I was reading Ethan Hawke's Rules for a Knight (again) this weekend and came across a story worth slowing down for. This is one of those books that takes on a different meaning the more you sit with it. Through the years, every re-read lands differently.

The book closes with a poem called "The Ballad of the Forty-Four-Pointed Red Deer." Hawke wrote it for the book, though it reads like something much older. It tells the story of a buck with forty-four points on its rack who stands before a hunter rather than running. He doesn't flee, doesn't fight in a panic. He negotiates. He stands. And in the end, he gives everything so the doe and the fawn, the whole herd, walk away free.

Interesting to think about.

When I read it this time, I couldn't help but connect it to the training process. To coaching. For the reason elitefts exists. Not as a loose metaphor. As a direct map.

Here's how I see it.

Live. Every Point Was Earned.

The buck has forty-four points. That is not an accident, and it is not a gift. Every point represents a season, a winter survived, a year of learning where to step, when to run, and when to hold ground. You don't get to 44 points by cutting corners or waiting for perfect conditions.

In the gym, this is what "Live" actually means.

It doesn't mean show up half-awake and go through the motions. It doesn't mean buying the right equipment, following someone else's program, and hoping results show up on their own. It means you commit fully to the process. You absorb every rep, every failed attempt, every session that beats you up worse than you expected. You don't skip the hard parts and expect the rack to grow.

The "Live" component of elitefts' core philosophy is this: live each day fully, know that fear is part of the process, and use adversity to get better without losing sight of where you came from. Not the absence of fear. The decision to show up completely in spite of it. The buck standing in that clearing is afraid. He stands anyway.

Living fully also means being honest about where you actually are. Not where you want to be. Not where you tell people you are. Where you actually are, right now, in this training cycle, in this phase of your business, in this chapter of your life. The barbell doesn't care about your story. It tells you the truth every single session. Learning to accept that truth instead of explaining it away is the foundation of everything that follows.

The early years of elitefts were built on this exact principle. I made nothing for a long time after going full-time. When I started making something, I put it back in. We posted training articles online for free because that was the right thing to do, not because a business consultant told us it would work. Every expert we spoke with said we were doing it backward. Give away the high-margin content and sell the low-margin product? Nobody built a sustainable business that way.

Except we did. Because the philosophy was real, not strategic. We lived it before we could explain it.

Every point was earned. The years before elitefts, the years building it broke, the years reinvesting everything back in instead of taking a salary. All of it. That's the "Live" part. You can't skip it and pretend the points are there.

Learn. You Don't Just Bash Through Walls.

The buck doesn't just charge the hunter. He stands, he reads the situation, and he responds with precision. Not reckless force. Intelligence applied under pressure.

This is where the training process is most often misunderstood.

Most lifters think getting stronger is about grinding harder. More volume, more weight, more suffering, more time under the bar. And while effort matters, raw effort without intelligence just breaks you down and burns you out. I have watched lifters grind themselves into the ground doing more of what was already wrong, and I have done it myself. The grind doesn't fix a broken movement pattern. It just breaks more things faster.

The conjugate method taught me this directly. You don't bash through a wall of tonnage and hope something gives. You identify the weak points. You target them precisely. The Max Effort method builds maximal strength by training at or above 90% of your one-rep max, teaching your nervous system and connective tissue to handle true-limit loads. The Dynamic Effort method develops force production at submaximal loads, training bar speed, and compensatory acceleration. The Repetition method builds volume and addresses the structural weak points holding everything else back. All three methods run simultaneously, not in isolated phases where stopping one undoes the gains from the last.

That is not brute force. That is negotiation with your body's actual limitations, with your nervous system, with the specific gaps in your training that are genuinely holding your numbers down.

No matter how you feel about Louie Simmons personally, the truth is he is responsible for bringing this approach to the masses. The conjugate method shifted how serious lifters think about programming because it was built on learning, not guessing. On diagnosing before prescribing. On finding what is weak and attacking it directly rather than doing more of what already feels good.

Here is where most people fail, even people who understand the method. They make good decisions on Max Effort and Dynamic Effort days, then choose their supplemental and accessory work based on what they like to do rather than what they actually need to fix. They train what they are already good at and call it smart programming. They pick the movements they are comfortable with, the ones that won't embarrass them, and they wonder why the same weak points keep showing up at meets and in maximal testing.

The "Learn" part of this philosophy means staying honest about what is actually broken. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. That's not a cliche. That's the experience of every coach and lifter who has spent real time under the bar and studying what happens there.

This transfers directly to business and to life. In business, people throw money at problems they haven't properly diagnosed. They add marketing before they fix the product. They add staff before they fix the process. They try to sell their way out of a product problem or coach their way out of a programming problem. The gym teaches you to diagnose before you prescribe. That skill, if you actually develop it, works everywhere. Every decision you will face in your business, your coaching career, your life, all of it benefits from the discipline of identifying what is actually wrong before you start solving things.

That is the Learn. Not just accumulating information. Developing the honest diagnostic ability to see what is real.

Pass On. The Buck Doesn't Get a Thank-You Card.

This is where the ballad hits hardest. This is also the piece most people want to skip, or soften, or frame as something more comfortable than it actually is.

The forty-four-pointed buck doesn't survive. He gives everything, so the herd walks away. He doesn't get recognition. He doesn't get to watch the doe and the fawn thrive years down the road. He stands, gives everything he has earned, and accepts the full cost of that decision.

Louie Simmons told me something years ago I haven't forgotten. He said it plainly, the way Louie always said things: "It's your responsibility to make the people around you stronger than you." Not just your total. Not just your own numbers. The people around you.

That is the Pass On.

I built elitefts broke. Reinvesting everything back into the company instead of paying myself, because somebody did that for me first. Eric Serrano saw me in his clinic when I couldn't pay. The guys in Findlay, Bowling Green, and Toledo let me train with them when they had no reason to. Louie let me in the door at Westside Barbell when I was nobody and had nothing to offer but effort.

People gave me access, knowledge, and time before I had anything to offer in return. That is what built me. That is also what obligates you, once you have something worth sharing.

None of us got here alone. Not one of us.

When elitefts started putting content online for free in 1998, people said it made no business sense. You give away your knowledge, you have nothing left to sell. I thought about that kid I once was and all the people who helped me for nothing. What if they had kept a ledger? What if they had charged me for every hour, every piece of advice, every time someone let me into their training environment before I could pay for it? Where and who would I be?

Giving the content away was never a marketing strategy. It was a direct reflection of what had been given to me. The Pass On made real. Every article, every Q&A, every seminar, every episode of Table Talk is this philosophy in action. You take what cost you everything to learn, and you hand it off for free. No record board. No tracking who said thank you and who didn't.

Seeds don't always grow the first time they hit the soil. Sometimes it takes ten, twenty, or fifty exposures before something sticks. And sometimes people only understand what you were trying to tell them years later, after the damage is done, when they finally have enough context to actually hear it. I have had lifters, coaches, and staff members come back years later and say, "Now I get it." And in that moment, you realize the point of passing on knowledge isn't to be heard immediately. It is to leave something behind that lasts long enough to matter when the time is right.

You'll help people who ghost you. You'll teach lifters who quit in three months. You'll watch somebody take what you gave them and act as if they figured it out themselves.

Doesn't matter. The buck doesn't get a thank-you card either.

How the Three Work Together

"Live, Learn, Pass On" is not three separate ideas. They are a cycle. Each one feeds the next, and pulling one out collapses the whole structure.

You cannot pass on what you have not learned. You cannot learn what you are not fully showing up for. And all the knowledge and experience in the world mean nothing if it dies with you.

In the gym, this cycle looks like a lifter who gives everything to the process over the years, accumulates real experience through wins and failures, develops the diagnostic ability to understand what is actually happening under the bar, and eventually becomes the most experienced person in the room. Not necessarily the one with the biggest total. The one who makes everyone around them better. The one who spots what is wrong before the set, who adjusts the program before the injury, who tells you the hard thing you need to hear instead of the comfortable thing that lets you off the hook.

The coaches who build programs that outlast their own careers are the ones who understand this. The lifters who leave a real legacy are the ones who eventually figure out that the total was never the point. The businesses that survive multiple decades are the ones that genuinely give a damn about the people they serve and prove it with consistent action over time, not with slogans on the wall.

In business, this cycle looks like a company that earns its reputation through real service and real knowledge instead of marketing noise. That stays curious enough to evolve its methods without abandoning its core. That gives freely because giving is the actual product, not a strategy layered on top of it. elitefts was built on this in 1998. It's still built on it now. The same equation: use equipment sales to fund free education, because free education is the mission, not the means.

In life, this cycle looks like someone who takes the full weight of their experience, good and bad, without flinching from the hard parts. Who uses those experiences to develop a real understanding rather than just opinions. And who makes sure that understanding reaches the people who come after them, whether those people ever say thank you or not.

The three parts only work together. Live it fully. Learn it completely. Pass it on without holding back.

What Are You Standing For?

Every lifter, every coach, every business owner reading this is in the middle of their own version of this story.

The question is not whether you will face a hunter. You already are, or you will be soon. The question is whether you are going to run or stand. And if you stand, what are you willing to give so the people behind you can walk away in a better position than they found you?

Your knowledge. Your time. Your honest assessment when someone needs to hear hard things. Your willingness to be the person in the room who holds the standard, even when it costs you something personally. Your refusal to hoard what was given to you freely.

The forty-four-pointed buck earned every point one season at a time. He learned how to survive by surviving. And then, when the moment came, he put everything he had earned on the line for something bigger than himself.

That is what this is supposed to be about. The training, the coaching, the business, the content. Not the personal glory. Not the record board. Not the revenue number at the end of the year.

Something bigger.

What are the points you have earned? What have you learned that needs to be passed on? And what are you willing to stand in front of so the people behind you can walk free?

Those are the questions worth sitting with.

Live, Learn, Pass On.
Dave Tate / elitefts