that could.
How High Would You Go? A Better Way to Figure Out What You Actually Value
A simple thought experiment with a plank reveals more about your values, your training, and your life than any goal-setting framework ever will.
Why Most Video Podcasts Fail: The Hidden Production Mistake Costing You Viewers
Most people think podcasting is as simple as hitting record. Table Talk proves otherwise. This behind-the-scenes breakdown shows the 25-hour workflow Elitefts uses to produce every episode, including guest sourcing, booking, AI-powered prep, live production, post-production, thumbnail strategy, and publishing.
The Evolution of “The Sheriff”: Matt Sharafinski’s 2,000-Pound Journey
Matt Sharafinski’s story is more than a powerlifting comeback. From high school addiction and identity struggles to becoming “The Sheriff,” an elite 2,000-pound totaler and coach, this feature breaks down how discipline, psychology, health, and the weight room helped him rebuild his life under the bar.
The Equipment Your Grandfather Trained On Is Back. It Never Should Have Left.
Five plate-loaded, old-school machines every serious gym should have, and why serious lifters keep coming back to the basics
The Void: Mastering the Mind Under the Bar
"The void" is described as a transformative mental state of freedom and peace where an athlete sheds their daily stressors to become a different, often more aggressive, version of themselves, pushing past physical limits into a space of absolute nothingness.
How to Use the elitefts SS Yoke Bar: Every Application Worth Knowing
The SS Yoke Bar is not just a squat bar replacement. Here is how to get everything out of the most important specialty bar in any serious gym.
How to Get the Most Out of Working With Any Coach
Most lifters hire a coach and then immediately get in their own way. Here's the framework that will make every session count.
The Generation That Figured It Out: How Growing Up Gen X Built the Way I Train
Gen X didn't have YouTube, apps, or on-demand coaches. We had a bar, a rack, and the stubborn refusal to quit, and that built something most lifters today never find.
I Built This Because Nothing Else Worked
I've been competing in powerlifting long enough to know what the tricep actually does in this sport. It locks out the bench. It finishes the press. So when every strap on the market kept failing me at both ends of the pushdown, I stopped looking for a solution and started building one. This is the origin of the elitefts 3-Loop Tricep Strap, why I designed it the way I did, and why it has never left my cable machine.
Why Modern Powerlifting is Falling Apart
Dave Tate and a current multi-ply competitor, Bob Merkh, go deep on fractured federations, band shirts, judging inconsistency, and the hidden cost of putting the bar before everything else.
Eight Training Principles Most Lifters Will Never Apply
Most lifters focus on what to add. The ones who get strong figure out what to cut.
The Conjugate Training Roadmap: Anatomy of a High-Performance Workout
"Conjugate training is basically the coupling... it's combining different methods of training... taking the method of Max effort... the repetition method and the dynamic effort method and combining them all together."
The "Meathead" Manifesto: 6 Unconventional Lessons on Performance, Recovery, and the Edge of Sanity
"I wanted to know what it felt like to break a PR one more time."
What a Business Strategy Book Taught Me About Why Most Lifters Never Reach Their Potential
I picked up a book about organizational strategy and ended up reading a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of every training mistake I made for the first decade of my career.
What the New ACSM Strength Guidelines Actually Mean for Competitive Powerlifters
The ACSM just updated their resistance training guidelines for the first time in over 15 years, and what the headlines say and what the document actually says are two different things.
The Mental Game: 10 Psychological Skills That Separate Lifters Who Stall From Lifters Who Dominate
The bar doesn't care about your program. It cares about what's between your ears. Dave Tate breaks down 10 mental skills he learned over 20+ years of competition, from identity and visualization to the composure that saved his career at the 1999 IPA Worlds.
Classic: 27 Reasons to Be Big
Dave Tate revisits a 2004 classic and asks the question all over again: why do we do this to ourselves?